They use hardware tricks (beamshaping) and software tricks (audio processing) to get as much out of them as possible, and they do sound better than generic cheap Bluetooth earbuds, but the Bluetooth connection is still the bottleneck.

They did announce a special "high quality recording mode" for Airpods in iOS 26 (which I didn't know, so thanks) but I couldn't find much except their developer announcement. It's not documented and I don't have the feeling it's being used.

Airpods use AAC-ELD for better microphone quality. While the codec is an open standard, activating it with Airpods is proprietary.

Interesting! It reads to me like Apple advertises AAC-ELD only for Facetime though?

And the alternative, newer "Bluetooth high quality recording" I mentioned in sibling comment is not recommended for real-time communication due to increased latency.

So the situation seems to be more complex than I thought. But I stand by my original sentiment: I dislike the prevalence of bad-sounding Airpods in meetings.

They do, and that's what is coming to Linux with PR #655. surprisingly, last I checked, even macOS doesn't support this!

PR #655 of which project? I thought you meant Wireplumber but that's not it: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/wireplumber/-/merge_...

Edit: You meant Librepods. Apparently I managed to forget what we were commenting on in the first place.