Bluetooth honestly feels like a non-deterministic stack sometimes, it even took Apple 4 years to support it on the iPhone, how they have the AirPods working is close to magic.

They control the entire ecosystem and keep the variants and with it, the testing complexity, down as far as possible. That's how Apple stuff works so damn seamlessly.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world has to contend with dozens if not hundreds of Bluetooth chipsets, driver combinations, OS stacks... and each of these has their own quirks, and even if a bug gets fixed in a Bluetooth driver or controller firmware, good luck getting that distributed to users...

Also, they don’t have decent passive noise cancellation, so they’re not appropriate for mowing the lawn, etc.

My Sennheiser ear buds solve all these problems for a much lower price, and their sound quality is much better than the last pair of AirPods I tried.

To each their own, I guess.

An old groundskeepers trick for having music and ear protection is to get those big over ear protectors and put your buds on with that over them, just being mindful of volume of course.

With the big over ear hearing protectors that works much better than either in isolation.

Sadly, you usually have to find third party tests to find out what the passive noise isolation rating is for different brands. Manufacturers are terrible at marketing it.

But you can buy much cheaper headphones with the H1 chip for fast switching between devices by buying one of the Beats headphones. I love my $60 Beats Fiex with the double flange ear tips for traveling.

I don't know what the h1 chip has to do with the fast switching—surely this is a bluetooth protocol detail, yea?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_noise_control

> I don't know what the h1 chip has to do with the fast switching—surely this is a bluetooth protocol detail, yea?

A detail apparently no-one else bothers to deal with. The amount of hardware out there that does bluetooth the worst way possible is horrendous, and I will gladly pay extra to not have those in my life.

But, a sucker is born every minute, and it seems most of them find their way into control of our anti trust laws.

What exactly should be “free”? The hardware? It is very much worth the extra $40 for the Beat Flex to have seamless integration between all five of my devices. Let alone the much better ANC of the AirPods Pro (or the AirPods with ANC).

The ones you have are bulkier on top of that, the AirPods Pro have heart rate monitoring when I exercise.

I don't doubt the Airpods Pro is better. But not "pay an extra $200 better".[1] My ANC is pretty decent. Sound quality's quite good. Adjusts to my hearing frequencies. Etc.

(The A40 has a much better battery life).

[1] Unless you need a hearing aid. Then it's a steal.