While they don’t have the excellent UX of Airpods with Apple products when used with non-Apple products, I’ve never experienced this “erratic behavior”. They just work like bluetooth headphones with no weird issues. I regularly use them with my desktop on both Linux and Windows, I’ve used them with my Nintendo Switch, etc… and no erratic behavior

Agreed. You put them in the case, hold the one button (basically the “pair” button) for a sec, and connect from your device.

Bam. Work perfectly after that.

For some reason on Windows AirPods show up as two different types of devices (not left and right) one of which sounds very bad with a lot of noise. And of course if you connect AirPods with your iPhone and your Windows laptop they’ll start fighting over who gets to connect.

This isn’t an AirPods specific issue, it’s a Windows issue. My laptop does the same thing with my galaxy buds where it shows two devices when I connect them. One of them uses the Bluetooth profile for headphones which sounds decent and the other uses the profile for headsets which sounds like garbage but that is needed in order to have the bandwidth to use the built in mic.

I believe the different Bluetooth codecs show up as different devices under Windows, so I assume the noisy one is the one for calls. Not sure exactly why it’s like this.

Windows and Bluetooth headphones just don’t work well together, regardless of manufacturer. And good luck of the headphones also have a mic and support the headset profile.

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.

Use the nicer one for listening. Use the shittier one for conferences. It's not an Airpod thing, Bluetooth just sucks and doesn't support high fidelity full duplex audio.

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.