It took a long time to realize that the most compelling devices have good, well maintained software.

I don’t mean to say that software devs are geniuses or that these orgs have to hire the best of the best. No, they just need to create an org that prioritizes software dev. Low attrition, increased visibility, the usual. You don’t need fancy new features. Just make sure the intern who wrote your v1 Bluetooth driver feels compelled enough to stay on to become a staff engineer running a team that still assures bugs get fixed. Simple.

A sibling noted the H1 chip and whatnot. I don't know how much the specific chip matters for that piece (certainly key for battery life & having both buds appear as a single device). After all, their Bluetooth stack was better than the competition even back when they were using off the shelf chips. Still, it's possible off the shelf chips for acting as the master are somehow simpler than the chips for acting as a slave (or maybe you notice it more).

TBF, can't blame them. Apple has pretty much a single stack. Android is about as fragmented as the PC world.

Google has had a single Bluetooth stack for quite a while although variable quality vendor implementation. IIRC BlueDroid took over more of the stack than Bluez did so we're talking about 10 years here where Android has had a single monolithic stack.

The main explanation I've heard is that Apple has much fewer Bluetooth chips to support but I don't know that explains it because there's generally not that many chips in the market that all phones choose from (granted Apple is now in-house but still, they didn't use to be).

Also, I have no wires now other than a couple of chargers. It is freedom. Never do I have to untangle some EarPods from my keys five times a day.

The custom Bluetooth processor seems to be letting Apple solve a lot of pain points that every other Bluetooth headphone just makes you live with.

I could switch devices and the one I was using could connect up easy without having to do the whole disconnect from the other device first thing.

I suspect on connect it was also issuing a disconnect to the previous sender as well because I never had an issue of a device reconnecting overtop.

Multiple devices could be paired at the same time and it just latched on to whichever device tried to connect last.

Even apple doesn't do well at this. Apple also has all kinds of weird bugs and sound issues. They are still nice for walking around though so I won't be ditching them anytime soon.

Sound is pretty nice upgrade though even for someone like me that can't tell. Noise cancelling helps a lot over COVID too.

There are very few people who are both passionate about the problem of wireless devices and who understand all of the stack enough to make a driver that is fast, resilient, and standards-compliant. I hear that Apple sometimes bends the "standards-compliant" part - which is why their airpods only work with their devices.

Apple has done a great job giving this team of <100 engineers the space they need to succeed, and it's a huge feat. Most other companies don't even try to write their own BT stack (for good reason) and just use a vendor solution, so their user experience is subpar.

Still better than the competition though. Had a Sony Xm something or another before, but the Airpods are way easier and more comfortable by a huge margin.

I thought I heard Airpods were the best Bluetooth headset on Android, too

I continue to hold the view that Tesla's success is because they are really a software company, not a car company.

A toggle on the headphones -- a slide switch for Device A or B.

(Auto software switching would be better if it worked 99%+ of the time.)

What kind of switch would you suggest they use?

Last time this happened was with the OG iPhone of course. Still remember Maddox’s tear down of the iPhone lol. https://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=iphone/

Having no wires was not life changing, I don't really care about that. Running out of battery sucks though. The noise canceling really is great, but they never last a full flight, so I always need backup headphones.

I always switch to the cable if I want to use them with my Linux laptop as repairing is a pain in the arse.

I've also found the cable to be very useful for anything that requires both sound quality and a microphone at the same time. Over Bluetooth and even on my Apple stuff they seem to switch to the headset profile to use the mic and the sound then becomes aweful.

I like hacking around a Linux workstation as much as the next nerd, but when I put BT headphones in my ears to listen to a podcast, I want it to just work.

That said, every so often I need to toggle my iPhone's bluetooth switch in Settings. Even Apple's software isn't 100%.

Older folks do not like feeling left behind. if Apple is causing them to feel liberated from their state of techno exile, that’s going to create insane goodwill.

Being Bluetooth, technically the Airpods will connect to say, a Dell laptop, but in practice they will have erratic behavior, which you can solve by buying a mac... and teaching said old folks how to use MacOS instead of Windows.

Bam. Work perfectly after that.

I recently went through this with a new Windows laptop. It was quite a shock after being in the Mac world for years how bad an experience Windows and headphones is.

Same issue on Macs for what it's worth. If you are listening to music and a meeting starts and the mic turns on, the protocol will switch and everything will sound like crap.

Apple just gives me that.

BTW for that specific use case AFAIK iPhone uses H.265 and H.264 (and ProRes but I don't think you're mentioning that when saying "raw", rather meaning straight out of device) videos inside a MOV container, which are both widely available (with H.265 having some license fees but available virtually on every device).

Like all apple products they do sacrifice some discoverability in favor of a sexier minimalist look

A photorealistic visual will appear on screen explaining what to do next. At this point, guided by the visual, you need to push the button on the back.

If you can think of a simpler way, I’d give Apple a call.

In which case, fair enough perhaps, but it feels a tad unfair to put the burden of universal discovery for all host devices on Apple.

And is it really that un-discoverable? What would you do on any other Bluetooth device? You'd look for a button. What is there on the AirPods case? A button.

I still say: if you have a simpler idea, let's hear it.

Edit: and, I'm sure the AirPods come with a folded slip of paper in the box, as all Apple products do, explaining the very basics of how to get the thing working.

I guess, but I've always felt apple deliberately thwarts such efforts for product lock in

>And is it really that un-discoverable? What would you do on any other Bluetooth device? You'd look for a button. What is there on the AirPods case? A button.

Lol but like I said you also have to arbitrarily open the lid and place both airpods inside

Deliberately thwarting efforts would be not having a button.

There's a button. Like every other Bluetooth headphone case. Push the button.

> Lol but like I said you also have to arbitrarily open the lid and place both airpods inside

Oh come now. In what scenario do you get handed an AirPods case and two loose AirPods and are expected to pair them? Is that what happened to your sister-in-law?

> Like all apple products they do sacrifice some discoverability in favor of a sexier minimalist look

And which Bluetooth headphones have a more ‘discoverable’ pairing mode?

Then your Apple account is used to make all your idevices recognize your AirPods.

For 90% of people, that solves 100% of their problems.

This is something that baffled me on Windows and MacOS, but I don't seem to experience on Linux/Android/iOS. Windows was particularly "greedy"; whenever you'd turn on your headphones it would attempt to steal the connection away (even booting other multipoint connections off). MacOS is slightly more graceful, but still hiccups when it initializes a new sound source and (for some godawful reason) launches iTunes for me. Thanks Apple.

On my FireTV and Linux desktop/laptop, they seem to have lazy-negotiation enabled by default. Turned-on devices will connect and acknowledge one another, but won't switch audio sources until the other device starts playing audio. I really think this ought to be the standard for all Bluetooth audio stacks.

(Note: this is a relatively recent development on the Linux side of things. Before PipeWire, it's Bluetooth audio stack was worse than Windows.)

I’m assuming that’s why all the popular USB “Bluetooth audio with aptX” all identify as an audio device and handle pairing etc. on their own. (Despite Windows’ stack having aptX support)

You can also set it to start something else (Spotify, whatever) instead

[0] https://jonahlupton.medium.com/what-is-airpods-was-a-company...

They wouldn't release a single product, because of proprietary Apple ecosystem and patents wall around it.

My Sony xm3 kept connecting to the laptop in my backpack - which was asleep - when I was getting on my bike.

I had to unpair my phone and re-pair it to force it to "own" the headphones. It was such a pita.

That really was the biggest value add of the Apple headphones, and it works absolutely great. It almost (a 99.5%+ kind of almost) always connects to the device I want it to connect to, right away.

It's a pity though that they have the common issues of Bluetooth, and turning on the microphone immediately kills the sound quality... It's one of the cases where I'd appreciate them just using a proprietary protocol. The headphones basically only work well with Apple devices anyway.

I had to either open up the mobile app, wait for it to do its stuff and force a disconnect with the laptop OR get up, walk to the laptop, open it, turn off BT and close it again.

Ordered AirPods Max and I've had pretty much zero issues since.

I can walk from my computer to the TV and Apple TV will prompt me to connect to it with one button. I can grab my phone, walk away and the headphones will move to the phone automatically. Magic.

After literally minutes of use, the thought to return them evaporated just as quickly.

Pretty much all because of the seamless connection.

To be fair to the Sennheisers, they are durable: they survived contact with a wall at least twice.

Well, duh!

>Bluesnooze prevents your sleeping Mac from connecting to Bluetooth accessories.

[1] https://github.com/odlp/bluesnooze

Some devices accept connect requests and gracefully disconnect from the current device (good but manual), some just ignore them, some don’t gracefully disconnect causing the original device to ping-pong reconnect, etc. And “real” BT5 multipoint can also break if an app happens to use “phone call” audio priority, and you get yanked off the second device.

The only device I have that does it well (and with non-Apple platforms) is an Xbox Wireless Headset, and that’s only because it literally has 2 wireless audio chipsets connected at the same time: Xbox Audio and Bluetooth. Sadly that means it’s also 2x the power and 0.5x the battery life.

But yeah, switching from iPhone to iPad with AirPods is really nice. I wish I had that on Windows (without MagicPods).

The issues you're describing sound more Bluetooth related, and given the above experience I suspect the experience would be just as bad on non apple devices.

And to add insult to injury, your listening audio quality also gets degraded whenever it's on... So it's a lose-lose for both sides every time you use it.

My main complaint is that OSX has no setting to completely disable it. I have to manually switch to the Macbook internal mic basically before every call.

I wish they would just sell a model without the crappy mic. I would even happily pay less for it.

At this point in my life, I want fewer things to remember to charge, not more.

My wired earphones will never run out of “battery” in the middle of a flight.

I’m a complete grump about this stage of the headphones cycle.

I use Beats Flex headphones though. It’s a lot easier to just hang them around my neck and they don’t fall to the floor if they fall out my ear. They also last 12 hours.

Wired headphones are especially a pain when running,

A good 95 percent of cases where I've dropped my phone, it's been wired to a pair of headphones and the wire snagged.

I moved to wireless about a decade ago and haven't looked back.

Certainly if you want to listen to music at decent quality, buy real headphones with a replaceable cable.

I had to pay a premium for a phone with an aux port, but extra features are worth it to me.

As for airpods, I don't get the hype, but thats mostly true for any Apple announcements apart from their CPUs. Yet they have the capitalization they have so they are doing something right, athough it feels its mostly marketing and "we are US" which means nothing to Europeans for good reasons unfortunately... I prefer higher quality customizable phone who respects me as user, higher quality cameras on it, higher quality in ear buds (even relatively mediocre Sennehiser Momentum 2 TW sounds miles and lightyears better, last longer, use HD codecs with anything ever created that has it too, which now means tons of devices, and pair flawlessly so far). I saw first hand my boss struggling and failing repeatedly to even pair his (back then) brand new Iphone 13 pro max pair with out-of-box charged airpods pro. WTFs all around the office, he was so ashamed... It was not the last time we all saw it from front seats, still happens quite regularly.

My wife has Garmin fenix watch. Apple watch are a bad joke if you have it for something else than showing off how "in" you are and not an "old boring fart", which seems mostly marketing/sales guys these days.

My wife, based on my recent recommendation which I am beginning to regret, just bought iphone 13 mini. Battery life is proper meh, seriously I expected better based on what online world says. The device with useless notch is fugly as hell, thick, heavy, screen has huge black borders - it looks like cheap chinese phone from cca 2015. OK, whatever, quality must be inside, and some is, some isn't.

You can't have a fucking unlocking pattern, because Apple knows better what you need, and you should learn what you actually want. Because 'security', so either full Face ID which she finds no-go because its her opinion and I respect it (and so should Apple), or some 6-digits idiotic code for every fucking unlock which is plain stupid and arrogant, or completely unsecured phone. No pattern draw like every other sane device since 2015 unless you want to straight jailbreak whole device and lose all warranty.

Fuck you Apple, I really, truly expected more from your devices in 2022, and so did my wife. Its not about how many things you get right (there are plenty of devices who get many things right), but where you fail hurts, especially when one is used to basic things working for many, many years.

At least resale value is quite good, especially when Apple decided to not continue their smallest line for whatever stupid reasons so this is last of the line, with A15 chip. Maybe she will eventually start liking it, but man I truly expected more from Apple since right now Samsungs seem a much better offer for people like her, if you are not counting pennies on resales

“BEEP. CONNECTED. BATTERY LEVEL IS 50%.”

Noise twice. OK by me.

The gadgets I've bought my mom that she's neglected and forgotten include: PC and Mac laptops, her iPhone (in lieu of getting her another Android), Apple Watch, and of course, various kinds of headphones, bluetooth and wired.

She's a pretty big luddite and I honestly had never really seen her use her iphone for much other than talking and texting -- e.g. when she's lost in the city, she will ask every random stranger for help and never think to use the phone GPS. But since she took to using the Airpods, it's opened up all the (obvious) possibilities of the phone as portable entertainment device.

Sorry if all this sounds like shilling for the Airpods (again, I'm personally meh on them and will likely try out Anker's offerings if I need to replace mine) -- it's just this comment thread triggered in me the pleasant experience I've had with it as a Mother's day gifter.

edit: isolation replaced with canceling

Two things:

1. Long hair. If your hair is in the way, you have to brush it away before the sensors will correctly register your input.

2. Beanies. If you wear an acrylic beanie (due to the aforementioned long hair), there is enough capacitance detected in contact with the material to generate spurious, and unwanted, inputs.

Tactile buttons would solve both of these issues.

I have literally zero problems with these: https://www.amazon.com/AfterShokz-Open-Ear-Wireless-Conducti...

They work everywhere - across my phone, laptop, personal laptop, hell - even my nvidia shield tv. Across Win/Linux/macOS/Android/iOS.

Connect just fine - play just fine. Reconnect just fine. Pair just fine.

I'm glad you like the Airpods, but damn is this some crazy bullshit thing to be claiming.

I also don’t have to decipher beeps to change settings. I can change anything about them visually from any of my devices.

Ding ding ding... Of course they do - and that's my point.

They're moderately nice on apple if you're entirely on that ecosystem, and utterly the same on everything else (frankly - I think they're actually much worse than some of the nicer headphones you can get, but that's not bluetooth related at all).

Good to know we agree.

A garden is usually a nice place where things are nicely pruned and organized. Unlike going out into the wilderness like our forefathers scavenging…

> "Unfortunately every other Bluetooth headphones suck when it comes to connectivity and stable playing."

and it's complete rubbish. The vast majority of high end bluetooth headsets work just fine (some are even FAR better in terms of battery life, comfort, and range - with no stability issues at all)

I'm glad you get a slightly improved experience when you stay in your walled garden, but that has zilch to do with my point - I'm not in that garden.

So your response of "Well it works ok if you [do this thing you're not doing]" is mostly a tangent that's not relevant.

I won't be buying any more Apple headphones after my current Airpods Pro dies (already quite unreliable charging in the case, so unless I check and place it down gently I'm likely to come back and find it out of battery from one of the earpieces having been on the whole time).

I only stuck with airpods this long because their bluetooth functionality really is great especially when I was in a little apartment with an Apple TV as well as my phone. But they're really disappointingly unreliable, badly overpriced, and Apple support around them is always terrible (in my experience in the UK).

This feature _alone_ made me buy the 1st generation AirPods Pro once I got an Apple Watch. They really hook you into that ecosystem! ;-) In all seriousness, these are the best-sounding and most reliable earbud headphones I've ever owned. I hear the Beats Pro are a little better sound bass-wise, but I bet that tech will be in the new generation of the AirPods Pro as well.

The fact that my AirPods can move between my multiple computers, phone, watch, and even television relatively easily is just amazing. It goes to show how hard this problem was to solve, though, since Apple had to literally invent their own processor to make this work.

It makes products that people widely need at a quality that's a class on its own.

So I was greatly surprised because they sound pretty decent, and they are able to pair on several devices, automatically switching, keeping the annoyance on a pretty low level, you still need to turn them on by long pressing a button and they still emit annoying sound when battery is low for a lot of time, but since they were just shitty 20 bucks generic gear I was thinking that maybe companies have finally solved Bluetooth.

Time skip to 5 days ago, I lost my airpods and thought to give non apple headset a chance, since I’m more into over ear stuff. So I bought a pair of not so cheap sony headphones… and yesterday I returned them. Bluetooth still sucks and maybe the generic ones were just a lucky hit. It seems like I will get a new set of airpods.

I was hoping for AirPods which synthesize audio from all of your devices using spacial positioning... maybe next generation

Add a third, fourth or a fifth device to the mix and you need to hold yourself back to not slam the headphones to the nearest wall in frustration.

If you chain your xm4's to a single device then they work pretty much flawlessly but that is also way less convenient.

I also had a pair of Airpods Pros, they're so close to being the perfect single pair of headphones for everyone. But they hurt my ear canal with anything but the small tips, and then they wouldn't seal.

I have the XM4s also. I've also had problems with switching devices at times, notably with certain Mac apps that would stay connected (sending silent audio?) and prevent them from switching to the other device. But this seems to have been resolved with recent macOS updates (or maybe app updates?), and I haven't had the issue for a while.

In any case, any occasional pain caused by multiple device connections is vastly less than the pain of having to manually switch devices... every. single. time. I had the XM3s before, which had no multiple device support, and it was horrible!

Err, the XM5s have been out for a few months now.

https://electronics.sony.com/audio/headphones/all-headphones...

Disagree. I had the XM3s before and it was a constant pain having to manually switch devices. Sure, it's not 100% perfect, but the XM4s seamlessly switching between my laptop and phone is a dream by comparison.

I love my HD600s but I will never buy another wireless Sennheiser product. They're garbage. Apple definitely did this one right.

Bose also connects blazingly fast, which is nice.

I still much prefer U-shaped headphones worn over the neck, much less hassle, more battery, better sound. Samsung's entry in that category was very good, I hope they keep putting those out and not go all in on airpod type products.

I do miss the U for the whole 'can't lose one of these' though .. that said I haven't yet lost one of these (it's been about 2 years).

In saying that, it seems to fail with more then 2 devices despite being able to remember 3 devices at a time.

If I have the headphones connected to iPhone and iPad, then want to use my laptop I will normally need to switch bluetooth off on the mobile devices before turning on the headphones - allowing it to connect to the computer. A little annoying but still faster then messing around with cables.

Some browser tab has some media playing that is keeping hold of the BT audio connection.

Same reason why laptops, neither my Windows or Mac laptops, can figure out when they should go to sleep. Some broken browser tabs keeps the CPU at max speed, and turns on the GPU.

Still can't pair to two devices without dueling but just drop it form one.

Most companies don't have those types of options.

That isn't a ringing endorsement. Not sucking isn't the least you can do, and for the price they charge, it should be better than not sucking.

That's part of the reason why I prefer a cord.

I went back to Bose.

I will give apple full marks for stupendous glitz and marketing though. Any other company would have been slaughtered in the feedback. The reality distortion field has been well-inherited by the company.

I wish they didn't have a microphone. People on the receiving end of the calls truly suffer when callers use them.

It also helps that Apple removed the headphone jack.