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Am I crazy or have Airpods gotten worse recently? I didn't get mine until recently (November?) and for the first month or so they kinda did work perfectly. The

by hbn 5y ago

Am I crazy or have Airpods gotten worse recently? I didn't get mine until recently (November?) and for the first month or so they kinda did work perfectly. The auto-pairing was annoying like the article mentions (switching from my Mac where I want it to my phone cause I pulled it out to look at something), but I turned that off and it was all good. But at some point in December I started constantly getting the issue where one doesn't have audio playing and I have to put it in the case to reset it, sometimes the tap gestures don't work, it'll pause when I pull one out (as intended) but doesn't unpause when I put it back in, etc. I wonder if they pushed some bad firmware. Oh, also here's another complaint: when your Airpods are connected to your iPhone, they HAVE to be the microphone. Which is annoying because for one thing, their microphone is way worse than the one built into your phone, and the other thing is in winter I usually have my AirPods concealed under my toque so my ears don't freeze off, but that means literally no sound will make it to the microphone, and I'm just SOL if I want to use my microphone (and when it's freezing out, I'm less likely to want to try typing a message with the keyboard, so it would be nice to just send a voice message to someone, but I can't). Of course no one at Apple will ever experience this cause they're all in California!

germinalphrase 5y ago
Clearly, no one at Apple considered cold weather when designing the pinch based Airpod Pro interface. Just about impossible with gloves.
- hbn 5y ago
  Yeah, that's actually one of the reasons I didn't go for the 3rd gen even though they were out when I got mine I can't use that through a toque, whereas with the 1st gen I can double tap the side of my head through the toque and it pauses
  - saurik 5y ago
    Yeah: the tapping interface for the original AirPods is one of the most interesting mechanisms I'd ever seen, both obvious in retrospect and yet not at all obvious. I think of it as one of the more "inspired" mechanisms I've ever seen in such a product... and then they replaced it with "the kind of thing an idiot might have built". And like, I know the pinch mechanism does have some smarts to it: it isn't even really a button, and the thing you think you are pinching is haptic feedback; but that frankly just makes it worse as the only reason why the pinch feature is better than the tap feature is because the tap feature had an unfortunate requirement that you had to have it in your ear to use it (and to the extent to which it would accidentally work when not in your ear was, fwiw, annoying)... ...but then, for some inexplicable reason, they decided that the pinch feature also shouldn't work if the AirPod isn't in your ear, only, due to the dynamic haptic feature, squeezing it suddenly isn't a button anymore and I find myself just squeezing it harder, twisting it around trying to find the button, until the part of my brain that knows how it works turns on and goes "there isn't really a button there" and I go into problem-solving mode to figure out I need to put it in my ear again for it to work. The tapping interface was (/is, as I still have them) incredibly intuitive on that front: the part of my brain that wanted to interact with it fundamentally got that "you have to put this in your ear in order to tap it", and I don't ever use them wrong. But with the new pinch interface, I've had a pair ever since they came out (and now have a pair of the AirPod 3, which I don't like anywhere near as the old ones) and I continue to routinely attempt to pinch them when they aren't in my head. What is crazy to me is that I've complained about this to various people and the response that I tend to get--both from people "in the know" as well as end users giving me this exact complaint back--is that a sizable number of customers apparently really really really hate tapping their head: they find the action annoying and the sound it makes in their skull / ear canal unfortunate. The pinch interface is simply sufficiently boring that everyone seems to be willing to do it without squinching. :/

by hbn 5y ago

germinalphrase 5y ago

Clearly, no one at Apple considered cold weather when designing the pinch based Airpod Pro interface. Just about impossible with gloves.

hbn 5y ago
Yeah, that's actually one of the reasons I didn't go for the 3rd gen even though they were out when I got mine I can't use that through a toque, whereas with the 1st gen I can double tap the side of my head through the toque and it pauses
- saurik 5y ago
  Yeah: the tapping interface for the original AirPods is one of the most interesting mechanisms I'd ever seen, both obvious in retrospect and yet not at all obvious. I think of it as one of the more "inspired" mechanisms I've ever seen in such a product... and then they replaced it with "the kind of thing an idiot might have built". And like, I know the pinch mechanism does have some smarts to it: it isn't even really a button, and the thing you think you are pinching is haptic feedback; but that frankly just makes it worse as the only reason why the pinch feature is better than the tap feature is because the tap feature had an unfortunate requirement that you had to have it in your ear to use it (and to the extent to which it would accidentally work when not in your ear was, fwiw, annoying)... ...but then, for some inexplicable reason, they decided that the pinch feature also shouldn't work if the AirPod isn't in your ear, only, due to the dynamic haptic feature, squeezing it suddenly isn't a button anymore and I find myself just squeezing it harder, twisting it around trying to find the button, until the part of my brain that knows how it works turns on and goes "there isn't really a button there" and I go into problem-solving mode to figure out I need to put it in my ear again for it to work. The tapping interface was (/is, as I still have them) incredibly intuitive on that front: the part of my brain that wanted to interact with it fundamentally got that "you have to put this in your ear in order to tap it", and I don't ever use them wrong. But with the new pinch interface, I've had a pair ever since they came out (and now have a pair of the AirPod 3, which I don't like anywhere near as the old ones) and I continue to routinely attempt to pinch them when they aren't in my head. What is crazy to me is that I've complained about this to various people and the response that I tend to get--both from people "in the know" as well as end users giving me this exact complaint back--is that a sizable number of customers apparently really really really hate tapping their head: they find the action annoying and the sound it makes in their skull / ear canal unfortunate. The pinch interface is simply sufficiently boring that everyone seems to be willing to do it without squinching. :/