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AirPods don't “just work”

philip.design

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Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#201

Post by toyg »

dijit wrote: post #39
m12k wrote: post #13

>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 accident…

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”…

I disagree, it's definitely a feature in my book. It allows me to keep listening or stay on calls basically forever.

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#202

Post by delecti »

soared wrote: post #169
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #52

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.…

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.

> they’d have to be bulkier

Then make them bulkier. What's worse, filling the planet with garbage, or a few industrial designers having slightly less impressive portfolios?

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#203

Post by dspillett »

nisegami wrote: post #174
xg15 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mobility, flexibility snd convenience of me still sitting on front of the same PC for eight hours?

Use the right tool for the job. Sometimes that's wired headphones. Sometimes that's bluetooth headphones.

Though being able to use the right tool, in circumstances where that is a wired set, can be a problem on some platforms.

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#204

Post by emilecantin »

macNchz wrote: post #93
rogual wrote: post #3

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.

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, waitin…

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.

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#205

Post by Wowfunhappy »

megapolitics wrote: post #196
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Y’know what headphones really did “just work” though? Wired headphones, circa 2017. Their battery life was infinite. You could “pair” them in seconds to any device with a headphone jack, aka any device, because we’re in 2017. Oh, and they were cheaper and better for the environment. Courage, indeed. And this is why I’m currently typing my comment on an iPhone 6S...

>Their battery life was infinite. However, the life of the cable was a few months at best in my experience.

Well, you had to pay more for better headphones with better cables. But wireless headphones are expensive anyway. (And have non-replaceable batteries which will also permanently die after a couple years.)

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#206

Post by [deleted] »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #100
dt2m wrote: post #63

All valid annoyances, but I really think OP should try using another brand of Bluetooth headphones for a week just to get some perspective of how well AirPods "just work" compared to the competition. Manually having to re-pair once in every blue moon, one earbud playing while the other isn't, no automatic device switching without having to go through the Settings app everytime, A/V desync, dodgy mic quality, earbuds…

Y’know what headphones really did “just work” though? Wired headphones, circa 2017. Their battery life was infinite. You could “pair” them in seconds to any device with a headphone jack, aka any device, because we’re in 2017. Oh, and they were cheaper and better for the environment. Courage, indeed. And this is why I’m currently typing my comment on an iPhone 6S...

[deleted]

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#207

Post by tksb »

davidbenhaim wrote: post #123

deleted

> …Airpods have a ton of extra UX settings in iOS that are not available to other bluetooth headsets.

To be fair, AirPods have "a ton" of hardware capabilities built in that are also not technically available, but that's kind of exactly the point, right?

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#208

Post by whizzter »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #100
dt2m wrote: post #63

All valid annoyances, but I really think OP should try using another brand of Bluetooth headphones for a week just to get some perspective of how well AirPods "just work" compared to the competition. Manually having to re-pair once in every blue moon, one earbud playing while the other isn't, no automatic device switching without having to go through the Settings app everytime, A/V desync, dodgy mic quality, earbuds…

Y’know what headphones really did “just work” though? Wired headphones, circa 2017. Their battery life was infinite. You could “pair” them in seconds to any device with a headphone jack, aka any device, because we’re in 2017. Oh, and they were cheaper and better for the environment. Courage, indeed. And this is why I’m currently typing my comment on an iPhone 6S...

A combination is the best, got some cheap noise cancelling JBL BT phones and if you plug a cable it'll always use that (they even work as dumb headphones when turned off), pull the cable and they'll happily go for BT.

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#209

Post by KptMarchewa »

prox wrote: post #181
Causality1 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention zero latency. Trying to have multiple people in a car play music/podcasts is a nightmare over bluetooth when you used to be able to just pass an aux cable around.

I bought a Sony that does BT and wired, I love the whynotboth movement personally. Why do we have to choose?

WH-1000xm3 sound much worse when wired. They are made to use internal DAC.

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#210

Post by duxup »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #100
dt2m wrote: post #63

All valid annoyances, but I really think OP should try using another brand of Bluetooth headphones for a week just to get some perspective of how well AirPods "just work" compared to the competition. Manually having to re-pair once in every blue moon, one earbud playing while the other isn't, no automatic device switching without having to go through the Settings app everytime, A/V desync, dodgy mic quality, earbuds…

Y’know what headphones really did “just work” though? Wired headphones, circa 2017. Their battery life was infinite. You could “pair” them in seconds to any device with a headphone jack, aka any device, because we’re in 2017. Oh, and they were cheaper and better for the environment. Courage, indeed. And this is why I’m currently typing my comment on an iPhone 6S...

I think it goes to show how much “just works enough “ consumers are happy to tolerate for wireless over other advantages of wired.

I remember early consumer wi- fi was just garbage compared to wired and… we still used it happily.

Granted sometimes we go back… my cars Bluetooth is so maddening I use a cable instead.

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