Makes sense to me. The audio quality isn't good. You never seem to know what they are going to decide to connect to a different device.
I had a pair, when the battery died I decided not to replace them. They are an environmental mess as well.
I use Bose QC35 headphones via Bluetooth at the gym to listen to music. A Blue Snowball iCE for podcast type things. And wired, in ear headphones (from JBL) with a microphone on the cable for everything else.
Not the parent, but the big issue I've had with the Snowball (which I think is an issue with condenser mics in general) is that it picks up way too much audio, so if you don't have a very quiet environment and a good mic boom and shock mount then it will pick up everything. Breathing, keyboard and mouse clicks, a dog barking 3 houses away, a truck going past.
I've since switched to an AudioTechnica ATR2100X (cardioid dynamic mic) and have found it sounds much better for the environment I'm in.
I comment occasionally on how much better people at my office sound when using their airpod pros rather than the headsets others use. I don’t hear the background noise and they just sound so much better.
Multiple times I have thought about pushing to get all of the Mac users a set as it is just so much of a night and day difference.
Only today did my other half say that her two day-old AP Pros were the cause of a complaint on her call where the other side could not hear her well.
There's plenty of similar experiences available to read - these expensive little things will be heading back to the retailer and swapped for something better.
Is this really an AirPods problem or is it more of a Bluetooth problem?
Might have Gustaf said AirPods because, let's be honest, the vast majority of people with wireless earbuds in our field are using Apple AirPods?
AirPods are by no means perfect, but they're the least problematic out of many Bluetooth earbuds I had tried in the past (granted, I've yet to try the brand that sponsor so many YouTube channels as of late). Bluetooth in general is very problematic and, if you've ever tried working with any version of the Bluetooth stack, you'd have immediately figured out why. Even BLE, which is supposed to be more restrictive, is still complex and hard to understand. And let's say you've got Bluetooth itself figured out, now you've got to make sure you've handled operating system quirks. And yes, there are quirks. If you were developing for Bluetooth on Windows or Linux and decide to do so on macOS, you'll be surprised to find that your code, even when directly translated to Swift or Objective-C, won't just work as-is because macOS has different restrictions for Bluetooth that are hardly documented anywhere. Today, macOS forces you to use a generated UUID to identify a hardware device instead of a MAC address, yet as far as I can tell it's documented nowhere as to how those UUIDs are generated.
But I digress.
Bluetooth just isn't a good tech stack for ultra-reliable audio, especially duplex audio. It's just going to have interruptions and random disconnections and reconnections. The mic quality will almost certainly stink unless the host has a better Bluetooth chipset and the peripheral does some neat tricks that likely result in lag as a tradeoff.
IMO, you don't use AirPods for any sort of audio production, except maybe if you are using them to receive cues. You use a "real" wireless lavalier mic such as the Rode Go Wireless II, which doesn't use Bluetooth at all, sounds great, handles distance and interference really well (important if you are walking around on a stage), and has a built-in audio backup in case there's interference or connection drops.
But no one actually wants to pay for real audio equipment for some reason.
I wish that companies, in particular remote ones, make quality mics and lavalier mics easily available to their employees. Only one company I've worked for provided good headphones, but never has a company provided a microphone.
It's an AirPods problem in that it's a problem that the default mode where it uses automatic device switching is unreliable for some users. Unless you're positing that that unreliability is actually a side-effect of the bluetooth standard, which I don't really know enough about to comment on.
Personally I haven't had issues with it despite hopping between iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air regularly, but if I were taking meetings more regularly I might be tempted to disable the feature.
If you use them with Mac, then Apple controls both ends of the Bluetooth stack. Apple developers should be uniquely qualified to know macOS quirks, right?
Apple earns tens of billions of dollars per quarter. They don't seem to have any issue coming up with their own standard when it suits them. If Bluetooth is such an issue, there's nothing stopping them from implementing their own protocol for use with their own products.
So I will say yes, this is definitely an AirPods problem.
A few releases ago, AirPods were significantly more reliable than other bluetooth headphones. Now I find that non-Apple bluetooth devices connect faster and stay connected much more reliably than Airpods.
Definitely seems like a bug that Apple introduced somewhat recently.
I was really happy with my AirPods and the microphone quality seemed to be fine. I've asked coworkers if they can understand me well and others also use AirPods without issues.
However since a few months the microphone began to be really quiet which I could not resolve yet, now I'm back using my cable bound Jabra headset which is uncomfortable and restricts my movement during meetings...
A quiet microphone or speaker, on a phone or earbuds is usually due to grease or wax and it may not be visually obvious. It's not a pleasant fact, and it's nothing personal it happens to my gear too. There are various ways to clean them depending on the device, google should be able to help.
I had a similar problem with an Airpod microphone (only on one side) starting to get quieter with intermittent drop-outs. It was likely a hardware problem and Apple exchanged it for a new pair after examination.
I was given a pair of AirPod Pros as a gift. Before long, one ear would randomly stop working. I went to an Apple store, they did something, I took it home, the problem persisted. I went back to the store, they replaced it. The problem still persists. I've given up, these were free to me and I stopped needing earbuds when covid started and I was always home. I just can't believe these sell for $50, let alone $200.
I've stopped buying Apple accessories as they are often overpriced mediocre products (e.g. Apple keyboards aren't even waterproof). My trial of the AirPods reaffirmed this belief. I had borrowed AirPods to watch some movies, and faced the same issue that you did - suddenly and randomly, one of the AirPods would just go mute. Sound would only come from one of the AirPod. The temporary solution to this is to "forget" the Airpods and re-pair it again in Bluetooth settings. But obviously that gets tiring when you have to do it 2 or 3 times during a movie! In contrast, a much, much cheaper generic wireless Bluetooth earphone works perfectly without any issues on the same iPad.
Just to throw in another anecdote, I realized a bias I was having interviewing. Talking with candidates who used airpods was such bad audio, that I was less engaged and generally had to devote more energy to understanding them, leaving me with an impression of them that wasn't so much to do with the content than the medium.
A good reminder to myself when I'm on an important call just to set up a yeti, out of respect to the people who have to listen to me.
Respect to the person on the other side of the conversation is why I invested $500 in camera, mic and phone setup when we went fully remote. All cable too, no wireless so no risk of pairing or battery issues.
Bonus is that giving a good impression helps my career too. Every little helps.
That last sentence is so true. I know I made at least a slightly positive impression on several people while I was interviewing, just by turning my desk so that my tall bookcases full of books were behind me. That, plus good audio and video basically is my 5 second first impression, so it's important to get it right.
Why only an "important" call? Once you've made the investment in the hardware, it's pretty much a simple matter of just plugging it in, as long as you're at home. I've found that the higher sound quality from a dedicated external mic more than makes up for any minor inconvenience having to deal with hardware, unless I have to be mobile for some reason.
It would be so nice if Apple reverted whatever regression they introduced in their Bluetooth stack 2 OS releases ago.
My AirPods don’t connect correctly about 20% of the time (at minimum) and switch connections for absolutely no reason to my Mac or iPhone despite those devices having no audio activity (in the middle of an active audio call on the active device, no less).
I turn off Bluetooth on the device I’m not using when I need to do a work call as a precaution.
Every headset I had before AirPods worked better than this.
To tangent on the device switching. Are there any headphones that mix all active streams? Why not?
Some guesses:
1. Energy use? It should be pretty easy to avoid complex mixing when only one stream is active anyways. If multiple streams are active then it is probably worth the energy cost.
2. Bluetooth bandwidth? I can imagine that if you are using the same hardware to manage all connections you can run out of bandwidth?
Because this bugs me a lot. My headphones (non AirPods) usually get it right. But even then the switching is often slow. Of course they also sometimes connect to the wrong device and then it is a huge pain.
When Apple's top end headphones cost $600, and plenty of headphones saree in the $300 range, I don't think it's a cost thing. I wish there were headphones that did this, that would be a real game changer.
Genki Waveform is supposed to do this for two streams but it's still at the kickstarter stage so ymmv. (The pitch is primarily for Nintendo Switch users since they have successfully launched three other devices to that user base to date, including a USB-C-to-Bluetooth audio adapter.)
I remember Siracusa saying something on ATP about it's how they're transitioning the driver model in OS X/iOS away from kernel extensions or something, apparently the benefit is more robust drivers in the future but there are growing pains...
Glad I'm not the only one experiencing this. All of my Bluetooth headphones (Sony WH1000XM4, WF1000XM4, AirPods Max) have experienced higher than usual dropouts in noisy areas. This wasn't a problem when I had AirPods Pro several years ago connected to an iPhone 11 Max.
On its own Bluetooth works quite well, but where there are a lot of active devices it only takes one device to drown out others. I've got an old Magic Trackpad which reconnects often and most of the time that results in Bluetooth audio dropping out. Since there are lots of people using lots of BT devices now I guess it's a tragedy of the commons situation...
I have a pair of first gen AirPods and a pair of AirPods pros.
The former are so crappy I only use them in a pinch when communicating with others. However the ABP are fantastic. Sound quality on both ends is always fine. The noise cancelling is appreciated. The only issue I have connectivity wise is on occasion when I join a Zoom my laptop will disconnect me. Which is admittedly irritating. But not frequent enough I'd call a serious issue.
I rarely ever have issues with AirPods since I upgraded from AirPods 1st gen. I wouldn't rely on them for Zoom calls, but they're pretty easy to deal with for listening to audio.
For me AirPods are generally pretty reliable with one exception: using them with my AppleTV is a total nightmare. Terrible reception (can barely walk ten feet away without losing audio, whereas other Bluetooth headphones work fine) constant disconnects, constantly can’t get it to connect in the first place, constantly audio desyncing, utterly random behavior when taking them out or putting them in while a video plays, and so much more. It’s a horrible experience.
Airpods are the only BT audio headset I have that can easily and consistently switch audio. Haven't had any reliability issues.
I can't get my Sony MX3's switch devices without removing and repairing. My work Bose QC35's says it's connected to both, but won't switch devices - it tries connecting, then fails and reverts to the last paired device.
I've owned both cheap and expensive Bluetooth headphones/earphones both from Apple and other companies. None of them are reliable, they drop connection, refuse to connect and sometimes need to be re-paired.
I also want to add that Apple's BT stack on Macs works way worse than Windows.
The automatic switching feature is a failure, honestly. I have never gotten it to work as it should across any of their AirPods models.
Also, the mic on the original AirPods were best-in-class when they came out, but they have since been bested by many other offerings (from Jabra, Sony, and others). The AirPods Pro were worse than a pair of Master and Dynamic MW30s I briefly had (which was surprising, since they are niche headphones), and they are definitely worse than my current Sony WF1000XM4s that I have now (which is even more surprising, since the mic on the WF1000XM3s were not good).
46 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadI had a pair, when the battery died I decided not to replace them. They are an environmental mess as well.
I use Bose QC35 headphones via Bluetooth at the gym to listen to music. A Blue Snowball iCE for podcast type things. And wired, in ear headphones (from JBL) with a microphone on the cable for everything else.
(I'm in the market for such a mic, and this one seems good!)
I've since switched to an AudioTechnica ATR2100X (cardioid dynamic mic) and have found it sounds much better for the environment I'm in.
I have the Snowball and the sound quality is great. There's a hardware control to switch between narrow/wide pickup.
Multiple times I have thought about pushing to get all of the Mac users a set as it is just so much of a night and day difference.
No relation to them, just a happy customer.
Sad no Linux.
Have used it for a long time now, and can absolutely recommend.
I have a mechanical keyboard. A loud dog. All sorts of noises, and Krisp mutes all of them, and does so without clipping me.
There's plenty of similar experiences available to read - these expensive little things will be heading back to the retailer and swapped for something better.
Might have Gustaf said AirPods because, let's be honest, the vast majority of people with wireless earbuds in our field are using Apple AirPods?
AirPods are by no means perfect, but they're the least problematic out of many Bluetooth earbuds I had tried in the past (granted, I've yet to try the brand that sponsor so many YouTube channels as of late). Bluetooth in general is very problematic and, if you've ever tried working with any version of the Bluetooth stack, you'd have immediately figured out why. Even BLE, which is supposed to be more restrictive, is still complex and hard to understand. And let's say you've got Bluetooth itself figured out, now you've got to make sure you've handled operating system quirks. And yes, there are quirks. If you were developing for Bluetooth on Windows or Linux and decide to do so on macOS, you'll be surprised to find that your code, even when directly translated to Swift or Objective-C, won't just work as-is because macOS has different restrictions for Bluetooth that are hardly documented anywhere. Today, macOS forces you to use a generated UUID to identify a hardware device instead of a MAC address, yet as far as I can tell it's documented nowhere as to how those UUIDs are generated.
But I digress.
Bluetooth just isn't a good tech stack for ultra-reliable audio, especially duplex audio. It's just going to have interruptions and random disconnections and reconnections. The mic quality will almost certainly stink unless the host has a better Bluetooth chipset and the peripheral does some neat tricks that likely result in lag as a tradeoff.
IMO, you don't use AirPods for any sort of audio production, except maybe if you are using them to receive cues. You use a "real" wireless lavalier mic such as the Rode Go Wireless II, which doesn't use Bluetooth at all, sounds great, handles distance and interference really well (important if you are walking around on a stage), and has a built-in audio backup in case there's interference or connection drops.
But no one actually wants to pay for real audio equipment for some reason.
I wish that companies, in particular remote ones, make quality mics and lavalier mics easily available to their employees. Only one company I've worked for provided good headphones, but never has a company provided a microphone.
Personally I haven't had issues with it despite hopping between iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air regularly, but if I were taking meetings more regularly I might be tempted to disable the feature.
So I will say yes, this is definitely an AirPods problem.
Definitely seems like a bug that Apple introduced somewhat recently.
I'm guessing it would be exceedingly rare for anyone to bring any non-AirPods Bluetooth headphones to YC demo day.
However since a few months the microphone began to be really quiet which I could not resolve yet, now I'm back using my cable bound Jabra headset which is uncomfortable and restricts my movement during meetings...
A good reminder to myself when I'm on an important call just to set up a yeti, out of respect to the people who have to listen to me.
Bonus is that giving a good impression helps my career too. Every little helps.
My AirPods don’t connect correctly about 20% of the time (at minimum) and switch connections for absolutely no reason to my Mac or iPhone despite those devices having no audio activity (in the middle of an active audio call on the active device, no less).
I turn off Bluetooth on the device I’m not using when I need to do a work call as a precaution.
Every headset I had before AirPods worked better than this.
Some guesses:
1. Energy use? It should be pretty easy to avoid complex mixing when only one stream is active anyways. If multiple streams are active then it is probably worth the energy cost.
2. Bluetooth bandwidth? I can imagine that if you are using the same hardware to manage all connections you can run out of bandwidth?
Because this bugs me a lot. My headphones (non AirPods) usually get it right. But even then the switching is often slow. Of course they also sometimes connect to the wrong device and then it is a huge pain.
I haven't had any issues for months now & the audio quality is better then my bose headphones i used to have in my experience atleast..
The former are so crappy I only use them in a pinch when communicating with others. However the ABP are fantastic. Sound quality on both ends is always fine. The noise cancelling is appreciated. The only issue I have connectivity wise is on occasion when I join a Zoom my laptop will disconnect me. Which is admittedly irritating. But not frequent enough I'd call a serious issue.
I find that Apple's wired EarPods have great microphone quality at a very accessible price.
I can't get my Sony MX3's switch devices without removing and repairing. My work Bose QC35's says it's connected to both, but won't switch devices - it tries connecting, then fails and reverts to the last paired device.
I also want to add that Apple's BT stack on Macs works way worse than Windows.
Also, the mic on the original AirPods were best-in-class when they came out, but they have since been bested by many other offerings (from Jabra, Sony, and others). The AirPods Pro were worse than a pair of Master and Dynamic MW30s I briefly had (which was surprising, since they are niche headphones), and they are definitely worse than my current Sony WF1000XM4s that I have now (which is even more surprising, since the mic on the WF1000XM3s were not good).