Basically all the annoying shit I have to handle with my AirPods is made up by how good of a product they are. I have nice headphones, speakers, studio and other microphones, etc for a bunch of use cases. AirPods are my workhorse. I haven't found anything as comfortable with as good a battery life and as good fidelity and as good price. The active noise cancelling is also very good.

And I'm an apple hater, in general.

Would you recommend those for someone with no Apple devices?

I'm thinking of gifting them to someone. But they are Android/Linux user.

No. Although I do use them on my Linux desktop I wouldn't recommend anyone use bluetooth on Linux regularly.

But AirPods are the only wireless headphones with which you can use the mic without having to suffer from horrible audio playback and microphone quality because of Headset/Handsfree.

They suffer from that on both Linux and MacOS.

Not Linux: librepods/#655

I've liked Sony, myself, at least before they shit the bed with firmware. They stayed on better, and had better noise canceling. The transparency was a bit metallic. AirPods in comparison rely a ton on a tight fit for noise canceling, but the transparency is magic. Sadly, I'm more of a noise canceling user.

Why would they try to make the AirPods a worse purchase? Apple is happy to let you run whatever operating system on your Mac -- they aren't actively hostile there, but they don't help the community either.

Still, I would recommend the Sony WF-1000XM6 if you're not an Apple computer or phone user already. The UX is reportedly worse and a bit buggy, but the sound should be better.

You can configure them to pause them when you take them out of your ear, except when it is not an Apple device. They will refuse to do so, even though they clearly detect the event since you can no longer use the stem as a pause button when you do so.

Clearly they make it worse just because you didn't get an Apple device, so yeah idk what you're smoking but give me some.

yeah the fact that many things start working if you change the host ID to apple device is very sus. i retract.

> Apple is happy to let you run whatever operating system on your Mac -- they aren't actively hostile there

Weird to praise Apple for the one line of devices they let you install your own operating system on and ignore that every other device doesn't.

Even that is a lie. It allows other OSs, but they know quite well, that without drivers, it’s an empty promise. I can’t run anything else on my Mini for example.

I'm expecting them to lock down future devices because of this. Asahi can't keep up so the feature is basically unused.

This is the same Apple that sued people making "Hackintosh" machines...

Which is completely the opposite—running Apple software on non-Apple hardware—so they make no money whatsoever off such users.

> Even that is a lie.

> It allows other OSs

So it's not a lie?

If I allow you to cross my main door, but I'm 100% kill you immediately after that, do I really allow you into my home, or not? Your legalese only works in court, and Apple and fanboys spread this nonsense only because of legal reasons.

You're really twisting yourself into a pretzel to make it seem like Apple has made it impossible to install Asahi or something. Introducing these weird analogies about doors and killing people just dilutes whatever point you think you're making, and only invites people to fork the conversation with their own "well akshually it's like inviting you into my kitchen but not giving you a cookbook" retorts. Be direct, make the point you're going to make, not a sophist's allegory.

I’m happy to tell you, that If you don’t understand, then you don’t want to understand, and that this poor trial of protection of self esteem doesn’t worth anybody’s time.

better point than i made by getting down into the analogy mud, well put

You are the first in my life who said to a cognitive dissonance that it’s well put. People always amaze me.

Except of course they did something. They created a new language from scratch when they knew this whole situation beforehand.

My analogy is perfect, because it’s easy to filter people out who cannot add anything to the discussion. They immediately start to divert the discussion to orthogonal topics, which has nothing to do with the core topic. It’s a bait for stupid people. It makes obvious when the commenter really has well thought thoughts, or just parroting something.

> Why would they try to make the AirPods a worse purchase?

Why assume this is what they're doing?

Apple can only QA so much. To open up proprietary tacked-on features to a hardware ecosystem they can't control, opens up AirPods to be perceived as buggy on those devices, which isn't going to help the perception of quality of Apple products for non-iPhone/iPad users.

The AirPods already work outside of the Apple ecosystem. This is just someone building out interfaces for their extra features that are already integrated into Apple operating systems.

Yeah I understand. But there are plenty of good headphones that work with Android and include most of the features. That's kind of the point of Librepods right? To bring AirPods up to par for non-Apple devices and make them a viable option for Android and/or non-Mac users. So "this working" means those features.

Still a useful project for those of us with a foot in both the iOS and Android camps. (And who use Linux as well as macOS)

Yeah no criticism of the devs here, it's a great project. I meant to point at Apple. Though I'm a customer and like many of their products. I do hate their rigid clearly profit driven walled garden.

Be wary - I do not have an iPhone, and I once connected my AirPods to my wifes MacBook. They now chirp at me loudly every time I pick them up, automatically try to connect to her phone etc, and I cannot unregister them from her account. I want to add them to Find My - I cannot add them to Find My from my MacBook, I 'need' an iPhone or iPad to do that...

I had the same problem but for me resetting them fixed that quickly. Then I was able to add them on my Macbook so they don't do that anymore when connecting to other peoples apple devices.

Since the AirPods are an offline device, if you buy a pair now they should work indefinitely. But perhaps it would be better to reward manufacturers that don't make you jump through such hoops to use the hardware that you bought.

Sure. But on the other hand it makes sense to reward manufactures that make good hardware. And AirPods are very good hardware for me so I'm perfectly ok rewarding them for it.

By "reward manufacturers that make good hardware" do you mean "purchase their hardware" or do you mean some other long term commitment to them? Or is this a jab at the person who suggested you not buy their "good hardware" for other reasons?

Personally, I will use whatever gear is good as long as there's no risk of it becoming a paperweight because the manufacturer aggressively gets in the way of using it with other operating systems. I'm not "all in" on Apple and never will be. I love certain apple hardware but I'll likely never buy an M series Macbook because one day they'll stop supporting it even though it still works perfectly, and it doesn't support Linux.

> an offline device

Until you or someone else pairs them with an iPhone and leave them sitting overnight. The iPhone will send them the latest firmware.

AirPods update while charging in their case and paired with an xOS device. You'll need to make sure that they never connect with an Apple product to "version pin" them.

I am pretty sure Apple doesn't care

I would be surprised if they could. Linux on Macs is still a thing. In fact, Linux on Mac is why I keep all the Macs we have in the house from the mid to late 2000s because they still turn on and work, if I choose to install Linux on any of them they are still usable.

> I would be surprised if they could.

They can. Require a valid signature from the mac's secure cryptoprocessor in order to interoperate. There's nothing we can do.

Remember when we used to use cryptography to protect ourselves from government and corporation espionage? Good times. Now cryptography is used by governments and corporations to protect themselves from us.

One day we'll need such hardware attestations to even get an internet connection.

> Now cryptography is used by governments and corporations to protect themselves from us.

Just in case you're not kidding, I'll remind you it was always thus. The Nazi Enigma machines were not created by libertarian anarcho-punks to distribute The Whole Earth Catalog.

I was referencing the time period that saw the invention of the personal computer which democratized access to strong cryptography, leading to the crypto wars as the US government attempted to restrict civilian use.

Linux on older Macs, currently. I'd love to install Linux on my M5 (or even ARM Windows 11) but it's not possible due to Apple's lack of documentation and some other issues.

Apple is still selling Macs with M3 and M4 chips.

Regarding M5 support, seems like a matter of time.

https://github.com/AsahiLinux/m1n1/pull/578

I wouldn't. Most uncomfortable earbuds in the market at any price.

I realize your statement is subjective, but AirPods are made up of variants with plastic buds and variants that come with literally 5 sizes of squishy tips in the box.

So you have a total of 6 different fits to choose from. Plus the fact that there are surely dozens of third party tip options available for the Pro models.

The idea that anything with that many fit options can be considered the most uncomfortable earbuds on the market is not really possible in concept. That idea is as meaningless as saying that a size 9 Converse All Star is the most uncomfortable shoe on the market.

We are many generations removed from the original one size fits all product which was much different.

There really aren't very many different tip types available for airpods, since they use a special clip attachment method that means you can't use any standard existing tips. I've been looking for aftermarket tips for my pro 3s and there's maybe 5 actually different tips available (crappy foam, decent foam, bad hybrid, basic sticky silicone, basic bad rubber). They're distinctly lacking in good quality tips with different textures (can help with comfort and keeping them in your ears) or different bore sizes (comfort and changes the sound signature). TRI clarion, Tangzu Tang Sancai, Penon Liqueur, JVC Spiral Dot are a few different standard tips that would likely be way more comfortable than the standard airpods tips if you could actually use them.

Shoes are actually a great analogy here, because the companies all use different lasts, so it doesn't matter that eg. Adidas has thousands of different shoes in over a dozen sizes, none of them actually comfortably fit my feet because the heel is always too wide and the forefoot too narrow.

Also, they only come with 5 tip sizes (4+1 on the buds) and use an oval shape which I personally find less comfortable than circular tips+stems.

I'm not sure how Apple could disable this for existing Airpods. Maybe future Airpod models won't be compatible with this version of the mod, but they could update the mod.