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AirPods don't “just work”

philip.design

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Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#621

Post by GuB-42 »

323 wrote: post #152
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.…

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.

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.

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#622

Post by recursive »

scrollaway wrote: post #19

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…

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.

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#623

Post by Tsiklon »

StevePerkins wrote: post #302
geoduck14 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a pair of fancy Bose over-the-ear headphones. They have the "connect to 2 devices" feature you mentioned. And it inconvenient. It will connect to my cell phone and computer at the same time. I'll be on a zoom call (computer) and something will make it decide to disconnect and reconnect from my phone - so I'll get a 10 second interruption notifying me of this glitch. Also, if someone calls me, I haven't figured…

That doesn't sound like simultaneous-connection support is inconvenient. It sounds like Bose's buggy implementation of it is inconvenient. Back when I used to lug around over-the-ear headphones, I mostly used a $50 pair of bluetooth headphones by Taotronics (a no-name, fly-by-night company that doesn't even seem to exist in Amazon's catalog now). And they work flawlessly with two simultaneously connected devices.

Taotronics were one of the brands banned from Amazon last year for inflating user reviews[1].

[1] - https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/1/22703276/amazon-banned-br...

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#624

Post by vel0city »

acomjean wrote: post #381
criddell wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Apple does go proprietary you won't be any worse off, assuming they still support Bluetooth (and I'd be very surprised if they stopped supporting Bluetooth).

They’ll keep Bluetooth. The “find my” airtag eco system depends on it. Plus car audio and external speakers. I always wonder if the removal of the headphone jack was a ploy to get iPhone users to use Bluetooth so the find my network worked better..

I don't think pushing users to Bluetooth is a ploy to get more users to use Bluetooth. Toggling Bluetooth off only means the user-land applications can't use Bluetooth, the system might still use it for location-based services, if those are enabled. The "Find My" network would probably do a similar thing of piggybacking on such a feature.

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#625

Post by archepyx »

eptcyka wrote: post #434
TurningCanadian wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the audio quality degradation when using the mic is a limitation of Bluetooth bandwidth. It switches to a different profile capable of sending and receiving audio instead of only receiving.

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.

There are vendor A2DP codecs that support duplex audio (faststream; aptx-ll optionally) but very few devices implement them. Software support is also fairly bad, although on Linux Pipewire does support them.

Also iirc CSR has a vendor codec (Auristream) in SCO transport that supposedly provides higher quality. Not sure how much better it is, or what software supports it.

So certainly better duplex quality is achievable. But there may be some licensing, hardware, or software support constraints that have prevented them from becoming more common.

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#626

Post by recursive »

criddell wrote: post #322
eadmund wrote: post #244

You know what always just works? Plugging headphones into a headphone jack. It also uses significantly more well-developed technology which does not require the use of rare earth metals and eye-wateringly complex semiconductor manufacturing processes. And those wired headphones will still be in use years or even decades after those AirPods have corroded to nasty plastic and metal lumps in a landfill somewhere.

You still have that option but you might need to buy an adapter which doesn't seem like such a big deal. Those wired headphones with noise cancelling and transparency modes probably do require eye-wateringly complex semiconductors.

You'll never need an adapter if you never buy an audio-producing device lacking a jack.

Passive attenuation seems to be almost as good as active in my experience. And when you factor in that the headphones no longer need a battery, it's a net benefit in my book.

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#627

Post by lifewallet_dev »

> AirPods are wonderful products. But I just wish these annoying gripes would go away.

What's wonderful about all that? Our fanboyism is re-defining the word "wonderful", Annoyence 4 and 3 made me think AirPods broke and they happen so frequently, I also have the Sony wh-1000xm4 and I cannot configure the mic without degrading my audio quality. I'm back to wired, I have a Beyerdynamic DT 1990 PRO, and none of these overhyped products match its quality, I can live with the cables :)

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#628

Post by shakna »

graiz wrote: post #119

Bluetooth is so broken at a deep and fundamental level. We should really have a low-energy wifi protocol. The listed problems are just the tip of the iceberg. The fact that my headphones can't be simultaneously connected to both my phone and my computer is ridiculous. The connectivity is awful. The latency of connection and disconnection is embarrassing. On top of that Apple has the worst UI to handle all of of the w…

> We should really have a low-energy wifi protocol.

HaLow? [0] It's been around since 2016, but never saw any great adoption. Which is a huge pity as it can actually achieve some crazy good speeds for such a low power draw. (300+ Mbit/s).

There's also LoRa [1], which _has_ a fair bit of things implemented using it, but unfortunately it's super slow, and has some serious issues around acks that make it unusable for something like wireless buds.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa

Re: AirPods don't “just work”

#629

Post by vel0city »

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…

If your dock is only able to negotiate a 100Mbit connection despite theoretically being 1000Mbit, and you're experiencing dropped packets, it might not be your dock. That sounds like an issue with ethernet cabling. Bad cabling will usually result in ports not being able to negotiate their max potential throughput, and sometimes they'll negotiate higher than what they can realistically do.
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