If I could do so, I would mandate that everyone at my workplace must use a wired headset with a boom mic for every Teams call.

You're fucking disgusting. You'd force people to use Teams?

I love the skeumorphic campfire style room layout of Teams, with the talking heads. It's hilarious.

Hah, I laughed. But seriously, I don’t love Teams overall, but for business video conferencing, what’s actually better? I’d take Teams over Zoom or Google Meet. Haven’t tried any others.

Phew, wasn't sure that would land :)

For video conferencing only, it's pretty okay. It's that it's terrible for instant messaging and group chats and everything else that it gets used for that makes it an exercise in getting papercut to death.

Meet is a lot friendlier about not having to download a client and just use a web browser, so that's nice for clients. It's not great for messaging and group chats either though.

The problem with Zoom is that a lot of people use it for personal use, but aren't tech savvy enough, so occasionally you'll get PantsPooper69 joining a business meeting until they change it right after joining, if they notice.

I laugh. Then I cry a little as I put on my wired headset with boom mike for another teams call... :-P

I used a couple of Plantronics 5200 until they died (~ 4-5 years each) and they were excellent for a wireless headset. Pods are indeed dubious.

Sometimes it takes an event to change your view. I bought my first noise canceling sennheiser about a dozen years back. Hated it. Tried the noise canceling on my airpods. Hated it. Kept Airpods on transparency since most of my usage was during walking and I wanted to hear ambient sound, and never drown that out.

Then never tried noise canceling this week while on the plane. I was like ... what happened? Now I am actively looking forward to it.

I also used to hate airpods for their disconnects but they have become more reliable, especially if you tell them to remain connected to the last device you manually connected to.

Meetings / video chats are an anti-pattern for sure. There is so much communication loss because of other factors - someone forgot to mute, someone forgot to mute, plus what not. You want your side of the communication to be pristine, and even if airpods flake out 1/20 times, it is not good. I agree with you on that.

I still use my earpods. Great for zoom or phone calls. Terrible for music but everything in that form factor is compared to my studio monitor over ears. I tasted the forbidden fruit already.

I've literally never seen any of those problems with Airpods in my meetings, and I'm in meetings A LOT. I can't remember the last time someone joined with audio issues in general!

I personally use a Plantronics DECT headset which is ~12 years old and on its third battery, but otherwise an excellent workhorse. If I couldn't get another one of these headsets, I'd probably move to Airpods.

Please don’t. All of Apple products and especially the AirPods have horrid microphones that cause me physical discomfort to listen to.

The mic on [wired] Earpods sounds great because you can make the design work when the mic is on the wire down where lapel mics go.

It's harder to get Airpods to sound great because the mic must be located inside the ear.

Might want to see a doctor about that