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AirPods don't “just work”

philip.design

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Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#601

Post by jcranberry »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #96
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…

Got some Samsung Galaxy Buds Live for my birthday and they're honestly one of the best tech products I've ever used. The case recharges them, the setup with a phone was very easy and worked well, they pair perfectly with my Ubuntu laptop as well. Taking them out of the case they automatically activate, put them in the case automatically shut off. And so on. They do just work.

Feel the same with the Galaxy Buds Plus.

My SO has airpods pro and I find to be the main thing they have over the GB+ is their talk through is vastly superior and the noise canceling is also very good.

The thing it doesnt have is a decent battery life.

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#603

Post by falcolas »

ashtonkem wrote: post #537
falcolas wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faster and lower latency are not the same things. > the cheap USB C adapter I have to ask, what kind of internet speeds do you have where even a cheap wired adapter can't beat it? That's pretty incredible.

950 down, 50 up. Wifi will pull 450 easy, but my hub will only do 100, despite claims to the contrary. 450 is good enough for my use case, so it’s easier to just not worry about it and avoid running another wire up the sit stand desk. If I upgrade my hub to something that’ll pull the claimed 1G, I might change. Or maybe not. I dunno. Literally nothing I do on the internet can get close to saturating it. Edit: wifi ad…

> my hub will only do 100

Oof, that sucks.

5ms per round trip adds up, especially when you add in every other source of latency in your chain. I've also found that, thanks to general RF noise from everything being wireless these days, latency spikes occur much more often over wi-fi than wired.

YMMV, of course. Always worth measuring your own experience.

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#604

Post by eptcyka »

RealityWinner wrote: post #504
eptcyka wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely not an issue with bandwidth, instead it's an issue of standardization. There just doesn't exist a bluetooth profile that supports high quality duplex audio communications between two devices. It's pathetic.

It doesn't exist because of bandwidth...

I struggle to believe that Bluetooth 5, which supposedly allows for a total of 2mbit/s transfer can't allow for a better codec to be used when a stereo stream of SBC is about 300kb/s. However, I'll be the first to admit that bluetooth is not my area of expertise, and my statement here is mostly driven by disbelief about the fact that we can't get better audio quality out of a bluetooth headset these days.

EDIT: Oh wait, the reason HSP uses low bandwidth codecs is because the standard makes a trade-off in favor of latency and non-blocking comms. Clearly, there are good reasons.

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#605

Post by eqvinox »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #596
quacker wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another option is 2.4 GHz wireless, which is common in gaming headsets, at least, for low-latency / high-quality audio. The downside is it requires a dongle.

>Another option is 2.4 GHz wireless Sorry to break it to you but Bluetooth also operates on the 2.4GHz ISM band. Those 2.4GHz dongles you're talking about is basically a custom wireless protocol that doesn't follow Bluetooth or any other open standard or OSI stack but is most likely based on some internal protocol of what the three major chip makers in the 2.4GHz space offer (Texas Instruments, Silicon Labs, Nordic S…

The reason "2.4 GHz wireless" is an option is the very proprietary standard right there, or rather the static pairing coming with it. The absence of Bluetooth connection negotiation/switching/… removes an entire class of bugs and annoyances.

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#606

Post by DoingIsLearning »

kristjansson wrote: post #539
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.…

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 we…

Wholly agree that transportation and energy usage of coal/natural gas should be our primary target.

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#607

Post by ryguytilidie »

My favorite part is how on Monday mornings when I have a meeting I can just 100% count on one of these things happening:

-One of them will have a dead battery, even though they've been in a perfectly clean case that charged it yesterday and will charge it tomorrow. -They will no longer be paired with my phone for some reason. -They will pair with my phone, but just not recognize that they should be the primary audio output and calls will just play on speaker phone.

But sure, they "just work".

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#608

Post by _qbjt »

jmacd wrote: post #254

There is something weird about the AirPods Pro product line. I think a lot of us who are very technology focused can appreciate the marvel of engineering that they are. Long battery life, excellent noise cancellation, the right weight, water resistant, etc. By many of my friends and my wife, all of who work in non tech fields but otherwise are 100% apple device people, all seem pretty much not impressed by them. For…

I've had the polar opposite experience with the Nothing Ear 1:

- I can't seem to use them for extended periods of time without running into this issue where one earbud stops playing audio entirely and I have to fully reset them to fix it.

- The audio completely cuts out every 5-10 minutes for a brief (like under a second) moment, leading to these annoying gaps in whatever I'm listening to.

- After pairing, the audio will sometimes be extremely low quality, output in mono or not output sound at all; usually unpairing and pairing fixes this.

- Firmware updates have done nothing to resolve these issues.

I tried reaching out to Nothing support to try to return them but have been unable to get a response. These headphones are unusable and probably the worst tech product I've ever purchased.

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#609

Post by ashtonkem »

falcolas wrote: post #603
ashtonkem wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

950 down, 50 up. Wifi will pull 450 easy, but my hub will only do 100, despite claims to the contrary. 450 is good enough for my use case, so it’s easier to just not worry about it and avoid running another wire up the sit stand desk. If I upgrade my hub to something that’ll pull the claimed 1G, I might change. Or maybe not. I dunno. Literally nothing I do on the internet can get close to saturating it. Edit: wifi ad…

> my hub will only do 100 Oof, that sucks. 5ms per round trip adds up, especially when you add in every other source of latency in your chain. I've also found that, thanks to general RF noise from everything being wireless these days, latency spikes occur much more often over wi-fi than wired. YMMV, of course. Always worth measuring your own experience.

I went back to wireless specifically because I was noticing issues on that hub. I went to the trouble to setup control plane to disable wifi when Ethernet was plugged in, and zoom performance tanked. Going back to wifi solved it. I think that the adapter was dropping packets, but I never bothered to triage since wifi works great in this house.

It’s worth mentioning that my setup has very, very low latency. Lag between me and the speed test server in city is 5ms wired, 10ms wireless. My router is way overpowered for what I ask of it, so throughput and latency tends to be very good.

To be fair, my wifi setup is a bit … extra. I’m running 5 APs, two switches, a controller, and a dedicated router, with a dedicated AP for my office that’s a combo wired/wireless outlet. I’ve turned it down so that it’s basically only serving my office, and it has a dedicated cat6 backhaul to the network cabinet, no sharing airspace with other APs. If I hadn’t gone to all this trouble, I’d probably upgrade my hub and go wired.

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#610

Post by Pxtl »

Honestly, the whole Bluetooth pairing process is an industry-wide failure. I'd throw out all the pairing logic industry-wide and say "Connecting to Bluetooth peripherals requires NFC. NFC-tap a Bluetooth device to its host to connect".
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