Airpods/MacOS - listening to background music. Phone call comes in... VERY LOUD facetime 'ring' announces on mac that I'm getting a phone call.
Pick up phone to answer it... holy tamole - it's minimum 8 seconds between clicking 'answer' and... eventually airpods switching over to phone - most of the time. To the calling party, I've 'answered', but they can't hear me - or... can sort of hear me, but I can't hear them. The speed at which the 'switch' takes place, and the visual delay (air pod icons turning on, then off, then on again, then a floating top notification saying "airpods connected"...)... this is always minimum 8 seconds. Usually 10-11.
I just say "hang on, i'm switching my earpiece over..." and wait. Annoying. Given that this is all in their ecosystem, I expect this to get better, not worse. I'd rather this sort of experience get fixed vs more emojis, or 'sidecar' or whatnot.
The long/short of it is, both devices 'know' about the airpods. Call comes in to phone, during an answer, having airpods switch to the phone quickly - like, under 2 seconds - is what I'm expecting. I'm not sure that's an unreasonable expectation (maybe it is?). At some point, I would think, given all the neural-core-AI stuff in the phones and ecosystem, it should know that I always switch airpods to phone to talk... maybe do it automatically at some point?
The phone now knows my daily routine, giving me traffic updates 10 minutes before I normally leave to hit the gym. Yet... the 'fill in your email' prompts on the phone suggest 'my' email address is something I have not actively used in 11 years. I don't understand the 'why' behind some of these things. If the device is going to learn... when will it learn I don't use that email address any longer? Obviously separate issue, but... as has gone on for decades - we get loads of new features, but often little attention paid to clean up and refine last year's new features.
It's far from universal. Most users never expect to understand their software in the first place, and so put a lot more value on new features. If anything I'd say developers put too much effort into polish, since we're the very small demographic that actually appreciates it.
Fwiw, this seemed to work smoothly two years ago. And then… updates. AirPod firmware updates. iPhone updates. macOS updates. Nothing works the same as it did 2 years ago for maybe … 2 months or so. And there’s no going back. :(
Also: I don’t get a lot of calls anyway. But when I do, I tend to wander around as well. So it makes complete sense.
1) It's a distraction. I am also one of those people who turned on "Silence unknown callers" to send everyone I don't know to voicemail. If it's important, you'll get a message there. My phone either lives in my pocket or is on the desk next to me, so it's very unlikely I'd miss something.
2) At least with AirPods, although I have "connect automatically" turned on, I will never intentionally connect them to more than one source at a time.
Therin lies madness and bugs.
I had to reread my own sentence to make sure I wasn't being a complete moron.
NOTE TO SELF: COFFEE COFFEE COFFEE
Let's say you're listening to a Youtube MV on your computer while cleaning the dishes. A Skype call comes on your phone, and you take it.
- Do you still hear the youtube sound in the background ?
- What does the play/pause button do on your earbuds ? Or the volume button ? Which source does it act on ?
- An alarm starts on your iPad somewhere in the house, how do you stop it ? Do you keep getting the sound until you physically find the device and act on it ?
And that's just 2 min of thinking about it. Not saying it can't be done, just that you'd need to deal with all the edge cases as well. Auto switching sources is annoying (I personally disabled it when I had airpods, and don't use it on any headset), but I think having all sources active at all time could be as annoying, or worse. If Apple couldn't solve auto-switching, I wouldn't be holding my breath for them to solve the all-devices at the same times edge cases.
There’s a reason it’s a shambles.
It means the airPods keep X active connections with any device that says it could emit sound at any time, while also harmonizing sound levels as the devices don’t have the same settings, and mixing it all at the end.
That feels like a lot to ask for tiny devices with limited battery. Now that could be a nice idea for a separate device that keeps all these bluetooth connection alive and deals with all the mess to deliver a single stream to your earbuds (albeit with double the latency)