It feels really good to hear that the expensive models have mostly the same flaws as the cheap ones. So the people who tell me it must be my 40€ anker models, because theirs always work fine probably just don't use them as much, but at the same time, spending more money would not have given me better functionality (except noise canceling).
I guess the real thing to take away is, that cable is still the most reliable option (and also saves a lot on battery!)
Annoyance 8: When I'm using the (good) noise cancelling of the AirPods to eliminate distracting background noise so I can focus, after a few hours the battery will run down to 15% and trigger the EXTREMELY LOUD "PING-pong-pong-pong" low-battery noise, right in my ear, without warning.
And it's Apple, so of course you can't turn it off.
You'd be no better off with a Sony Headphone that screams in your ear that a device connected, the device is turned on and the battery is almost empty. The flagship Sony headphone is so bug ridden it's a joke if you ask me.
I can't comment on the bugs (I'm actually not sure that I've experienced any), but those connected etc. Messages really are very annoying, partly because they feel like forever
I'm reasonably sure you can actually turn those messages off though. I did that for a while, but ended up turning them back on again as connecting them can be ... difficult ... and I'm never quite sure if they're connected until they tell me they are (and if I don't play any audio fast enough, they will also helpfully disconnect).
There should be an option to have this information shown as an alert on the device. iPhones already show the battery charge level of the headphones so why not make it an alert banner?
> You'd be no better off with a Sony Headphone that screams in your ear that a device connected, the device is turned on and the battery is almost empty.
I have the WF-1000XM4s. On the iOS headphones app, visiting System and turning off "Notification & Voice Guide" gets rid of the power on and battery level announcements leaving only the connection/disconnection alerts (although I keep all of them on as I find them useful, and wouldn't characterise them as screams).
I have the same headphones and the main issue I have with it is their multi-device support is pretty much broken for me. If I'm on a zoom call and I get a phone call on my other device it takes over the audio (as expected), but then if I decline the phone call the audio doesn't switch back to my zoom call (computer). I end up having to turn the headphones off and back on for them to reconnect, which actually takes a good 10-15 seconds at least. The Bose QC35 I had before handled multiple devices way better, unfortunately they just didn't sound as good as the Sony.
I hate to say this but I mostly turn Bluetooth on and off as I use different devices. If I get a iPhone call during meeting that I can not listen to for a minute, then I will check mute, stop video, and then answer the phone on speaker. I try to have Bluetooth off when I am outside anyways for security and privacy reasons, so it is complementary to that.
I too have the WF-1000XM4 and I only have the function to turn off the notification & voice guide that will stop making the sound that tells me what mode it is in. But it will happily scream in my ear that its either connected, almost empty or on / off.
Regarding the bugs I experience on a regular basis:
- Every off week the Speak-to-chat is somehow activated and than it drops me out of the music with the sound amplified.
- The standby function does no longer work since a month or two and I find it empty every time I forget to either manually turn it off or put it in the charger
- The multi device is so odd that I need to disconnect all devices in the surrounding and start connecting one by one
- The dual bluetooth sometimes struggle to work with both Windows and Mac.
- The connection with Windows was something I actually needed to Google as I couldnt get the quality to work, I somehow had to read somewhere that I needed to wait for ±1min till the actual device pops up in the list (Its registered as two seperate devices) but for this I actually blame Windows
- Teams often refuses to play with the main device, but rather prefers the crappy audio system one.
To finish off and it's not a bug, but the microphone they advertise is so laughably bad that roughly 80% of the people couldnt hear me properly on the other end of the line. But reading the reviews I find myself one of the few in this situation.
I have a pair of (I wanna say Honeywell? Maybe 3m?) hearing protection bluetooth headphones that I simply keep off my head while pairing and unpairing because it's loud enough that I can hear it clearly with the phones down in my hand.
AirPod Pro 4, coming in 2025, will like have a feature to let you choose custom alert sounds, tied to ios 19. And it will be heralded with enormous classy custom Helvetiral fonts in a multi parallax scrolling site announcing "we've heard the future, and it's quiet". Or... "If you listen carefully, you can hear the future".
Or they'll provide haptic in-ear custom vibrations in AirPod Pros 5, and their slogan will be "Your ears never felt better".
I'm not actually 100% sure I'm 'joking'. I think we'll see some in-ear haptic feedback stuff in a few years, which take a few more years to get 'right', and will be confusing as heck, but will be useful. If it's customizable, there will be a small but fervent ASMR community around it. It will be pitched as accessibility-friendly, helping people with hearing issues or other sensory issues just 'feel' indicators. Wire it up to 'apple home' and you'll get little in-ear tinglings when certain people come home or leave, or when the garage door opens, and so on. Happy/sad emojis in iMessage will trigger certain ear vibrations, etc.
Having played around with very convincing binaural recording, I am all for subtle auditory haptics as an additional communication layer. I’d be surprised if it’s strictly coded rather than localized to specific objects/interactions within your specific environment.
Better yet, AirPods Pro 4 will allow you to adjust the volume of the warning tone, AirPods Pro 5 will allow you to customize it. AirPods Pro 6 will undo that but allow you to disable the tone and use haptic feedback. Then AirPods Pro 7 will allow you to adjust the volume of the warning tone, and customize it.
Your comment made me realise that I actually never switch with the pods button (rather on the display of my phone) because of the loud noise. I don't get why they have not fixed this after years of complains from users.
Doesn't it still make the noise when you use the onscreen switch?
Either way it's horrible, all of these noises seem to be at a fixed or separate volume level than the media volume (which actually is common for apple). Siri used to have a separate volume than media (still might?), and then you also have ringtone volume, and sound in settings barely even hints that all these separate volumes exist.
Just to provide my own ancedata, I've been an AirPods users for a long time, and don't find the alert sounds particularly loud or annoying.
I think the volume of complaints and popularity of AirPods this speaks to wider variations in human hearing perception than one would expect. The main body of users have no problem, but enough people experience those sounds as painful to generate a volume complaints.
Conversely, it might just speak to the different kinds of music we listen to. "Dynamic range" is a pretty big phrase you'll hear in the mixing industry, and Airpods effectively have no way to determine how loud your music is before sending an audible notification. If you're listening to a song that's mixed at -12dbLUFS on Spotify or Apple Music, the alert will play at the exact same volume as it would when you're watching a Netflix show mixed at -25dbLUFS. The difference in sound is, quite literally, an order of magnitude apart, and could quite easily account for having such a loud and annoying sound blowing up your ears and ruining your listening experience.
Reminds me of my roommate’s Jambox bluetooth speaker years ago…I learned that it had this behavior while fully asleep at 4:30am after we’d had a party, when, every few minutes it started loudly blasting “BOOOOP. LOW BATTERY” alerts.
The trouble was that it was hidden somewhere in our messy living room, and the alerts weren’t frequent enough to find it quickly, so I was standing around in my underwear for ages, waiting for each subsequent alert and getting a bit closer each time, because it was too loud to go back to sleep.
Sounds like the small slice of hell that is a low battery in most smoke detectors: one short (and loud AF) beep every ~15 minutes. Fine when you have only one, but in a large house you never know which one of these f*ckers is actually the one complaining.
With Amazon Basics 9V batteries sitting at about $1.50 a piece, I've started the practice of just replacing all the smoke detector batteries when one of them starts getting low. When I get to the end of that supply, I'm going to switch to rechargeables and just recharge them all before they start chirping. One night of bad sleep from the option of laying awake, anticipating the next chirp, or going around the house changing batteries in the middle of the night isn't worth it.
I once had an EE friend that built these tiny chips he called Annoyers. They simply emitted a loud chirp at a random time interval. The interval was too long to effectively locate the chip, and the chirp was terribly annoying. It could take weeks to find the quarter-sides device hidden in someone’s home (or the battery would just die).
Of course, while he was explaining this to me, the chip slipped from my fingers and fell down an air vent of another friend’s living room. The comedic timing was perfect, and it really might have been the funniest thing to happen to me in 2012.
When I started a new job at a NOC, I was pranked with one of those. I didn't know what to make of the odd recurring ~12khz beeps, and figured it was some old device slowly dying. So I pulled out a stopwatch to see if I could suss out the interval on the beeping. I was too focused on timing the beeps to notice my coworkers exchanging glances with each other after asking them, "Does anyone else hear that?"
I found a pattern emerge. It repeated itself every 10 beeps or so, with irregular intervals between those beeps. Armed with that information, I could effectively predict the next beep within 3-5 seconds (intervals ranged between 3-10 minutes, if I recall.) So I started walking around the room, standing in different locations as I stared at my stopwatch. The farther apart the places I stood, the better chance I'd have of triangulating the source with each beep.
I got within 3-5 feet of it in the ~300 square foot room before the coworkers came clean about what they had done. I wasn't even mad, I was having a blast!
This is the ridiculous experience with all blue tooth headphones. "BATTERY LOW CHARGE NOW!", or "DING DING DING". Your battery is effectively 10% or 15% because they become impossible to listen to once they get low.
Your (and other's) complaints about the volume of the AirPod alert notifications makes me think either (a) your hearing is more sensitive than most or (b) I've lost more hearing than I thought I had. Either way, those alerts play at what seems like a reasonable and moderate volume to me.
I know a lot of people use airpods as like ambient sound, just keeping them playing super quiet all the time. I personally keep them at a moderate volume because I have no interest in hearing anything other than my music, but maybe the low battery sound is volume-independent, so people who listen at 10% would be jarred by it.
Those alerts are pretty loud, particularly with noise canceling on. One of the things I love about noise canceling is I can listen to my music almost at zero volume on the phone. With everything else blocked out, it's plenty loud. Then the 'bloop bloop' happens and it's like someone hit me over the head.
Annoyance 9: Misplacing or losing these tiny $200 devices is a lot more painful than when I used to lose $20 wired headphones.
Maybe I'm more prone to losing things than the average person. But after losing two of these things over the last couple years I'm not buying them again.
I don't use my AirPods Max below 25% charge anymore because I'm scared of being startled by the ridiculously loud noise. I can't believe this passed Apple's QA.
Apple engineers reading this: The painfully loud "PING" sounds on the AirPods Max hurt my ears when I switch from transparency to sound isolation mode. It's really unpleasant and I'm concerned this is damaging my hearing. The "ping" volume level should be customizable or at least quieter across the AirPods line.
Had Music.app completely hose my entire data plan last month because it was downloading about 12 albums I had in “Downloaded Music” then deleting them then downloading them over and over last month.
Not to mention Apple Music keeps turning itself back on when I turn it off.
All impossible to diagnose why and the only advice is reset and delete everything and start over.
I was wondering why my phone battery kept running down some days faster than others. Seems it randomly turns on Apple Music even when the volume is down to 0% and I don’t really notice that until I see it is actually playing on the notifications centre. I never, ever want it to play without me touching the play button on my phone, but that is not an option I guess.
And sometimes it "just works", but only if everybody is within the Apple ecosystem. Otherwise, it's just a net exporter of problems. See, for example, SMS message of "Liked an image.", email attachments converted into icloud download links, .DS_STORE files scattered everywhere, and so on. Any time Apple comes up with a new feature that would require improving capabilities at a lower level, Apple instead makes a new layer of abstraction on top. And oh how conveniently, that new layer of abstraction is transparent only to Apple users.
I overheard someone the other day ranting about Android phones and their broken SMS support. They apparently didn't realize it's actually Apple that has the buggy code/design and will try to send proprietary data to a non-Apple device.
See my comment here[0]. Apple added application-level support for non-standard features not supported by SMS. When Apple sends message through the Message application, it selects either iMessage or SMS, based on whether there exists an iMessage connection, and whether the recipient has an iMessage account. This includes for things that are not representable by SMS. Reactions in the Message application, sent to a non-Apple device, show up as nonsense replies, such as "Liked an image", or "Liked 'The full text of the thing you just sent them.'".
"Just works" is absolutely a statement that should be considered on a time curve! Some products work incredibly in the most trivial use case you test during unboxing, but fall apart when deeply integrated. Others are a PITA to set up, but stop requiring any unproductive attention afterwards.
This was incredibly clear for anyone WITHOUT AirPods during 2019-2020. Everyone picked them up with their iPhone 11 upgrade and immediately started talking about how they "just work". Three months later, you'd see people fiddling with extra devices to keep them charged, or complaining about sending them through the laundry or into subway grates. Then the pandemic hit and they became an entire category of Zoom fatigue due to multiple bluetooth connections.
This has been my observation as well. They mostly just work, but when they don’t they are indefinitely more annoying to fix than „regular“ BT headphones.
Aha, just experienced this yesterday when I couldn’t update or download any new app on my child’s iPad with the newest OS because it refused to ever finish accepting my iCloud password.
Through some obscure digging, I found that changing my region language on the ipad from English > UK English and back somehow fixed it…
I think a lot of this is down to the fact that all issues that the user could resolve have already been fixed and when you eventually hit an issue, its some low level problem you have no hope of fixing anyway. While on windows or linux you often run in to situations where its just "Oh don't press that button, thats the button that makes it blow up, press the one next to it" while apple removes the button that makes it blow up.
If you're within the warranty period (or have AppleCare) you should definitely bring them into an Apple store. It might be a hardware issue. If you describe the problem to them they will almost certainly take your word for it and give you a free replacement left AirPod. Even if it's not a hardware issue you'll get a fresh new battery for one ear :) I've done this several times between my two pairs of airpods.
It's an accessibility problem, especially for people (like me) who have astigmatism. But y'all don't look away from white text on black background to a bright light source (like a page of black text on a white background) and get a "burned in" impression of the previous page in your vision? Lucky you.
Dark mode is fine, please let the user choose to have dark mode when she wants to.
The problem in general is the stark contrast between white and black. My editor is set with a grey background with grey text (or low chroma colors), and it works great.
There IS also a difference (as well) between Dark Mode and pure white text (or close to it) on pure black background. Usually a Dark Mode will have the contrast be slightly less (both text and bg are grays).
Sorry to point this out, but it IS a UI design site, and the person is griping about the minutia problems of an Apple device, so: fair game.
>Annoyance 4: Sometimes, only the left or right AirPod plays sound. Taking them in/out of your ears doesn't fix it, you need to put it back into the case and take it back out, which sometimes, doesn't fix it. So you need to put your AirPods in/out of your case two or three times to fix it.
I run into this too, anyone know what's up with that? Is there some "listen with only one headphone in" feature that I'm accidentally enabling?
It’s not a feature it’s a bug that will affect nearly all Bluetooth in-ears that don’t share a receiver.
The design of Bluetooth buds is such that one of the buds is elected to be the receiver of data from the phone, it then propagates its signal to the second bud.
What you’re experiencing is a disconnection of one earbud to the other.
FWIW: apples AirPods Pro’s rehandshake (from the “slave” side towards the “master” side) every 10s- so you can have a lot of luck just waiting for it to reconnect; that is assuming that the slave device _wants_ to reconnect; it might believe it’s not in your ear.
The ability to listen with one headphone in is definitely a feature, but the issue is that sometimes that's happening when it shouldn't be. You pulled both Airpods out of the case, put them in your ears, but only one connects. And you can't get the one with no sound to play sound until you put it back in the case and try again (sometimes takes a couple attempts)
I don't think that's specific to AirPods .. I have Sony's bluetooth earbuds and that occasionally happens. Sometimes just waiting a bit and one of the ears will reconnect on its own. I chalked it up to the bluetooth standard.
I have a solution for that: with bare hands close your ears tightly with Airpods in them. Depending on the duration of such covering Airpods either just mute for a moment, or disconnect and reconnect right away. This helps to re-sync if one is ahead/behind another, or if one is not connected. I do that occasionally with my Airpods Pro connected to iPhone, Android or Macbook Pro - same outcome in all these cases. Such connection "reboot" helps in most described cases, though occasionally explicit Bluetooth toggle Off/On is needed, especially with the Macbook.
I imagine that hands and head create an improvised Faraday cage. Though 2.4GHz Bluetooth signal should nevertheless pass thought the body tissue, likely there is just a signa-to-noise ratio rapid drop which forces Airpods to re-establish the connection.
Yes, it's meant to reproduce the traditional one-earplug bluetooth experience for busy people. It also allows one to effectively bypass battery limits: if you hear the battery alert, you take one earplug off and put it in the case - it charges so quickly, it makes it doable to put it back on before the other dies, and then you recharge the other.
That simply doesn't work for me. Regardless of what options I set, about 60% of the time, if I'm talking on an iphone with airpod pros, and I walk within a few feet of my mac (which does have a connection to the airpods), it will switch from the phone while I'm talking and... there's no reliable way to get that back. In the phone app, clicking 'airpods'... is slow as molasses and sometimes shows them as connected again, but... no sound. Speaker works - the call is still ongoing. If I walk far enough away, sometimes it will reconnect, but not usually. The only near reliable way is to disconnect the airpods in the bluetooth menu, then wait, then reconnect. This is annoying as hell for the person on the call to have to sit through.
Yeah, sorry Apple support... I've only got the ios 15.x from a couple weeks ago. No doubt upgrading to the very latest will definitely solve all extant problems, everything will magically 'just work' and there will be absolutely no new problems introduced. /s
When I describe this to some Apple store folks (2x last fall), they seemed 'shocked' (couldn't tell if it was fake or not). "Wow, never heard of that - no one's ever told me that before, that doesn't seem right. We have some training classes next week you can sign up for".
In case you don’t know this, since it isn’t obvious, you have to set them not to automatically connect on each device they are paired to. And if you unpair and re-pair them you have to do it again. This is annoying but not as annoying as auto-pairing.
I hope it works for the parent, but in my case even that doesn't work. Whatever extra protocol or other crap they introduced with this "automatic switching" feature is garbage and worsens the experience even if you disable the new functionality. The audio menu and connection/disconnection being slow as molasses is a new thing introduced by this change.
Options are "automatically" and "when last connected to thi..."
These don't even make sense as options, imo.
What I think they're meaning is "automatically connect..." and the options are "automatically" and "when last connected". But.. if the software is broken, and it 'magically' connects when I don't want it to, then that will be the last time it connected anyway.
“When last connected” is supposed to mean “if this phone is the last thing they were connected to when they were put away last time, connect to this phone when they are taken back out.” “Never” in that context would mean each time you put them in, you would have to go to your device and manually connect.
Of course if that’s not working, that’s a problem, but conceptually I think the options make sense.
Yeah, they're great, but definitely not quite perfect / magical.
Another thing I noticed is that using the noise cancelling ocassionally gives me terrible, luckily short-lived tinnitus. Never encountered that with other (over or on ear) noise cancelling devices.
For me personally, one of the most infuriating product design decisions that Apple made was the removal of the headphone jack from the iPhones and iPads. This is literally the only reason why I switched to Android, despite being a long-time Apple user.
I stayed with Apple, went through three of the super-fragile 3.5mm adaptors, and now am on a third-party ”heavy duty” adaptor. Let’s see if this lasts.
Too bad Android manufacturers want to emulate Apple even with bad decissions. Headhpone port is getting rarer with each new release. Samsung S21 line doesn’t have it in any model afaik.
A list of a variety of bugs isn't what I expected from the title.
Airpods are nice, but outside the Apple ecosystem they're horrendous (and somehow still better than most alternatives...). The proprietary chip / protocol in use makes me sad, but what makes me even sadder is that they're not actually even working on supporting them as a good product on Android.
Maybe it makes economical sense but it's really sad that we got to the point that a company can release hardware and go out of their way not to support a significant amount of potential customers. This feels like what anti-monopoly regs try to prevent, but it's not a monopoly either so ...
Also, the microphone quality is a lot worse than people say it is (I'm using the Pro version). They are barely usable for calls in a loud environment.
Apple has always gone to lengths to prevent their products from interacting outside their walled garden. The last straw for me (more than a decade ago) was when a firmware update closed a gap I was using to load music onto my ipod without going through the hateful ITunes synchronization process.
I had one pair of AirPods and left the charging case on a plane; getting a replacement case was a pain because I had to prove the AirPods were mine. When the battery died in them I gave up on them completely. Battery life too short, too easy to lose, and environmentally not sound.
I have the "listen for Hey Siri" thing enabled on my iPhone and also my MacBook. I would like to be able to use this to start playing music on the Macbook. But when I say hey siri, and both devices are in range, they both answer, then the macbook shuts off, and siri proceeds only on the iPhone.
My airpods broke so I bought some €25 Bluetooth earbuds and honestly they work just as well for my needs. The best thing is not worrying about losing or breaking them.
Heh, I got my spouse a pair of AirPods, and long ago she went back to a pair of wired earbuds due to various issues with them. IIRC, noiuse cancelling didn't work well and causes a lot of sudio issues, there were connection issues all the time. The cheap wired heaphones work much better for her.
Out of curiousity, does anyone have a good recommendation for a good pair of 3.5mm wired headphones with a microphone? I still have an old pair of Bose Sport headphones, but they are only wireless now.
I generally like the QC20, but I think those were recently discontinued. The mic wasn't the best, but for regular conversations generally didn't have problems if I clipped the mic to a shirt. If it bounced around and rustled on a shirt that wasn't good, but that's going to be a problem with any mic on a wire, I'd think.
The market, that ill-tempered, irrational screwball, has spoken, and its says that everyone wants wireless headphones. The manufacturers have listened, and fervently believe that you’re wrong if you disagree.
I'm not using Apple ear phones, but wireless head phones are seriously practical. Anytime I have to use my corded ones when walking the dog I get reminded of how they are actually pretty handy.
Still use cord ones in other circumstances. When lying down, for example. I like to have the choice at least.
Wow, this was a perfect description of my experience. An additional factor is the release date of the used devices. My experience improved by a large margin when I replaced my late 2018 Macbook and my 2019 iPad. Another example are calls which ring on multiple devices. I'm using my iPad and somebody calls me on my iPhone, but the iPhone sends the call also to the iPad. The same when I have MS Teams on my Macbook and my iPhone. Once I put the Airpods in my ears anything can and does happen. Sometimes one Airpod is lost in these situations.
I have many of these problems plus: the advertised tap-to-control behavior never seems to work when I want it to. It only activates when my AirPods are misinterpreting my adjusting them as trying to pause what I’m listening to. And, of course, tapping again doesn’t restart playback.
Annoyance 1 actually has a setting. You can setup the AirPods to actively switch to a preferred source (your phone), or stay connected to your computer. This one bugged the hell out of me for months before I found the option.
> To prevent AirPods from automatically switching between devices, go to Settings > Bluetooth. Tap the Actions Available button next to the name of your AirPods, tap Connect to This iPhone, then tap When Last Connected to This iPhone.
Very true, and it's not very intuitive, but at least the setting is available.
I guess that's the problem with "it just works" magic -- when it doesn't work, you need to have a few settings available. And unfortunately, those are rarely included.
I would posit that the AirPods used to be the most magical "Just Works" Apple product I've ever owned, but over-time as Apple has added more features and complications to them, they've lost the magic.
Those first generation AirPods were a thing of beauty. Newer ones now are technically better--better sounding, longer lasting, ANC, etc. But I've experienced a lot of the same annoyances that OP is complaining about.
I still love them, but the experience is definitely a little fiddly these days.
I generally enjoy my AirPods. They are occasionally quirky, but most of the time they really do “just work” for me. The annoyances are annoying when they happen, though.
The strangest part is that the annoyances aren’t getting any better over time. At first I assumed that they were growing pains of an early product launch. Yet now we’re years into the AirPods experience and they continue to be just as quirky as when I first got them.
Apple seems so hot or cold on fixing their own bugs. Certain bugs get rapidly patched in the next iOS or Mac software release. Other bugs languish for what feels like forever. Do Apple execs just not use AirPods? Are they using a different configuration or hardware combination that doesn’t have these bugs? Have they just trained themselves to overlook the bugs because the workarounds have become a reflex? I can’t imagine working at any tech company where one of the flagship products had such a high rate of annoyances without having a lot of engineers diverted to replicating, diagnosing, and fixing it ASAP.
Apple seems to only improve peripherals (like the AirPods) with new hardware releases; not software updates. They make money based on units of AirPods moved.
Not strictly true in this case. Apple added a lot of additional functionality to the airpod pros over time. The tuning is hidden under the accessibility settings, but it’s there.
They have added some things to the airpods over software updates. But I assume they are pretty limited if they are already pushing the hardware to the absolute limit on release. A lot of the stuff they push over updates seem to be things they already planned to have but perhaps didn't have the firmware polished enough yet.
In my experience, the annoyances actually get worse over time.
I got my AirPods back when the original ones were released and the experience probably was as good as physically possible (short of including multiple radios so they can maintain connections to multiple devices in parallel and simply mix the audio client-side).
They then (2 years ago?) released this new feature where AirPods could automatically switch between all your devices which is just too slow and is more of an annoyance in practice, but even disabling the behavior made the existing experience much worse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30085538
I agree. When I got my first pair roughly two years ago (after years of using various versions bluetooth earbuds you could buy on Amazon for $20) they seemed like magic. Take them out, they automatically and nearly instantly connect, and almost never had any issues.
I just bought v3, and while the sound is noticeably better, the connections are all over the place. At least once a day, the connection simply dies. Multiple times a day it decides to connect to another device that I'm not using. If you answer a call and then put an airpod in your ear, it's got about a 50% chance of connecting, after a multi-second delay. Sometimes it says its connected, but it's not, so the iphone isn't emitting sound from its speakers and nothing is coming out of the airpods, leaving me sounding like an idiot repeating "can you hear me now?" until I manually kill the connection and use the built in speakers. Absolutely infuriating.
Whoa I thought that was just me. It used to be pretty easy to switch the device AirPods are connected to. Now, AirPods connect to the right device in 50% of the cases, 30% of cases they do not, but I can click connect on the new device and it works, remaining 20% the only way to get things working is either manually disconnecting on the device they attach to or putting them in the case and trying to get happy scenario again.
To summarize, things are generally better but way less consistent.
Yeah I totally know what you are talking about with it being too slow and unreliable. But it's also the primary reason I use airpods. They are the only device I know of that let me almost seamlessly switch between my macbook, iphone, ipad, and while running they connect direct to my watch. It's worth so much to me that I don't even consider any competitors.
And I will put up with a lot of quirkyness or waiting for connection to have that.
I recently upgraded from an iPhone XR and a lot of frustrating software problems just went away. Nothing to do with AirPods in my case, but it made me realize the effect of having an older phone with less processing power and less developer attention paid to it. I wonder if your AirPods problems might have to do with having older devices connecting — ie. the other side of the Bluetooth connection.
I have an iPhone 13 and I have all of the annoyances, often, except 6+7. In fact I have had these annoyances with all my iPhone and Airpods combinations. It's probably all due to bluetooth, even though Apple uses their own W1 chip to connect.
It's not always processing power. Some of the older phones had known issues, for example the iPhone 7 often had a faulty audio IC, and the iPhone 6/6+ had low RAM relative to its larger screen size and bigger graphic sizes.
Prior to the 8 and XR, iPhones had Bluetooth versions 4.0 or 4.2, which meant things were slower to connect, and also meant lower microphone data quality. Apple hasn't done any customer education around this. A lot of people with older MacBooks have poor microphone quality when using AirPods - but it's primarily their computer that is the bottleneck.
Extend that to AirPods Pro. My right ear cup crashes periodically - then I can only hear out of the left side until the watchdog timer engages and nukes the left cup too. I frequently have to reset it by holding down the buttons for 10 seconds in order to get it to connect to anything. It frequently disconnects and refuses to reconnect if I take off my mask out from under it. It stops detecting my head occasionally. An iOS bug probably, but I can't change the Mic mode anymore when on calls - it just shows me them menu options but I can't tap any of them. And the ear cups started to smell, lol, but there's no clear way to actually clean them due to their, well, magnets. I bike to work and have to dry them when I arrive because sweat builds up under the cups. They're also just too big to fit into anything practical, so I end up just carrying them around in one hand.
All in all, they're fine, but they most certainly do not just work for me, and they're not a $600 product IMO.
Are there any other over the ear headphones that provide great sound quality, noise cancellation, pair with computers and smartphones, and have a solid mic?
I’ve looked at the Sony XM1000’s and from what I understand there is some issue with Windows where if you enable the mic, it goes into some different Bluetooth mode that degrades the audio quality coming out of the headphones. Many wireless headphones are advertised to only work with smartphones.
I just want something that does it all, connects to all my devices, and works.
Wait is there a device that can do stereo AND mic? I’m not aware of any and I’ve searched long and hard. AFAIK, there is no way it is possible with the current BT spec. Are you saying your Apple headphones can do that?
I think it’s mostly on the device side. Both sender and receiver have to have the codecs available. TBH, I just recently learned you can go into iOS Bluetooth settings and change the device type to “speakers” and use your computer (at least if your computer is running Linux) as a speaker. It’s freakin magic.
Bose quite comfort 35 ii and the 700. We use them 4-6 hours a day due to covid homeoffice and couldn't be happier. IMHO if you want to have something better you have to switch to the studio section and give up the BT.
> I’ve looked at the Sony XM1000’s and from what I understand there is some issue with Windows where if you enable the mic, it goes into some different Bluetooth mode that degrades the audio quality coming out of the headphones.
I have the Jabra Elite 85h's and have the same exact problem on OS X from time to time. (I really like them otherwise, though!) I'm not entirely sure what it is.
I don't think there's really any headphones that provide "great"[1] sound quality and noise cancelling + bluetooth. There's necessary tradeoffs that need to be made and physical limitations that mean that sound quality and noise cancelling ability are kind of at odds with each other.
You can definitely get "good"[1] sound quality + noise cancelling, but for me at least most decent non noise cancelling headphones sound noticeably better than my Sony XM4s, even at much lower price points. I'm fine with this though, because I use my XM4s when I need to focus without being distracted by background noise and they do an amazing job at that.
(There's also the issue of bluetooth signal not being as good as wired, and the DAC/Amplification needing to be built into the headphones but I don't think that's having as much of an impact on the overall sound signature - it hasn't been my experience when using bluetooth adapters on some other headphones, and using the XM4s wired).
[1] Obviously peoples subjective idea of "good" vs "great" vary wildly, I'm just sharing my subjective opinion on things.
I got the Sony WH-1000XM4 as a replacement to a cheap wired Sharkoon RUSH ER2. It's like 300 USD vs 30 USD.
Sony provides good sound quality + great noise canceling + bluetooth. But as soon as I switch on the mic the quality turns bad. It's abysmal with a old Win 7 Laptop and bad on a Win10 Laptop/iPhone. So for all cases which require a mic, I switched back to the cheaper wired one. Getting an extension cord for the wired one would have been a much cheaper solution. The Sony one only shows its real strengths when walking outside in a noisy environment.
If you are experiencing all of these reliability issues, have them replaced by Apple. My original AirPods Pro had some serious issues. Firmware would update on only one of the pair, and so preventing them both from connecting to the same device. Or one would just crash frequently...
After having both replaced I have had zero issues since. I assumed it was some hardware quirks with earlier models.
I've similarly found AirPods both "just work" from a user experience, especially compared to alternative bluetooth audio devices, and also are quirky from a reliability standpoint. There have been fixes pushed out in past, particularly with the earlier models, where fixes could be done via OTA firmware updates.
The remaining quirks all feel related to Bluetooth tech and, specifically, the low-power available to AirPods (compared to, say, my giant Bose headphones).
I can only speculate but I think AirPods are currently limited by the bluetooth tech itself. What I expect we'll see is apple will ship a version with a proprietary radio system. They probably won't be compatible with non-Apple devices but they'll be 10x better than today's AirPods (more reliable, simultaneous audio from multiple devices, even better battery life, etc.).
There's no guarantee Apple will pull this off. But I'd bet it's far more likely there's a team of engineers dedicated to this strategy as we speak than that Apple just "gave up" on one of their best-selling product lines as soon as the MVP proved there was a huge market.
Man, you sure are overly optimistic. That part about bluetooth doesn't make sense, tons of products work reliably with similar dimension/weight restrictions as airpods. If Apple with its army of engineers can't make their products work reliably, how could have much smaller companies succeeded? Btw one of biggest disappointments for me with airpods (pro) is weak bettery life compared to competition.
I am currently shopping around for new truly wireless headphones for iphone and not a single comparison has apple airpods/pro as winners in 2 most important categories (for me but I believe for many others too): sound quality and battery life. Same for their smartwatches but thats another topic.
Apple, or any company, sees that even product with such flaws still sells very well, so there is little pressure to fix things asap. That some engineers somewhere are working on next gen (or even 2 next gens in parallel) is expected, but these generational updates are very iterative and never revolutionary (that's what new product lines are for, for much higher price).
One anecdote from today - had a year end review call with my boss while being on sick leave due to covid. He desperately tried to pair his new iphone 13 pro max with his new airpods (not sure if pro or regular) and gave up after some time. It just didn't work and we had good old phone-in-hand call.
If you know any bluetooth headsets that don't have similar quirks to what the post talks about, let me know, because otherwise I'm thinking this is Bluetooth and it wont get better until we ditch it.
Quirks of Bose AE2 that I'm dealing with:
1) Switching to the low fidelity Bluetooth headset mode when the mic is activated. Why does this still exist? I'd be happier if they just didn't add a mic if they can't support better quality audio.
2) The headset nominally supports connecting to two devices, except there's no mixing. One channel is primary and will override the other. Annoying when you're on a meeting on a laptop and a notification arrives on your phone and the audio cuts out to play the notification tone.
3) To add, sometimes Apple devices just play silence? Meaning, the secondary device will get muted and it will take a minute for you to figure out why it's not playing. There's no user control over this primary/secondary aspect.
4) Oh, yes, I use three devices daily which results in a lot of manual switching.
5) The devices or the headphones don't always automatically connect for some reason. It's not clear either if it's from me manually switching them or what..
6) Endless issues with Spotify "Failing to play song" when the audio output switches.
7) Not bluetooth, but this headset gives the "Low power, charge me!" chime when the battery is low, even when plugged in and charging.
re #1: This is basically because it's written into the standard that everyone implements. There are non-standardized extensions to get around this that nobody implements because they're non-standard and a perpetual "This will be fixed by the next standard!". There are also codecs that mitigate the issue by solving the underlying bandwidth problem, but nobody implements those because there's licensing and thus it's not universal. All of this is made worse by the fact that there's really only a few vendors out there. Almost everyone buys the same stuff, which makes the same tradeoffs and the result is that everything sucks in basically the same ways.
Which is why people pay extra for Apple products, because they don’t make excuses like “this sucks because of the Bluetooth standard”, they build something that works even if it’s incompatible with non-Apple systems.
Funny you should say that because one of the issues with Catalina was MacOS forcing all headsets, airpods included, to use the terrible default codec I was explaining. Moreover, this then forces all other audio data on the system down to the same terrible quality [1]. The official response was that this was "expected behavior".
This is probably also the explanation for annoyance #3 in the article.
#1 was explicitly mentioned in TFA, so not sure why this is an oppy to say airpods fixes common bluetooth problems, instead it seems Apple is equally burdened by them??
So, I just switched from Android to iOS, and I've noticed that the bluetooth reliability is significantly worse than what I've become used to.
I switch from a Pixel 4a to an iPhone 11, and both my Bose QC 35 headphones and Sony wireless earbuds are having lots of issue that I never head on the pixel.
So, my takeaway is that iOS is behind here, though I don't know enough about the underlying tech to say anything for sure. Just my anecdotal experience...
FWIW, Android is now on it's 3rd (4th?) Bluetooth stack rewrite (latest being Gabeldorsh?). I haven't done Android dev in a long time, but bluetooth reliability was a real pain to get sorted even for Google.
I'm a on Mac, but it's interesting that you have the same issue on an entirely different system. Clearly we haven't figured out how to reliably have audio devices popping in and out of existence, all while playing music.
I've used 100+ Bluetooth devices and ever single one of them had weird connection quirks. Hell every wireless protocol I've ever seen has been similar excluding some actual industrial stuff.
My only other bluetooth headset is a set of Bose QC35s. As sibling comments reported, quality is about par overall. I find UX of Bose is worse on all counts when working with multiple devices. And the battery life of my AirPods is less on a single use, but much better overall considering I can recharge in the case.
My airpods, generally, also have to put up with more. I don't use my Bose with my phone or on the go which is, generally, where the AirPods experience 90% of their quirks.
That makes for a poor sample size though so would absolutely love suggestions for more reliable alternatives.
> I don't use my Boss with my phone or on the go which is, generally, where the AirPods experience 90% of their quirks.
My experience is the opposite. When I'm not on the go, the likelihood that my AirPods pick up the right device is slim -- like trying to connect to an iPad on a complete different floor vs. the phone I'm trying to make a call on.
When I'm on the go, the only device they can find is my phone, and all works great.
Yeah, makes sense for that problem specifically. I don't really have that problem ever. All my problems are skipping audio, dropped connections in one pod, and other intermittent problems.
My Bose always connect to the wrong device in my home and have zero method to correct. So I'm quite satisfied with the AirPods which seem to get the right device 99% of the time (no exaggeration - probably use 4x per day and connect to unintended device maybe once per month). I'm sure it helps that my phone is always on silent mode.
>The strangest part is that the annoyances aren’t getting any better over time.
Like most of what apple releases lately. People claim apple maps is better now, but its still missing a lot of data around the LA area especially with local business that Google maps has no issue crawling, and generally shoddy navigational asks (like unprotected lefts). Siri has also gotten no better since its release 10 years ago now (wow), if anything it defers to coarsly googling my terms more and throwing me the first couple irrelevant results as a response. If I wanted to do that I would open a browser and touch to talk into the search field.
They seem rarer for me with Google maps. Imo I think rerouting is better with google maps as well. If I get an instruction like that I'll ignore it and turn right and Google will pick up a new routing before I get to the next intersection. If I do it with Apple it might ask me to do a u turn after a right turn and still try and make that left. To be fair I don't use apple maps at all anymore but I see it fail horribly whenever my partner uses their phone for navigation. Its missing a bunch of local businesses and restaurants and sometimes looses the GPS lock on the phone too (like assuming you are on the parallel road to the freeway and trying to route you back on rather than correctly assuming you are still on the 5 and didn't teleport onto surface streets)
If by "unprotected" you mean "no green arrow", in what part of the LA area is it feasible to avoid unprotected lefts? They are all over the place in my neighborhood.
If by "unprotected" you mean a left from a stop sign onto a street that does not stop, then I agree. They can be almost impossible. Waze was especially notorious for them a few years ago.
The latter I mean. "Take a left on pico from this stop sign, hold your breath and good luck, no one will let you in." Somehow google maps ignores these and prefers me to make a right out of a parking lot or a stop signed street and take my lefts at lights (or off the major arterial) seems like its just a simple set of rules you can apply to your navigation algorithm to avoid these entirely, but the fact that they are still there years later tells me the Apple maps designers really don't care too much.
It does seem like it should be simple to avoid those. I can imagine it might be complicated if the model treats turns as instantaneous and only considers edges in the road graph as taking time.
I would love a road navigation tool that gives more options to modify the cost of various route features other than pure distance/traffic. To me, Google is too willing to give a complicated route to save a tiny amount of time. It makes the driving more mentally draining. I would raise the cost of all turns, stop signs, and intersections where I don't have priority.
Apple could farm their data to see how long people wait to make turns it recommends and adjust the edge weight accordingly. I'm guessing that's what Google does.
The maps themselves are fantastic if you live somewhere covered by the latest round of updates. I think the business data will always be trailing Google Maps though. Google has their entire search engine to grab data, they crowdsource data via app notifications, and in cases where businesses are updating their own info it wouldn’t surprise me if they do it on Google Maps and just don’t bother anywhere else.
Siri does continue to be lame though. Driving is the one place I would want to use it for anything beyond timers and reminders, but I don’t dare because I can’t check to see if it’s doing anything dumb. Last time I tried to text someone while driving using Siri, it got picked up by my Apple Watch, which worked great, but also my phone, which picked the same message up and promptly sent it to a totally different contact.
I don’t care, I want google maps and I want the default to be google maps, but there’s no way of setting that, I even tried uninstalling apple maps and now when I click on addresses it prompts me to reinstall it.
Didn’t Microsoft get done for antitrust for similar dark patterns in the late 90s?
I like "workarounds become a reflex". This is a very succinct way of describing one of the causes of why people often claim to have no issues using something that universally has issues.
A great example is the gaming PC vs gaming console war. PC gamers often seem to refuse to admit there's untold little quirks you have to deal with when using a general-purpose operating system and modular hardware to play games. They don't notice the workarounds they are continuously employing, because it's become a reflex.
> there's untold little quirks you have to deal with when using a general-purpose operating system
"Though initial iterations of the software for the original Xbox and Xbox 360 were based on heavily modified versions of Windows, the newer consoles feature operating systems that are highly compatible with Microsoft's desktop operating systems, allowing for shared applications and ease-of-development between personal computers and the Xbox line." Wikipedia
> and modular hardware
This is true. There are, e.g., fake GPUs that will make your experience quite bad. I always buy pre-build PCs from my favorite tech store, and I have personally avoided the problem. But Steam forums show that some people is not so fortunate. Also there is people trying to run modern games in very old PCs, consoles solve that problem by not running new games in previous generation consoles.
> newer consoles feature operating systems that are highly compatible with Microsoft's desktop operating systems, allowing for shared applications and ease-of-development between personal computers and the Xbox line
Microsoft created its Universal Windows Platform (UWP) to enable software to run across multiple Windows devices from desktops to tablets to consoles. It has not really been a resounding success, though it has some inconvenient limitations as well as business restrictions such as being tied to the Windows Store.
Even the Windows Store has moved away from UWP by supporting Win32 apps.
It's not about the OS technology in use, it's about all the practicalities of how it is deployed on consoles vs. on desktops. Things like immutable OS volumes, fixed configuration tested on the hardware, the extent to which they build higher level automation to do what the user expects, etc. "The Xbox One runs Windows" ignores all these details which make it a much more seamless experience than on a PC. The PS4 runs FreeBSD, but try gaming on FreeBSD and let me know how it goes in comparison...
Honestly, it's plainly obvious that gaming on consoles is much more seamless than on PCs. If you don't think so, you're not recognizing all the little quirks you're dealing with on a PC. When was the last time a driver update broke a game on a console? Ever had to install support software to make a game work well with a particular controller? Issues with overlays and system feature integration? Unexpected performance loss due to a weird configuration? Mysterious DRM malfunction issues? Windows Update gone wrong? Those things (mostly) just don't happen on consoles because it's a much more controlled ecosystem.
> When was the last time a driver update broke game on a console? Ever had to install support software to make a game work well with a particular controller? Issues with overlays and system feature integration? Unexpected performance loss due to weird configuration? Mysterious DRM malfunction issues? Windows Update gone wrong?
I agree (I don't get why people downvotes). My argument is that a quality PC does not have that problems. The fact that you can get a very cheap PC creates many of this situations. But I get into "No true Scotsman" territory with that logic. And that is why I agree with your arguments.
But those things I mentioned happen regardless of the hardware build quality. Hardware quality will avoid hardware issues, things like overheating or stability problems. The things I mentioned are software integration problems that are a natural consequence of the PC ecosystem being much more heterogeneous. It doesn't matter how good your hardware is.
There's just no way around the fact that when your ecosystem gives people much more choice and flexibility, it's going to be jankier than one which doesn't. It's just math. As you add dimensions to the problem space you reduce the fraction of the problem space you can test to ensure the user experience is good, and you rely on users to figure out how to reach a good point in that space, since you can't do it for them. If your dimensions are at least separable you might have a better chance (linear scaling instead of exponential), but modern systems are too complex to keep one issue from influencing others. It's a massive engineering problem.
Just the simple fact that you have to manually install graphics drivers is a basic issue that you don't have to deal with on console. Just visit any of the PCgaming subreddits and you'll find plenty of examples to do with troubleshooting graphics issues, with people suggesting using Graphics Driver Uninstaller to try and completely remove conflicting driver versions etc.etc.
I remember when there were annoying stutters after the initial BF1 launch and one of the workarounds was to use task manager to change the CPU priority for the task. Here's an example thread for ModernWarfare https://www.reddit.com/r/modernwarfare/comments/j26zli/stutt...
Literally none of those issues affect console gaming. It's sit down and start gaming without any hassles within 15 sec of turning the machine on.
I've been a PC gamer for 30 years and it's a pain in the ass compared to console. With the new generation of consoles targeting 60fps, my final annoyance with console gaming has disappeared.
>My argument is that a quality PC does not have that problems.
Part of nvidia's drivers often contain workarounds and hacks specific to games. Sometimes they have gone wrong and bricked a game until the developer or nvidia can fix it. Buying a "quality" PC doesn't alleviate you from having to use nvidia drivers.
There's also a lot of little things. Like, you launch a game and there's no audio. Well, Windows at some point decided to switch audio outputs on you. You may have a lot of them. Line out, headphones, a bluetooth headset, a virtual out for streaming software, a monitor with built-in speakers - and now you've got to click the little speaker icon and try to figure out what should be selected, which may be named after the driver or hardware vendor and not totally obvious.
That's the sort of thing that for the most part just doesn't happen with the consoles, because they're limited and tuned for the intended experience.
> Well, Windows at some point decided to switch audio outputs on you. You may have a lot of them. Line out, headphones, a bluetooth headset, a virtual out for streaming software, a monitor with built-in speakers
I agree that I have found that problems. I just get the same problems with my TV (Samsung) when I have several audio devices. Maybe one can argue that is a TV problem, not a console problem. But non-portable consoles need a TV to work. So, the problem exists but it's moved somewhere else.
After your comment I realize that portable consoles are that ideal all-in-one, at least older ones without HDMI or Bluetooth.
On my PC each legitimate output device has a duplicate with the same name that does nothing. Every once in a while when I launch a game it will switch to the duplicate entry and I will have to switch it back. It's a quirk where the fix has become a reflex.
I've never had to deal with this on any console I've owned.
I remember it being pretty good on Windows XP. I’d run programs like reaper with full control of my soundcard and it’s IO. It wasn’t until win10 that everything sound related became a chore. I can still find snippets of XP UI in win10 hidden under many layers of new age UX. Stuff like the “listen to this device” checkbox
Right. You can. A workaround. This is something you don't have to do on an XBox or PS5.
And that's a workaround to make it easier to perform another workaround, the "why can't I hear my game" problem. So we're in workaround Inception now, nested workarounds.
Yeah, there's something to be said for playing an online game in which everyone has the same exact hardware (mostly). This is coming from a person who occasionally plays competitive games on a 2012 Thinkpad and comforts himself when he loses by saying, "it's ok, their computer cost as much as a used car. Don't feel bad about losing".
Happy 10th birthday T-530, 1 decade and still trucking!
>A great example is the gaming PC vs gaming console war.
Which war was that? A bunch of teenagers and man-children arguing online between PC vs console superiority is in no way a 'war' and is anything but a great example for "workarounds become a reflex". Online squabbles between rabid fanboys and brand loyalists should be left alone and not be used in logical debates.
>PC gamers often seem to refuse to admit there's untold little quirks you have to deal with when using a general-purpose operating system and modular hardware to play games.
I highly doubt your broad generalization is accurate. Do you have any sources for your claims? Every PC owner and gamer I know both online and IRL openly admits this hobby is not a smooth sailing endeavor. Again, I would love to see your sources for your claims, otherwise I feel HN is degrading into reddit where people make broad fact-less generalizations with no arguments and others upvote regardless because it gives them self-approval and dopamine hits.
>They don't notice the workarounds they are continuously employing, because it's become a reflex.
My personal example would be MacOS, when I, an outsider who never regularly used MacOS, point out various UX quirks that trip me up and cause issues for me rather than make my life easier as I was promised, I saw that everyone I know who is a long time user of MacOS got so used to the quirks that they formed some workarounds that turned into reflexes and just became part of the experience and not viewed as issue anymore but as tolerated and expected behavior. Basically for them MacOS is simpler because they already know the quirks and workarounds inside and out, not because it's objectively simpler than the alternatives. Same goes for long time users of Linux and Windows if you're coming from the other side.
So in the end it's not about one being objectively better than the other, it's about people always will have more issues with the things they don't know very well and be subjectively biased towards the things they already know and like. It's the nature of humanity.
> PC gamers often seem to refuse to admit there's untold little quirks you have to deal with when using a general-purpose operating system and modular hardware to play games. They don't notice the workarounds they are continuously employing, because it's become a reflex.
Not just a reflex, a cargo-cult reflex.
Look at the litany of optimization/debugging nonsense that is parroted across the internet. Registry fiddling, disabling Windows services, setting core affinities, divination by chicken bones, all sorts of nonsense - the impact of which is, of course, not ever empirically measured.
That one's actually a good argument for open source software, in my experience. While the cargo-cult culture exists everywhere less experienced users are involved, in FOSS land there's a decent chance some developer or power user (any developer, not just a project member) will stumble upon the problem and either figure out the real issue themselves or coordinate with the project devs to do so. I've done this many, many times over the years. Complete nonsense cargo-cult stuff doesn't tend to survive forever in this ecosystem, because someone eventually realizes it's nonsense.
In Windows land? Decades can go by without anyone knowing what's going on, unless someone motivated enough to reverse engineer the binaries involved shows up and finds the issue. That isn't very common. Though when it happens it can be hilarious [1].
Apple's stuff _always_ have issues and annoying ones. My Homepod stopped seeing any HomeKit devices. Reboot didn't help. I didn't feel like digging into it so I just went to bed. Couple days later out of all a sudden they start seeing stuff again.
Recently my Hue bulbs have decided to sometimes all show as unavailable in HomeKit, which is annoying. They normally revive themselves in a few minutes but I can’t figure it out.
Unfortunately no other home automation platform (Google, Amazon) lets you keep everything on your local network, and using Home Assistant would make using Siri for it harder, so I’m stuck with an annoyingly buggy platform.
You can use home assistant and HomeKit together pretty seamlessly. We have all our lighting automation as a zwave network though hass, and the lights are also included in HomeKit. We can use Siri or hass app or the native home app/widgets in iOS without any issues. And everything runs locally too.
At least their issues are relatively benign compared to the hot mess that is Windows. Had to re-install a friend's Asus all-in-one PC last weekend and god this was not fun. Took over a day worth of downloading Windows updates, battling Realtek's audio driver and Intel's chipset drivers until everything was finally working as expected (and most of the drivers are from 2016 - only God knows how much exploit surface these have!). Anything Bluetooth on Windows is still a hit-and-miss. And then you have to research on how to disable all the phone home crap, the ads and other bloat.
Linux is even worse, where even basic stuff such as suspend to disk or 3D acceleration regularly takes days or weeks worth of sifting through StackExchange posts, mailing lists, obscure blogs and 2010-era Debian Wiki posts.
And don't get me started on the clusterfuck that is Android. Got a new iPhone? No problem, transferring all the data is painless. Migrating in the Android world? Good luck getting even half of your stuff working.
Compared to all that, Apple is a fucking breeze to work with, because the competition is just mind bogglingly bad.
It's only bad for 3D because nVidia has their secret sauce (and corner cutting) in the driver and locked down firmware blobs that have very restrictive distribution.
If you have an Intel or AMD GPU everything either just works, or works with the latest drivers (might require an added repo if the card came out after the last stable release).
New Pixel data transfer? Plugged in iPhone with the supplied USB-C -> A adapter, and all my contacts, photos, calendar data, etc. migrated to the new phone. Took less time than my mom migrating from an iPhone 6s to an iPhone 13.
Android isn't a fair comparison, since Apple is a single-manufacturer monoculture.
Samsung-to-samsung: I can give anecdata only but moving to a new samsung phone was completely effortless. The only things that broke, broke because there was a newer android OS version on the target (not much of that). This would of course break (and maybe worse) on iPhone -> newer iPhone.
> Apple's stuff _always_ have issues and annoying ones
True. I’m fully into apple ecosystem with iMac, Apple tv, macbook and phones. So, naturally I use airdrop a lot, to the point that sometimes I depend on it to work. But, every few days it just stops working. Even after turning off Bluetooth, wifi on phone and mac it just doesn’t shows the device. Sometimes I just give up and sometimes when I don’t feel like giving up I go up to even restarting devices. This is something that I don’t expect from Apple.
My last three MacBooks, including the new 16” M1, have inexplicably had issues syncing to iCloud for several days (sometimes weeks) until magically everything seems to just work as expected and I forget all about it.
It’s all part of the magic of owning Apple devices. They’re annoyances, but minor and usually easy enough to fix.
Yep. For one game, the launcher screen depends on an old version of a Microsoft .NET runtime that is no longer distributed by Microsoft, and the current version (theoretically compatible) is disallowed because the launcher has apparently hardcoded a dependency to a specific version.
Then there was another game where I had to install a different DLL to get it to run.
Then there was IL2 Sturmovik that was just plain broken for a long time on more recent versions of Windows. I of course didn't discover this until after the refund window...
i feel like i can't identify issues in my life because I am so used to doing workarounds. this is why everything needs to be tested by someone else that is completely separate from the work, their fresh perspective will point out such obvious issues and your first reaction should never be to balk and say "no but you just do it like this"
The more minimalist a system is, the less people seem to think in terms of "annoyances". In fact, simplicity fans seem to pride themselves on doing a bit more themselves.
Like, manual transmission people think of the constant need to manage it yourself as just how driving is supposed to be.
It's a big problem in Linux, where things can totally break and nobody bats an eye.
I guess I'm eligible to answer this as I'm both a Linux user and a stick shifter.
I hate Linux for when things fall-apart. But I also know most of the things are being made by devs because of their passion. My hardware doesn't fail because Linux is blindly arrogant, but because of the hardware vendors who don't support the platform or me (as I paid them money)
Manual transmissions are an extra level of engagement that's fun to drive and useful in many casses. My 86bhp car lacks torque and power, specially combined with its heavy metal body. When I need to overtake and I lack the power for it I can downshift and pass. Add in the rev matching, and it makes it sweeter and perfect.
In a country like India, you pay a good price for a reliable automatic. So that's money saved.
It's the same difference as a home cooked meal and a takeout.
Apple doesn't get slack from me because they know the hardware, the software and still manage to mess it up with loyal fans defending their bad decisions
This sentiment is seen in almost every response on http://discussions.apple.com, on Apple's subreddits and often in HN comments as well.
People are just too eager to jump on behalf on Apple - "but why you would rather not do this instead" (Why? Because I was looking for something else and I mentioned it for heaven's sake!) and these hacks and workarounds stack up while "Apple products and services just work" stays where it was in such Apple users' imaginations.
This is frustratingly weird and quite niche to Apple's user-fans.
For instance Apple's online services - the whole iCloud charade is a living and growing mess.
The SMS sync between phone and mac and in fact difference of basic UX options ("you can't select multiple messages on Catalina Messages app - not sure if it is added in later versions -- if you delete an SMS on phone it will still be synced to your mac Messages). And there apps are opaque in the guise of "simplicity" you just end up getting frustrated. I can go on for hours. Now as an Apple fan - but why would you not want those SMS to sync to mac as well? Yes, even if you delete them! What's the use of multiple message selection on mac Messages app - that's bad use case! Yes, yes, even though it is supported on iPhone - you don't get it!
The problem is the essential duopoly - Android and iOS - rock and a hard place.
Any time I search the internet for a solution to a problem with an Apple product or device, I intentionally exclude discussions.apple.com domains from my search results. I have never found a solution there, and the forums seem to be dominated — and I mean DOMINATED — by two or three ‘experts’ whose bottom-line is that Apple’s products work, so you must be doing something wrong.
One guy is convinced that uninstalling Chrome is the solution.
The go-to first response is “run Etrecheck,” after which they’ll chastise you for having installed anything they don’t recognize. And god help you if you’ve installed CleanMyMac. The only solution is to reinstall macOS and never do that again!
(They all seem to ignore that CleanMyMac X is now notarized and sold in the App Store...)
Stackoverflow > Apple’s community support. Every time.
> the forums seem to be dominated — and I mean DOMINATED — by two or three ‘experts’ whose bottom-line is that Apple’s products work, so you must be doing something wrong.
I've experience this first-hand, and it's annoying AF.
I wrote a post on Apple's forum about the years-old iOS celluar-draining bug[1], and one of these high-reputation "experts" (read: Apple apologist/shill) kept insisting that the OS corrupting its own settings and not handling the corruption gracefully was somehow all my fault - when I pointed out this was a clear OS bug (even linking to the Wikipedia definition for 'software bug'), his long-winded pushback reply boiled down to him essentially saying that "bugs aren't bugs". Beyond useless as a help forum with these clowns being allowed to earn those "reputation" points.
I found the same about moving to GIMP from Photoshop. Granted, Photoshop has more conveniences and fancy features. But a good deal of the frustration is not GIMP's so-called confusing interface, just the habits I formed while using Photoshop. Now that I'm a GIMP user for a time, every time I go back to Photoshop, I find myself annoyed in the same way. I think this just boils down to people's natural resistance to change.
i don't know if it's limitations of the bluetooth protocol, or necessary optimizations in order to maintain battery life, but in my experience most battery operated bluetooth devices seem to have pairing issues.
i suspect that it's probably a combination of three things:
1) reliability is hard when on a power budget. if power was free, they'd just always be looking to renegotiate, but since power is limited, they probably are very miserly about this process which leads to getting stuck in states that require power cycling to force retries.
2) interoperability is hard with open standards, especially old standards that are complicated.
3) open standards come with limitations that sometimes cannot be worked around. (this is where i'm surprised apple hasn't just cheated as they usually do when open standards result in ux they find unacceptable, this leads me to believe the problem itself, of distributed consensus between multiple wireless low power devices with potentially noisy links, is actually very hard)
when you think about it, the technology behind wireless earbuds is nothing short of astounding. they're little battery operated wireless two node compute clusters that can literally fit in your ears, stream audio and maintain nearly perfect synchronization when rendering that audio in the most absolute basic use case.
I can say I have had all of the issues listed in the post with three different bluetooth headphones. Random disconnections, only left or right speaker working, drivers issue on anything that was not an android phone, having to turn off bluetooth on phone when using on pc, having to deactivate phone and mic to boost bandwidth for audio (night and day difference).
I don't think I will ever buy bluetooth earbuds or headphones again, also because those devices are terrible for the environment.
It's amazing that these issues are exactly the same on both Airpods Pro and Max. You'd think the Max would have a better software stack given the claimed sound improvements.
Most ridiculous bug I’ve encountered is that if you have Notes open in list view and with an external monitor, it will consume 100% CPU non-stop, killing the battery life and overheating the Macbook Pro and eventually physically damaging the device (screen connection fails).
I would add to the list that it is environmentally negligent to allow for such a complex device to be near irreparable (specifically on battery replacement).
Unless you are selling medical devices your electronics should never be thrown away because after-sales cannot swap a battery. Then again Google just dropped the Pixel 3 after just 3 years so this is clearly an issue with the consumer electronics business model.
Consumer electronics will remain a vastly wasteful business unless governments force tighter environmental regulations.
How many people do you see using 2010 smartphones with replaceable batteries?
Or put another way: people throw away phones after 3-4 years regardless of if you can replace the battery or not.
You can pretty cheaply replace the battery in any phone at a repair shop. But people don't want that, they want the new phone with new look and new features.
> How many people do you see using 2010 smartphones with replaceable batteries?
How many 2010 smartphones have security updates that you can safely use? It's a chicken and egg problem.
For every person that chases the shinny new thing there are plenty of people who don't care about that and just want to have minimal functions, phone, sms, video chat, some decent photos/video, and occasional online banking.
However due a broken business model from Tech giants and firmware lock-in from Mobile SoC manufacturers this is unattainable at the moment.
Vendors should be forced to maintain an LTS work stream to give the alternative to those costumers who do want to act sustainably. Unfortunately that will never happen unless they are forced by regulatory changes.
For the last 6 years, the average number of new smartphones sold per year was 1.5 billion. There are 6.5 billion people with smartphones in the world. So that's at most a 4 year churn rate.
Either your research is showing that people on average keep their phones longer than 4 years, which seems to line up well with the argument that they don't throw out their phones every 3-4 years for the best new features for no reason;
Or your research is showing that they do churn through at a 4 year rate, which seems to roughly line up with the average battery lifespan and security lifespan across the market. 3 years is right about the time period where I need to replace my phone battery. It would not surprise me at all to see stats that suggest that a lot of people keep their phones until the batteries are unusable or until they're no longer getting updates, and then swap to a new phone -- and across multiple manufacturers, I would not be surprised at all to see that work out to be a ~4 year churn rate, if not a little higher.
I'm not sure what this proves.
Anecdotally, I know more than a few people who prefer Apple devices specifically because of their longevity and support lifespan, so I don't think that the "we have to throw this out because a new phone got announced" characterization is universally true or even necessarily the most common consumer attitude.
I also know people who have bought new phones because the battery was getting weak. I have argued with them to take their phones to a repair shop and to pay $60 to replace the battery, but they felt weird doing that for whatever reason. I suspect some of that might come from the fear of having their phone broken during the repair process before a new one comes in, but that's pure speculation on my part.
And yeah, I also know a few people who have bought new phones just because they care about getting a slightly fancier camera. But I don't necessarily think they're the majority, and an average churn-rate of 4 years across the market would seem to reinforce that point more than anything else.
How many 2010 smartphones are still getting security updates, or updates that let them work with modern network standards? LTE was only barely available in 2010, and 3G is almost gone now.
Not talking about you since I don't know, but a funny thing I noticed, is that people who are very loud about saving the environment are always the ones with the latest iPhone 13 Max/Macbook Pro M1 in their hands one week after it's released.
It was a side point, because it's always very rich people with iPhone 13 Max which are like "poor people should use 10 year old phones, but not me, I can't be seen on gram with that, I need credibility so I can speak out about the climate"
Modular phones were tried and were a complete market failure. Because they sacrifice thinness, robustness and water proofing.
Older standards are removed because they are not used anymore, so the bandwidth is freed for newer ones.
And "people don't really want it" remains just as true. Just like people didn't want small screens, until even Apple famously yielded.
> Always the very rich people with iPhone 13 Max ....
Funnily enough, I can name numerous people who use iPhone 13 Pros/Pro Maxes, just bought this past year and are certainly making less than median wage.
Part of it is fashion, 'not appearing poor', and they may only know iOS due to a history of using it. So no, the very rich aren't the only ones buying iPhones. The stigma that they are phones for the wealthy should go, just as the idea that Android phones are for the poor.
Many people I know who make well more than three or four times what I do use a variety of Android devices.
In 2010, smartphones were just taking off, every new generation offered significant improvement. 2010 smartphones are terrible by today's standards: small storage, underpowered, no 4G, bad camera, etc...
2015 smartphones are a different story. Things have stabilized, and a good 2015 smartphone should be perfectly usable today, a bit sluggish, but usable. And interestingly, that's when they stopped having user replaceable batteries. More generally, the market shifted from real obsolescence to planned obsolescence.
Airpods are insanely small and the outside casing is pretty much a single piece of plastic. I am all for right to repair, but it does not seem feasible or reasonable for AirPods - they’d have to be bulkier.
That's entirely fair, but the issue is the demand for the less bulky bluetooth headset isn't there. To think that this will be solved from the supply-side is wishful thinking at best; if folks really demanded repairable headsets, the supply would take care of itself.
I mean there was no demand for more expensive unleaded fuel but we still regulated leaded fuel out of existence. What consumers want and what is needed for the environment is not always aligned.
Consumer demand is not a very good guiding principle for environmental protection.
It's actually pretty bad for the airpods. The gen 3 airpods are bulkier than the 1 and 2 which now means they don't stay in my ears nearly as well. I never had issues with the originals falling out which I now do with the gen 3.
The airpods in entirety would be less waste than the packaging most spare parts come wrapped in. It just feels worse because they cost a lot more than a plastic foam pack your steak comes in.
Apple consumers don’t care about the environment, that’s why they buy products that need to be replaced yearly by choice or by design. So these arguments are lost on them.
Just as a gentle counterpoint, consider the magnitude of the problem. Let's say there are 300m AirPod units that have been produced (60m sales per year for the last 5 years). Each unit is about 2oz, mostly plastic and batteries. That's roughly 20,000 tons. Los Angeles County alone (to pick a place) generates about 100,000 tons of solid waste per _day_, of which about 20,000 tons makes it to landfill[0][1]. If they were all thrown away at once, all in Los Angeles, they'd hardly notice.
Semiconductors and consumer electronics are more environmentally sensitive than they were, and can be better than they are. With the lithium and trace metals, AirPods are more damaging pound for pound than bulk waste, and you're right to insist that Apple do a better supporting recycle and recapture. We should also focus on how those materials are mined in the first place.
However, even a repairable AirPod would generate lithium waste as the batteries wear out. If we're going to have consumer electronics, there's going to be a bit of waste. Let's just keep in mind that real problems are coal and SUVs and beef and so on. A business like AirPods (or all of electronics) that generates fractional ounces (or pounds considering everything) of waste per person-year while enabling environmentally-positive changes like remote work is perhaps not the first target for reprobation.
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[ 7.8 ms ] story [ 431 ms ] threadEdit: I have a pair of JBL LIVE300TWS. They're good!
I guess the real thing to take away is, that cable is still the most reliable option (and also saves a lot on battery!)
And it's Apple, so of course you can't turn it off.
> You'd be no better off with a Sony Headphone that screams in your ear that a device connected, the device is turned on and the battery is almost empty.
I have the WF-1000XM4s. On the iOS headphones app, visiting System and turning off "Notification & Voice Guide" gets rid of the power on and battery level announcements leaving only the connection/disconnection alerts (although I keep all of them on as I find them useful, and wouldn't characterise them as screams).
To finish off and it's not a bug, but the microphone they advertise is so laughably bad that roughly 80% of the people couldnt hear me properly on the other end of the line. But reading the reviews I find myself one of the few in this situation.
Or they'll provide haptic in-ear custom vibrations in AirPod Pros 5, and their slogan will be "Your ears never felt better".
The 'device connected' sound is pretty loud as well.
People have been complaining about BEING CAUSED PAIN BY AIRPODS for YEARS and they are not doing anything about it!
This being the top rated comment here further proves it's a major issue for airpod users. What the fuck, apple?
I am absolutely terrified of that painful sound and will regularly check battery to ensure it won't hit me.
Either way it's horrible, all of these noises seem to be at a fixed or separate volume level than the media volume (which actually is common for apple). Siri used to have a separate volume than media (still might?), and then you also have ringtone volume, and sound in settings barely even hints that all these separate volumes exist.
I can only assume they know but can't fix it.
In fact, why isn't there "adjust volume to surroundings" like there is for brightness? They should KNOW how loud is appropriate based on mic input.
Maybe it's for people who drop their earbuds? So it can be heard from a distance? That would certainly explain it...
A hack would be to put some foam or so inside to dampen the sound and then max out the volume. Then they physically cannot make loud sounds.
I think the volume of complaints and popularity of AirPods this speaks to wider variations in human hearing perception than one would expect. The main body of users have no problem, but enough people experience those sounds as painful to generate a volume complaints.
The trouble was that it was hidden somewhere in our messy living room, and the alerts weren’t frequent enough to find it quickly, so I was standing around in my underwear for ages, waiting for each subsequent alert and getting a bit closer each time, because it was too loud to go back to sleep.
Of course, while he was explaining this to me, the chip slipped from my fingers and fell down an air vent of another friend’s living room. The comedic timing was perfect, and it really might have been the funniest thing to happen to me in 2012.
I found a pattern emerge. It repeated itself every 10 beeps or so, with irregular intervals between those beeps. Armed with that information, I could effectively predict the next beep within 3-5 seconds (intervals ranged between 3-10 minutes, if I recall.) So I started walking around the room, standing in different locations as I stared at my stopwatch. The farther apart the places I stood, the better chance I'd have of triangulating the source with each beep.
I got within 3-5 feet of it in the ~300 square foot room before the coworkers came clean about what they had done. I wasn't even mad, I was having a blast!
Maybe I'm more prone to losing things than the average person. But after losing two of these things over the last couple years I'm not buying them again.
Not to mention Apple Music keeps turning itself back on when I turn it off.
All impossible to diagnose why and the only advice is reset and delete everything and start over.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30085322
Thank you: I was wondering where those inane 'Liked' SMS messages were coming from. The poor iPhone user is unaware of how rude that comes across.
"Just works" is absolutely a statement that should be considered on a time curve! Some products work incredibly in the most trivial use case you test during unboxing, but fall apart when deeply integrated. Others are a PITA to set up, but stop requiring any unproductive attention afterwards.
This was incredibly clear for anyone WITHOUT AirPods during 2019-2020. Everyone picked them up with their iPhone 11 upgrade and immediately started talking about how they "just work". Three months later, you'd see people fiddling with extra devices to keep them charged, or complaining about sending them through the laundry or into subway grates. Then the pandemic hit and they became an entire category of Zoom fatigue due to multiple bluetooth connections.
Through some obscure digging, I found that changing my region language on the ipad from English > UK English and back somehow fixed it…
That isn't always the case, but it tends to be.
both are fully charged, but when i put them into ears, only the right one actually connects
i have to put the left one back into the case and take it out again to get it to connect
i assume this is a software issue
Dark mode is fine, please let the user choose to have dark mode when she wants to.
I also don't like the huge font. Looks almost what I'd expect an h2 to look like.
Sorry to point this out, but it IS a UI design site, and the person is griping about the minutia problems of an Apple device, so: fair game.
I run into this too, anyone know what's up with that? Is there some "listen with only one headphone in" feature that I'm accidentally enabling?
The design of Bluetooth buds is such that one of the buds is elected to be the receiver of data from the phone, it then propagates its signal to the second bud.
What you’re experiencing is a disconnection of one earbud to the other.
FWIW: apples AirPods Pro’s rehandshake (from the “slave” side towards the “master” side) every 10s- so you can have a lot of luck just waiting for it to reconnect; that is assuming that the slave device _wants_ to reconnect; it might believe it’s not in your ear.
I imagine that hands and head create an improvised Faraday cage. Though 2.4GHz Bluetooth signal should nevertheless pass thought the body tissue, likely there is just a signa-to-noise ratio rapid drop which forces Airpods to re-establish the connection.
One thing he could've said under gazillions of NDAs: software came much behind the hardware.
Yeah, sorry Apple support... I've only got the ios 15.x from a couple weeks ago. No doubt upgrading to the very latest will definitely solve all extant problems, everything will magically 'just work' and there will be absolutely no new problems introduced. /s
When I describe this to some Apple store folks (2x last fall), they seemed 'shocked' (couldn't tell if it was fake or not). "Wow, never heard of that - no one's ever told me that before, that doesn't seem right. We have some training classes next week you can sign up for".
"Connect to this iphone" in bluetooth settings..
Options are "automatically" and "when last connected to thi..."
These don't even make sense as options, imo.
What I think they're meaning is "automatically connect..." and the options are "automatically" and "when last connected". But.. if the software is broken, and it 'magically' connects when I don't want it to, then that will be the last time it connected anyway.
"NEVER" needs to be an option.
Of course if that’s not working, that’s a problem, but conceptually I think the options make sense.
Airpods are nice, but outside the Apple ecosystem they're horrendous (and somehow still better than most alternatives...). The proprietary chip / protocol in use makes me sad, but what makes me even sadder is that they're not actually even working on supporting them as a good product on Android.
Maybe it makes economical sense but it's really sad that we got to the point that a company can release hardware and go out of their way not to support a significant amount of potential customers. This feels like what anti-monopoly regs try to prevent, but it's not a monopoly either so ...
Also, the microphone quality is a lot worse than people say it is (I'm using the Pro version). They are barely usable for calls in a loud environment.
A good product would have 1 gripe found by 1 in 7 customers...
Out of curiousity, does anyone have a good recommendation for a good pair of 3.5mm wired headphones with a microphone? I still have an old pair of Bose Sport headphones, but they are only wireless now.
Or if you want a boom mic, some of the “Pro” or “G” branded logitech headsets.
Still use cord ones in other circumstances. When lying down, for example. I like to have the choice at least.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/switch-airpods-betwee...
> To prevent AirPods from automatically switching between devices, go to Settings > Bluetooth. Tap the Actions Available button next to the name of your AirPods, tap Connect to This iPhone, then tap When Last Connected to This iPhone.
I guess that's the problem with "it just works" magic -- when it doesn't work, you need to have a few settings available. And unfortunately, those are rarely included.
Those first generation AirPods were a thing of beauty. Newer ones now are technically better--better sounding, longer lasting, ANC, etc. But I've experienced a lot of the same annoyances that OP is complaining about.
I still love them, but the experience is definitely a little fiddly these days.
The strangest part is that the annoyances aren’t getting any better over time. At first I assumed that they were growing pains of an early product launch. Yet now we’re years into the AirPods experience and they continue to be just as quirky as when I first got them.
Apple seems so hot or cold on fixing their own bugs. Certain bugs get rapidly patched in the next iOS or Mac software release. Other bugs languish for what feels like forever. Do Apple execs just not use AirPods? Are they using a different configuration or hardware combination that doesn’t have these bugs? Have they just trained themselves to overlook the bugs because the workarounds have become a reflex? I can’t imagine working at any tech company where one of the flagship products had such a high rate of annoyances without having a lot of engineers diverted to replicating, diagnosing, and fixing it ASAP.
I got my AirPods back when the original ones were released and the experience probably was as good as physically possible (short of including multiple radios so they can maintain connections to multiple devices in parallel and simply mix the audio client-side).
They then (2 years ago?) released this new feature where AirPods could automatically switch between all your devices which is just too slow and is more of an annoyance in practice, but even disabling the behavior made the existing experience much worse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30085538
I just bought v3, and while the sound is noticeably better, the connections are all over the place. At least once a day, the connection simply dies. Multiple times a day it decides to connect to another device that I'm not using. If you answer a call and then put an airpod in your ear, it's got about a 50% chance of connecting, after a multi-second delay. Sometimes it says its connected, but it's not, so the iphone isn't emitting sound from its speakers and nothing is coming out of the airpods, leaving me sounding like an idiot repeating "can you hear me now?" until I manually kill the connection and use the built in speakers. Absolutely infuriating.
To summarize, things are generally better but way less consistent.
And I will put up with a lot of quirkyness or waiting for connection to have that.
Prior to the 8 and XR, iPhones had Bluetooth versions 4.0 or 4.2, which meant things were slower to connect, and also meant lower microphone data quality. Apple hasn't done any customer education around this. A lot of people with older MacBooks have poor microphone quality when using AirPods - but it's primarily their computer that is the bottleneck.
All in all, they're fine, but they most certainly do not just work for me, and they're not a $600 product IMO.
I’ve looked at the Sony XM1000’s and from what I understand there is some issue with Windows where if you enable the mic, it goes into some different Bluetooth mode that degrades the audio quality coming out of the headphones. Many wireless headphones are advertised to only work with smartphones.
I just want something that does it all, connects to all my devices, and works.
I have the Jabra Elite 85h's and have the same exact problem on OS X from time to time. (I really like them otherwise, though!) I'm not entirely sure what it is.
You can definitely get "good"[1] sound quality + noise cancelling, but for me at least most decent non noise cancelling headphones sound noticeably better than my Sony XM4s, even at much lower price points. I'm fine with this though, because I use my XM4s when I need to focus without being distracted by background noise and they do an amazing job at that.
(There's also the issue of bluetooth signal not being as good as wired, and the DAC/Amplification needing to be built into the headphones but I don't think that's having as much of an impact on the overall sound signature - it hasn't been my experience when using bluetooth adapters on some other headphones, and using the XM4s wired).
[1] Obviously peoples subjective idea of "good" vs "great" vary wildly, I'm just sharing my subjective opinion on things.
After having both replaced I have had zero issues since. I assumed it was some hardware quirks with earlier models.
The remaining quirks all feel related to Bluetooth tech and, specifically, the low-power available to AirPods (compared to, say, my giant Bose headphones).
I can only speculate but I think AirPods are currently limited by the bluetooth tech itself. What I expect we'll see is apple will ship a version with a proprietary radio system. They probably won't be compatible with non-Apple devices but they'll be 10x better than today's AirPods (more reliable, simultaneous audio from multiple devices, even better battery life, etc.).
There's no guarantee Apple will pull this off. But I'd bet it's far more likely there's a team of engineers dedicated to this strategy as we speak than that Apple just "gave up" on one of their best-selling product lines as soon as the MVP proved there was a huge market.
I am currently shopping around for new truly wireless headphones for iphone and not a single comparison has apple airpods/pro as winners in 2 most important categories (for me but I believe for many others too): sound quality and battery life. Same for their smartwatches but thats another topic.
Apple, or any company, sees that even product with such flaws still sells very well, so there is little pressure to fix things asap. That some engineers somewhere are working on next gen (or even 2 next gens in parallel) is expected, but these generational updates are very iterative and never revolutionary (that's what new product lines are for, for much higher price).
One anecdote from today - had a year end review call with my boss while being on sick leave due to covid. He desperately tried to pair his new iphone 13 pro max with his new airpods (not sure if pro or regular) and gave up after some time. It just didn't work and we had good old phone-in-hand call.
Quirks of Bose AE2 that I'm dealing with:
1) Switching to the low fidelity Bluetooth headset mode when the mic is activated. Why does this still exist? I'd be happier if they just didn't add a mic if they can't support better quality audio. 2) The headset nominally supports connecting to two devices, except there's no mixing. One channel is primary and will override the other. Annoying when you're on a meeting on a laptop and a notification arrives on your phone and the audio cuts out to play the notification tone. 3) To add, sometimes Apple devices just play silence? Meaning, the secondary device will get muted and it will take a minute for you to figure out why it's not playing. There's no user control over this primary/secondary aspect. 4) Oh, yes, I use three devices daily which results in a lot of manual switching. 5) The devices or the headphones don't always automatically connect for some reason. It's not clear either if it's from me manually switching them or what.. 6) Endless issues with Spotify "Failing to play song" when the audio output switches. 7) Not bluetooth, but this headset gives the "Low power, charge me!" chime when the battery is low, even when plugged in and charging.
This is probably also the explanation for annoyance #3 in the article.
[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/282705/airpods-ext...
I switch from a Pixel 4a to an iPhone 11, and both my Bose QC 35 headphones and Sony wireless earbuds are having lots of issue that I never head on the pixel.
So, my takeaway is that iOS is behind here, though I don't know enough about the underlying tech to say anything for sure. Just my anecdotal experience...
Are you on Windows? I have the same issue with iTunes on Win11
My airpods, generally, also have to put up with more. I don't use my Bose with my phone or on the go which is, generally, where the AirPods experience 90% of their quirks.
That makes for a poor sample size though so would absolutely love suggestions for more reliable alternatives.
Edit: apparently I don't know how to spell Bose
My experience is the opposite. When I'm not on the go, the likelihood that my AirPods pick up the right device is slim -- like trying to connect to an iPad on a complete different floor vs. the phone I'm trying to make a call on.
When I'm on the go, the only device they can find is my phone, and all works great.
My Bose always connect to the wrong device in my home and have zero method to correct. So I'm quite satisfied with the AirPods which seem to get the right device 99% of the time (no exaggeration - probably use 4x per day and connect to unintended device maybe once per month). I'm sure it helps that my phone is always on silent mode.
Like most of what apple releases lately. People claim apple maps is better now, but its still missing a lot of data around the LA area especially with local business that Google maps has no issue crawling, and generally shoddy navigational asks (like unprotected lefts). Siri has also gotten no better since its release 10 years ago now (wow), if anything it defers to coarsly googling my terms more and throwing me the first couple irrelevant results as a response. If I wanted to do that I would open a browser and touch to talk into the search field.
If by "unprotected" you mean a left from a stop sign onto a street that does not stop, then I agree. They can be almost impossible. Waze was especially notorious for them a few years ago.
I would love a road navigation tool that gives more options to modify the cost of various route features other than pure distance/traffic. To me, Google is too willing to give a complicated route to save a tiny amount of time. It makes the driving more mentally draining. I would raise the cost of all turns, stop signs, and intersections where I don't have priority.
Siri does continue to be lame though. Driving is the one place I would want to use it for anything beyond timers and reminders, but I don’t dare because I can’t check to see if it’s doing anything dumb. Last time I tried to text someone while driving using Siri, it got picked up by my Apple Watch, which worked great, but also my phone, which picked the same message up and promptly sent it to a totally different contact.
Didn’t Microsoft get done for antitrust for similar dark patterns in the late 90s?
A great example is the gaming PC vs gaming console war. PC gamers often seem to refuse to admit there's untold little quirks you have to deal with when using a general-purpose operating system and modular hardware to play games. They don't notice the workarounds they are continuously employing, because it's become a reflex.
"Though initial iterations of the software for the original Xbox and Xbox 360 were based on heavily modified versions of Windows, the newer consoles feature operating systems that are highly compatible with Microsoft's desktop operating systems, allowing for shared applications and ease-of-development between personal computers and the Xbox line." Wikipedia
> and modular hardware
This is true. There are, e.g., fake GPUs that will make your experience quite bad. I always buy pre-build PCs from my favorite tech store, and I have personally avoided the problem. But Steam forums show that some people is not so fortunate. Also there is people trying to run modern games in very old PCs, consoles solve that problem by not running new games in previous generation consoles.
Microsoft created its Universal Windows Platform (UWP) to enable software to run across multiple Windows devices from desktops to tablets to consoles. It has not really been a resounding success, though it has some inconvenient limitations as well as business restrictions such as being tied to the Windows Store.
Even the Windows Store has moved away from UWP by supporting Win32 apps.
Honestly, it's plainly obvious that gaming on consoles is much more seamless than on PCs. If you don't think so, you're not recognizing all the little quirks you're dealing with on a PC. When was the last time a driver update broke a game on a console? Ever had to install support software to make a game work well with a particular controller? Issues with overlays and system feature integration? Unexpected performance loss due to a weird configuration? Mysterious DRM malfunction issues? Windows Update gone wrong? Those things (mostly) just don't happen on consoles because it's a much more controlled ecosystem.
I agree (I don't get why people downvotes). My argument is that a quality PC does not have that problems. The fact that you can get a very cheap PC creates many of this situations. But I get into "No true Scotsman" territory with that logic. And that is why I agree with your arguments.
There's just no way around the fact that when your ecosystem gives people much more choice and flexibility, it's going to be jankier than one which doesn't. It's just math. As you add dimensions to the problem space you reduce the fraction of the problem space you can test to ensure the user experience is good, and you rely on users to figure out how to reach a good point in that space, since you can't do it for them. If your dimensions are at least separable you might have a better chance (linear scaling instead of exponential), but modern systems are too complex to keep one issue from influencing others. It's a massive engineering problem.
Just the simple fact that you have to manually install graphics drivers is a basic issue that you don't have to deal with on console. Just visit any of the PCgaming subreddits and you'll find plenty of examples to do with troubleshooting graphics issues, with people suggesting using Graphics Driver Uninstaller to try and completely remove conflicting driver versions etc.etc.
I remember when there were annoying stutters after the initial BF1 launch and one of the workarounds was to use task manager to change the CPU priority for the task. Here's an example thread for ModernWarfare https://www.reddit.com/r/modernwarfare/comments/j26zli/stutt...
Literally none of those issues affect console gaming. It's sit down and start gaming without any hassles within 15 sec of turning the machine on.
I've been a PC gamer for 30 years and it's a pain in the ass compared to console. With the new generation of consoles targeting 60fps, my final annoyance with console gaming has disappeared.
Part of nvidia's drivers often contain workarounds and hacks specific to games. Sometimes they have gone wrong and bricked a game until the developer or nvidia can fix it. Buying a "quality" PC doesn't alleviate you from having to use nvidia drivers.
That's the sort of thing that for the most part just doesn't happen with the consoles, because they're limited and tuned for the intended experience.
I agree that I have found that problems. I just get the same problems with my TV (Samsung) when I have several audio devices. Maybe one can argue that is a TV problem, not a console problem. But non-portable consoles need a TV to work. So, the problem exists but it's moved somewhere else.
After your comment I realize that portable consoles are that ideal all-in-one, at least older ones without HDMI or Bluetooth.
I've never had to deal with this on any console I've owned.
Or not. Shrug. Sound configuration is one of worst aspects of Windows.
And that's a workaround to make it easier to perform another workaround, the "why can't I hear my game" problem. So we're in workaround Inception now, nested workarounds.
Happy 10th birthday T-530, 1 decade and still trucking!
Which war was that? A bunch of teenagers and man-children arguing online between PC vs console superiority is in no way a 'war' and is anything but a great example for "workarounds become a reflex". Online squabbles between rabid fanboys and brand loyalists should be left alone and not be used in logical debates.
>PC gamers often seem to refuse to admit there's untold little quirks you have to deal with when using a general-purpose operating system and modular hardware to play games.
I highly doubt your broad generalization is accurate. Do you have any sources for your claims? Every PC owner and gamer I know both online and IRL openly admits this hobby is not a smooth sailing endeavor. Again, I would love to see your sources for your claims, otherwise I feel HN is degrading into reddit where people make broad fact-less generalizations with no arguments and others upvote regardless because it gives them self-approval and dopamine hits.
>They don't notice the workarounds they are continuously employing, because it's become a reflex.
My personal example would be MacOS, when I, an outsider who never regularly used MacOS, point out various UX quirks that trip me up and cause issues for me rather than make my life easier as I was promised, I saw that everyone I know who is a long time user of MacOS got so used to the quirks that they formed some workarounds that turned into reflexes and just became part of the experience and not viewed as issue anymore but as tolerated and expected behavior. Basically for them MacOS is simpler because they already know the quirks and workarounds inside and out, not because it's objectively simpler than the alternatives. Same goes for long time users of Linux and Windows if you're coming from the other side.
So in the end it's not about one being objectively better than the other, it's about people always will have more issues with the things they don't know very well and be subjectively biased towards the things they already know and like. It's the nature of humanity.
Not just a reflex, a cargo-cult reflex.
Look at the litany of optimization/debugging nonsense that is parroted across the internet. Registry fiddling, disabling Windows services, setting core affinities, divination by chicken bones, all sorts of nonsense - the impact of which is, of course, not ever empirically measured.
In Windows land? Decades can go by without anyone knowing what's going on, unless someone motivated enough to reverse engineer the binaries involved shows up and finds the issue. That isn't very common. Though when it happens it can be hilarious [1].
[1] https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...
Unfortunately no other home automation platform (Google, Amazon) lets you keep everything on your local network, and using Home Assistant would make using Siri for it harder, so I’m stuck with an annoyingly buggy platform.
Exactly the reason I keep dealing with HomeKit annoyances.
Linux is even worse, where even basic stuff such as suspend to disk or 3D acceleration regularly takes days or weeks worth of sifting through StackExchange posts, mailing lists, obscure blogs and 2010-era Debian Wiki posts.
And don't get me started on the clusterfuck that is Android. Got a new iPhone? No problem, transferring all the data is painless. Migrating in the Android world? Good luck getting even half of your stuff working.
Compared to all that, Apple is a fucking breeze to work with, because the competition is just mind bogglingly bad.
If you have an Intel or AMD GPU everything either just works, or works with the latest drivers (might require an added repo if the card came out after the last stable release).
Samsung-to-samsung: I can give anecdata only but moving to a new samsung phone was completely effortless. The only things that broke, broke because there was a newer android OS version on the target (not much of that). This would of course break (and maybe worse) on iPhone -> newer iPhone.
True. I’m fully into apple ecosystem with iMac, Apple tv, macbook and phones. So, naturally I use airdrop a lot, to the point that sometimes I depend on it to work. But, every few days it just stops working. Even after turning off Bluetooth, wifi on phone and mac it just doesn’t shows the device. Sometimes I just give up and sometimes when I don’t feel like giving up I go up to even restarting devices. This is something that I don’t expect from Apple.
My last three MacBooks, including the new 16” M1, have inexplicably had issues syncing to iCloud for several days (sometimes weeks) until magically everything seems to just work as expected and I forget all about it.
It’s all part of the magic of owning Apple devices. They’re annoyances, but minor and usually easy enough to fix.
Then there was another game where I had to install a different DLL to get it to run.
Then there was IL2 Sturmovik that was just plain broken for a long time on more recent versions of Windows. I of course didn't discover this until after the refund window...
Like, manual transmission people think of the constant need to manage it yourself as just how driving is supposed to be.
It's a big problem in Linux, where things can totally break and nobody bats an eye.
I hate Linux for when things fall-apart. But I also know most of the things are being made by devs because of their passion. My hardware doesn't fail because Linux is blindly arrogant, but because of the hardware vendors who don't support the platform or me (as I paid them money)
Manual transmissions are an extra level of engagement that's fun to drive and useful in many casses. My 86bhp car lacks torque and power, specially combined with its heavy metal body. When I need to overtake and I lack the power for it I can downshift and pass. Add in the rev matching, and it makes it sweeter and perfect.
In a country like India, you pay a good price for a reliable automatic. So that's money saved.
It's the same difference as a home cooked meal and a takeout.
Apple doesn't get slack from me because they know the hardware, the software and still manage to mess it up with loyal fans defending their bad decisions
People are just too eager to jump on behalf on Apple - "but why you would rather not do this instead" (Why? Because I was looking for something else and I mentioned it for heaven's sake!) and these hacks and workarounds stack up while "Apple products and services just work" stays where it was in such Apple users' imaginations.
This is frustratingly weird and quite niche to Apple's user-fans.
For instance Apple's online services - the whole iCloud charade is a living and growing mess.
The SMS sync between phone and mac and in fact difference of basic UX options ("you can't select multiple messages on Catalina Messages app - not sure if it is added in later versions -- if you delete an SMS on phone it will still be synced to your mac Messages). And there apps are opaque in the guise of "simplicity" you just end up getting frustrated. I can go on for hours. Now as an Apple fan - but why would you not want those SMS to sync to mac as well? Yes, even if you delete them! What's the use of multiple message selection on mac Messages app - that's bad use case! Yes, yes, even though it is supported on iPhone - you don't get it!
The problem is the essential duopoly - Android and iOS - rock and a hard place.
One guy is convinced that uninstalling Chrome is the solution.
The go-to first response is “run Etrecheck,” after which they’ll chastise you for having installed anything they don’t recognize. And god help you if you’ve installed CleanMyMac. The only solution is to reinstall macOS and never do that again!
(They all seem to ignore that CleanMyMac X is now notarized and sold in the App Store...)
Stackoverflow > Apple’s community support. Every time.
I've experience this first-hand, and it's annoying AF.
I wrote a post on Apple's forum about the years-old iOS celluar-draining bug[1], and one of these high-reputation "experts" (read: Apple apologist/shill) kept insisting that the OS corrupting its own settings and not handling the corruption gracefully was somehow all my fault - when I pointed out this was a clear OS bug (even linking to the Wikipedia definition for 'software bug'), his long-winded pushback reply boiled down to him essentially saying that "bugs aren't bugs". Beyond useless as a help forum with these clowns being allowed to earn those "reputation" points.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29764360
Fuck the apple forums, they are usefulness. I'd like to add another type: return to apple for repairs alongside the 'reinstall os'.
There's gotta be a better answer than reinstalling the os! That's a nuclear option that should be a last resort. But it's recommended all the time.
Now it’s just a phenomenal waste of time.
i suspect that it's probably a combination of three things:
1) reliability is hard when on a power budget. if power was free, they'd just always be looking to renegotiate, but since power is limited, they probably are very miserly about this process which leads to getting stuck in states that require power cycling to force retries.
2) interoperability is hard with open standards, especially old standards that are complicated.
3) open standards come with limitations that sometimes cannot be worked around. (this is where i'm surprised apple hasn't just cheated as they usually do when open standards result in ux they find unacceptable, this leads me to believe the problem itself, of distributed consensus between multiple wireless low power devices with potentially noisy links, is actually very hard)
when you think about it, the technology behind wireless earbuds is nothing short of astounding. they're little battery operated wireless two node compute clusters that can literally fit in your ears, stream audio and maintain nearly perfect synchronization when rendering that audio in the most absolute basic use case.
I don't think I will ever buy bluetooth earbuds or headphones again, also because those devices are terrible for the environment.
Unless you are selling medical devices your electronics should never be thrown away because after-sales cannot swap a battery. Then again Google just dropped the Pixel 3 after just 3 years so this is clearly an issue with the consumer electronics business model.
Consumer electronics will remain a vastly wasteful business unless governments force tighter environmental regulations.
Or put another way: people throw away phones after 3-4 years regardless of if you can replace the battery or not.
You can pretty cheaply replace the battery in any phone at a repair shop. But people don't want that, they want the new phone with new look and new features.
How many 2010 smartphones have security updates that you can safely use? It's a chicken and egg problem.
For every person that chases the shinny new thing there are plenty of people who don't care about that and just want to have minimal functions, phone, sms, video chat, some decent photos/video, and occasional online banking.
However due a broken business model from Tech giants and firmware lock-in from Mobile SoC manufacturers this is unattainable at the moment.
Vendors should be forced to maintain an LTS work stream to give the alternative to those costumers who do want to act sustainably. Unfortunately that will never happen unless they are forced by regulatory changes.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone...
https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-w...
Either your research is showing that people on average keep their phones longer than 4 years, which seems to line up well with the argument that they don't throw out their phones every 3-4 years for the best new features for no reason;
Or your research is showing that they do churn through at a 4 year rate, which seems to roughly line up with the average battery lifespan and security lifespan across the market. 3 years is right about the time period where I need to replace my phone battery. It would not surprise me at all to see stats that suggest that a lot of people keep their phones until the batteries are unusable or until they're no longer getting updates, and then swap to a new phone -- and across multiple manufacturers, I would not be surprised at all to see that work out to be a ~4 year churn rate, if not a little higher.
I'm not sure what this proves.
Anecdotally, I know more than a few people who prefer Apple devices specifically because of their longevity and support lifespan, so I don't think that the "we have to throw this out because a new phone got announced" characterization is universally true or even necessarily the most common consumer attitude.
I also know people who have bought new phones because the battery was getting weak. I have argued with them to take their phones to a repair shop and to pay $60 to replace the battery, but they felt weird doing that for whatever reason. I suspect some of that might come from the fear of having their phone broken during the repair process before a new one comes in, but that's pure speculation on my part.
And yeah, I also know a few people who have bought new phones just because they care about getting a slightly fancier camera. But I don't necessarily think they're the majority, and an average churn-rate of 4 years across the market would seem to reinforce that point more than anything else.
Modular phones were tried and were a complete market failure. Because they sacrifice thinness, robustness and water proofing.
Older standards are removed because they are not used anymore, so the bandwidth is freed for newer ones.
And "people don't really want it" remains just as true. Just like people didn't want small screens, until even Apple famously yielded.
Funnily enough, I can name numerous people who use iPhone 13 Pros/Pro Maxes, just bought this past year and are certainly making less than median wage.
Part of it is fashion, 'not appearing poor', and they may only know iOS due to a history of using it. So no, the very rich aren't the only ones buying iPhones. The stigma that they are phones for the wealthy should go, just as the idea that Android phones are for the poor.
Many people I know who make well more than three or four times what I do use a variety of Android devices.
2015 smartphones are a different story. Things have stabilized, and a good 2015 smartphone should be perfectly usable today, a bit sluggish, but usable. And interestingly, that's when they stopped having user replaceable batteries. More generally, the market shifted from real obsolescence to planned obsolescence.
Then make them bulkier. What's worse, filling the planet with garbage, or a few industrial designers having slightly less impressive portfolios?
Consumer demand is not a very good guiding principle for environmental protection.
Semiconductors and consumer electronics are more environmentally sensitive than they were, and can be better than they are. With the lithium and trace metals, AirPods are more damaging pound for pound than bulk waste, and you're right to insist that Apple do a better supporting recycle and recapture. We should also focus on how those materials are mined in the first place.
However, even a repairable AirPod would generate lithium waste as the batteries wear out. If we're going to have consumer electronics, there's going to be a bit of waste. Let's just keep in mind that real problems are coal and SUVs and beef and so on. A business like AirPods (or all of electronics) that generates fractional ounces (or pounds considering everything) of waste per person-year while enabling environmentally-positive changes like remote work is perhaps not the first target for reprobation.
[0]: https://dpw.lacounty.gov/epd/swims/OnlineServices/reports.as... [1]: https://www.laalmanac.com/environment/ev04.php