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 not waking up correctly when removing them from the case, etc are all part of the non-AirPods Bluetooth experience.
I recently switched to a pair of Sony Bluetooth headphones as I don't like the too-neutral AirPods Pro EQ curve, and while they sound excellent, the UX really leaves a bit to be desired.
Courage, indeed.
And this is why I’m currently typing my comment on an iPhone 6S...
Still, the OP's complaints are valid. But when they work, which is most of the time, they're great. Surprisingly (but not insanely) great.
I used to jerk my wired earbuds out of the jack all the time.
While I’m up and moving around, or relaxing on my bed watching something on my iPad with a cat that has an inclination to chew on cables? AirPods/Bluetooth.
On another hand, I've a pair of Bose wireless headphones for close to 6 years now. Battery is still good enough for 2+ hours of workout.
edit: lol, an instant downvote - didn't realize I was on Reddit. It was at best a suggestion for when you have to get by with cabled headphones. I'm not on some holy war.
> From https://9to5mac.com/2021/12/30/apple-airpods-bluetooth-limit...
> One of the most notable comments in the interview came from Geaves when asked whether Bluetooth could be “holding back” the AirPods hardware and “stifling sound quality. In his response, Geaves danced around criticizing Bluetooth directly, but acknowledged that Apple would really like a wireless standard that allows for more bandwidth.
Courage, indeed.
And this is why I am not even typing this. I’m just imagining things, because it’s free and good for the environment.
For outside, I actually find wireless headphones to sound better for three main reasons:
- Better fit. Proper fit is essential for good sound and I rarely get a good fit on wired in-ears due to the constant pull on the cord.
- Microphonics (cable rubbing noise). Microphonics is very obvious and annoying. It is far more obvious than for example the difference between AAC and lossless. Audiophile reviewers hardly ever evaluate microphonics, because they test under ideal conditions behind their desk. Cable noise is not considered part of the driver's sound signature, but in real life it has a huge impact of what comes in your ear.
- Noise cancelling. Music sounds better without bus engine sounds.
That's nothing to do with wireless though?
I'm a bit of a convert to (Anker .. 'SoundCore P2' I think) wireless earphones (AirPod style, not sports-style-round-back-of-neck), but for ages I used noise cancelling wired earphones, with a little Bluetooth receiver when I wanted them wireless that I thought was the best of both worlds. I now think no wire at all is nicer though. (But probably not if I had to pay Apple prices! These Anker ones were £30.)
The disadvantages of the bluetooth is by far outweighed by the wireless advantage. The mobility, flexibility and convenience of no tangles and accidental wire pulling and causing phone to drop - all worth it.
And wireless UX is only going to get better. Wired is dead.
You can thread the wired headphone/IEM cord under your shirt, or even over your ear and down your back [0] to prevent tangles and wire pulling that causes a phone to drop.
It's less convenient than wireless earphones, but it solves the problem, and comes with advantages (better noise isolation and sound quality with certain models, plus you don't need to worry about the batteries degrading and having to buy a new pair after possibly 2-3 years, so you save money). I'm considering switching back to wired after my current AirPods pair dies for these advantages.
>Wired is dead
Not at all. You can get high-quality, professional earphones (in-ear monitors or IEMs) that fit in a pouch in your pocket, which are great for people in loud environments (better than noise cancelling due to their noise isolation); who appreciate music (sound quality is noticeably better for any genre); or who do professional audio work.
For as long as we both live, manufacturers will make wired headphones, and people will buy them. Latency and quality might not be important to the casual user, but for some wired headphones and speakers will be, and will always be, essential.
There are two situations where earbuds are far more convenient:
Getting ready in the morning - I can put the earbuds in once I'm out of the shower and dried off and listen to a podcast. They don't get in the way of getting dressed, moving around etc.. This is just not workable with wired headphones and my partner has already started work so I can't use a speaker, and even if I could I'm moving between different rooms and floors of the house.
Driving - getting headphones out of your pocket, untangling them and putting them in is basically impossible to do (safely) while driving. But earbuds are never tangled I can just open the case and put them in all while my eyes never leave the road. Means I can make phonecalls or listen to stuff easily and safely. This is a particular case of them just being quicker and easier to put in than wired earbuds - no having to thread it down your jumper just because you want to watch a 5 minute YouTube video.
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.
I said above that wired headphones have infinite battery life. I suppose I could say the same about a desktop computer versus a laptop, but I don't think that would be fair.
edit: Oh, and to themselves. Knotted up cords leading to wires failing caused more than one set of mine to only work in one ear.
- Cables would get cluttered in my clothes
- Cables would eventually all break at one point
- The cables were a mess in a any jacket / bag
- The microphone was making weird sounds when they hit my face and and people would complain
- etc.
Of course, I'm also baffled about how everyone I know and hear about seems to be unable to keep their macbook power cable from self-destructing, and I just keep accumulating them because they never die. My favorite one is still a MagSafe 1 from, I think, 2012.
[edit: in retrospect, perhaps the fact that I have a "favorite" power cable is some kind of red flag. Re-evaluating my life...]
I misplaced my AirPods for a bit a while ago and switched to wired headphones and couldn’t believe I had put up with it for years before I got AirPods.
I've ended up using the FiiO UTWS5 (over ear bluetooth hooks that connect via standard IEM connectors) + Moondrop Katos, the setup is sublime. Fantastic sound quality, very reliable and great battery life with no faf and can fit it in my pocket.
If you still want wired, the Apple dongle actually has a DAC/amp that is regarded surprisingly highly in the audiophile headphone community. Just remember to charge your phone.
I think most of the mainstream options for wireless stuff will make hi-fi enjoyers miserable, you just have to look at something a bit more interesting.
The only disadvantage is you don't get so much of the supporting features. Ambient mode isn't great, there's no ANC (I don't really care about these things), and it doesn't have the fancy pair-switching integrated stuff, so wouldn't be great if you switch between laptop and phone.
But for audio, we've reached a point where it is absolutely excellent.
There are issues with wireless headphones, but they also solve a lot of genuine problems with wired ones.
That being said, I use my Airpod Pros almost all the time, because I'm hooked on wireless and being able to stand up and walk around, etc.
I ended up with a pair and turns out wireless headphones were a giant QOL improvement. I can run around do chores while my computer/phone charges upstairs and listen to music at the same time. I'd never use earbuds though, I absolutely can't stand anything inside my ear canal.
I still want my phone/computer to have a headphone jack in it, and mine does.
With my Airpods Pro, my original pair are working great, no breakages, amazing for working out with, no cable to get tangled. I love them.
I think I’m going to buy 3 of those adapters and leave them where I use my headphones. What a waste.
Wireless changing helps the charge while listening though, so that’s a plus.
And realistically, it's not that significant to just buy an adapter and keep it permanently affixed to your headphones. Will be better if/when apple fully moves off of lightning to usb-c but I have found that when I want a high fidelity experience w/ music I'm more likely to be sitting and plugged in anyways.
And you know what's a major annoyance right? Untangling wired headphones.
I do have a nostalgic feelings for the iPhone 4s and headphones. I wish there were products out there that excited me in the same way my first iPhone did.
The problem is that I’d have to unplug that adapter to use my headphones with a device other than my phone, including other Apple devices like my Macbook. I would subsequently loose the adapter, guaranteed.
If the world could agree to use USB-C for everything, that might work, but Apple—who started this mess—is a prime holdout there.
if i'm on the laptop, by the time i take five paces away the sound quality on bluetooth is so bad it's basically unusable anyway
However, the life of the cable was a few months at best in my experience.
I agree with you to an overwhelming degree. I also had an iPhone 6S until about a year ago and I have to say the upgrade to the iNext Pro was pretty underwhelming in many, if not most ways when objectively evaluated.
I have also had AirPods for however long they have been out and even though I would agree with the rebuttal to your point that many other BT headphones are notably even more glitchy, I also paid about 5 times less for some of them that work almost just as well in most ways and aspects.
There seems to be an odd kind of self-delusion going on where somehow whatever is new, is assumed to not only also be better, but significantly better, when if one just takes a first principles approach to evaluating that proposition, at best you find marginal or incremental improvement of diminishing returns.
The 6S was released over 6 years ago, is it even doubly as good, let alone exponentially more capable? There is a huge hurdle in overcoming the reality that the answer is no.
There is all this lamenting about sustainability and environment this and climate change that, but for some reason, e.g., an old Apple device (picking on them because I believe they are the highest standard bar) cannot perform as well due to simple UI and UX changes?
There is seriously something wrong with the whole matrix and I have not been able to get any kind of satisfactory answer as to why, e.g., an old 1st (or 2nd) gen iPad Air all the sudden cannot perform †h same simple, core tasks it performed exceedingly well when it was new, that being loading safari and less than demanding website like HN.
What has changed in the 9 years since the 1st gen iPad Air came out that all the sudden browsing is now an extremely demanding task on the device? It seems like intentional and fraudulent designed obsolescence. Where are the environmentally concerned drawing attention to this like I am?
Just imagine if your car got updates every year, and then you find that 9 years later all the sudden the same engine has 100 less horsepower and can't get up a moderately sized hill anymore. That's not suspect to anyone else?
Again, I would love for someone to explain how I am wrong, that I cannot expect a product I buy to retain the same performance for the same actions/tasks when nothing else has changed. Does the CPU age and die off?
We should all be demanding that a device must retain its performance in all aspects of the original function. Everything else is fraud. Please for anyone compelled to, refrain from your "you don't know how it works" comments, that is not the case, nor helpful, and rather blind to reality.
I hope we never go back to those days. That constant struggle with the wires, having to take the phone with you, too short wire for desktop usage, the wire getting in the way when moving/jogging, etc...
You can get aux adapters for newer iphones for around $10 - great for when you can’t find your airpods
Note that it also causes a problem that bugs me daily, which is that I can't use my headset when my power is low and I need to plug my phone in. They make those little "splitter" dongles that allegedly allow you to do both, but in my experience, they only work about 50% of the time, and while you're on your call, your phone secretly stops charging and goes dead, or sometimes the moment you plug it in, it puts up an alert that says "unsupported device" and neither the power nor the headset work at all. I've tried three or four different brands on three different iPhones and they're all so flaky I've stopped even trying. I wish Apple would just make one and stand behind the quality and make me pay $10 for it. I'd be grumpy about it, but at least it would work.
That's true, but only because they used your device's battery.
It takes more power for your phone to drive headphones than it does to transmit a bluetooth signal. This is not such a big issue any more since recent phones have crazy long battery life as do recent bluetooth headphones. In 2017 it was a bigger issue.
...are you sure? And, is that still true even once you consider the extra encoding the phone’s CPU has to do?
I was under the impression that conventional 3.55mm jacks output exceedingly little power...
Ironically, with the loss of the 2.5mm jack power has a greater chance to be an issue, since your headphones and power have to occupy the same jack.
I have the same issue with wireless keyboards and mice. The idea that I have to charge or put batteries into my mouse is infuriating.
I keep one plugged into an inexpensive USB-C "dock" at my desk, and it's wonderful. That and wired headphones mean I always sound decent, don't break up when the microwave's in use, and never have to play the "can you hear me now" game.
Wifi is great, consumer grade routers are not though.
There's your problem. Dongles = cheap hardware to patch missing pieces of your expensive hardware. It's hard to find good ones even if you want to. One of the big reasons so many of us hated the TouchBar era of Macbooks was the reliance on dongles, which inevitably flake out at the worst times possible and cause weird bugs when you're trying to concentrate.
The best Ethernet dongle ever was the AAUI ones you used to have to use on old Macs.
Extensive user of various BT headphones on Android for few years now - went through everything from cheap Corwin E7 to Galaxy Buds to Bose QC to latest one Sony WH-1000XM4 - had minor issues with the Galaxy Buds - had to wiggle them in the case to get the charging going but other than that all of the other ones work really well - Sony being the king of the hill - even two devices work as expected and the sound quality is good.
The biggest pro of the airpods for me though is the non-pro version, for whatever reason I just cannot stand in-ear headphones. The gripes in the article are all valid though, personally I'd really like to be able to pair bluetooth headphones to as many devices as I like then have a button in the system tray (or anywhere where it'd be a couple of swipes/clicks maximum) that is the equivalent of "I want sound from this device now"
I think this just depends on Bluetooth version. My current FreeBuds 4 switch between devices seamlessly, no manual switching needed.
With my old headphones I head to switch manually, but it wasn't that much of a bother with a switching widget on the main screen (instead going deep into the settings).
They still work as good as new except for battery life, but this expected for device that had 500-1000 recharge cycles. I guess battery lost like 30-50% of original capacity.
PS: I only used Sony app a few times to update firmware and change settings though.
The 2021 MacBook Pro has a headphone jack. I can understand taking the jack out of a phone because it makes it more water resistant and frees up space, but in a laptop there's a much larger footprint to work with. And users are more concerned with plugging in peripherals vs waterproofing in a laptop.
Admitting past decisions were bad is hard.
Sometimes going into the Bluetooth menu and selecting them is not even enough to convince them to play audio from my phone. I had to get out of bed and turn off the Bluetooth on my laptop.
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.
I’d love to have a new, modern protocol that simply requires some kind of basic, physical connection to pair two devices. That way, I’d always know exactly which two devices are connected and a third couldn’t break it so easily.
I don't use them as a microphone very often (as I have an arm-mounted Blue Yeti), but when I've had to use them, they also worked without me getting complaints from the other side.
Maybe Airpods are wildly better somehow, but I can't see how much better they could be versus the totally acceptable experience I've had with the cheap ones.
They support multiple devices, but no automatic switching, it's just a button short-cut to switch between them, works quite nicely for switching from my iPhone to my iPad and back.
Many of these have been part of my experience with both my Airpods and Airpod Pros.
They even went through the wash, twice. But then I lost them.
My wife's soundcores work great.
My Bose over-ear are a much better experience.
The most annoying one is that if I pair my Airpods to my mac, they stop auto connecting to my android phone even when they are not in range of my mac. Probably by design
The Bluedios were better for podcasts than music due to their middling sound quality, but they paired properly most of the time and worked without issue.
Funny, i deal with this nearly every day with my AirPods Pro. Often the pods do this when switching from high bandwidth listening to low bandwidth for mic/headset usage.
I, personally, don't understand this. I'm a bit of a stickler for making sure my audio quality is good. I validate the products I'm using sound good using local device recording as well as HD echo test numbers before I use them during real life meetings. I'm on the phone at least a couple hours a day and it's baffling how many people assume that their AirPods sound good. The TL;DR of it is - they don't.
But with respect to the "UX" side of the house, I'm curious what you really need? I own a number of Jabra and Sony products that I can - pull out of their cases on any day at any point in time and they will work with no input from me. Do people fiddle with EQ and other settings often? The only thing I really do once I get the audio setup is make sure the firmware is up to date from time to time.
I could not use my AirPods with my old Windows laptop because everytime it got in range it would steal them away from any device, even sometimes when in sleep (the Surface Pro's crappy sleep mode may have had something to do with it).
The microphone quality is a tin can on all of them. Among my friends in Discord, anytime someone logs on with a shit mic the meme is "dude are you using airpods?!" They usually are. Or any earbeans. Because they're all bad.
The AV desync is an equal issue on both of them. BT headphones are basically useless for any realtime application (think: playing a digital piano).
This may just be me, but: I have no idea what the "automatic device switching" airpods feature is. I have a Mac. I have an iPhone. If I want to switch my Airpods from iPhone to the Mac, I have to go to the bluetooth menu in the toolbar, and click the Airpods on the Mac... just like the XM4s. To go back, I go into the bluetooth quick settings menu and click Airpods Pros. Its exactly the same. Like, ever since they announced this feature, I feel like either the world entered a collective psychosis on what this feature does, or I'm getting old and I'm missing something, but its exactly the same (and, not that bad; exactly how many steps I'd expect to switch an audio output device). The Airpods are certainly very nice during the initial pair process, but that's a one-time thing on both devices.
The scary part to me is: the APPs do have slightly better UX on Apple devices. And it isn't just the value-add features like "automatic" switching and spatial audio; I do experience slightly more AV desync on the XM4s on iPhone. The XM4s sometimes won't connect to my Mac. But these issues are entirely and totally Apple device specific; I also regularly use the XM4s with a Galaxy S21 Ultra and Windows 11 PC, and they're just where I'd expect BT headphones to land there. I really think this is an "Intel Mac situation", where Apple is intentionally ruining (or ignoring, and thus leaving to languish) the experience of integrating non-Apple devices so they can sell their accessories. Then, even educated customers start saying "the APPs just work better" even though what's really happening is, the iPhone is just working worse with non-APPs, and Apple is pushing their monopoly once again.
And I say all that coming to the conclusion: If friends ask me what earbeans to buy, if they have an iPhone, just buy APPs. They have better UX, in very small but nonetheless extant ways, even if I'm convinced it's because of Apple's monopoly control over consumer devices. Maybe more-so: they have a very neutral, unoffensive sound profile. Its boring. But the quality is competitive with any other bean out there, which is to say: great. It works for nearly any type of music, and no one will complain about it.
None of the other "tech company beans" can compete with the APPs. Some are cheaper. All of them suck. This meaning: Samsung, Microsoft, Google beans.
But if you're on Android; the APPs are still a top 3 choice. However, I'd add: if you want a neutral sound profile, the Bose QC beans (non-sport) have better noise cancellation and comparable audio quality. If you'd welcome or accept a more bass-heavy sound signature and larger (yet still comfortable) in-ear profile: the Sony XM4s are the best beans money can buy.
