Item — HN Reader

I find AirPods to be a disappointing product.

The pairing isn’t great IMO. So many calls take a minute to figure out AirPod connectivity issues. It’s frustrating switching airpods between a Mac and iPhone. Much of the time only left or right pair, and the only way to fix it is to put them back in the case and re-pair them. Sadly it doesn’t “just work”

Another common problem is the mics tend to rust out after about a year of usage, eventually breaking down. This happens if you use them for any exercise (which apple advertises them for) with sweat rusting the mesh on the bottom.

Eventually I switched back to a manual headphone cable with a mic built in. It always works...

1 comments

The switching between iOS and Mac is indeed buggy. macOS also lacks system-wide support for airplay 2. I think they must be dealing with legacy code and/or support that needs modernized. Switching between iOS and iPad with AirPods doesn’t give people issues, so I don’t think it’s a problem with AirPod hardware or iOS.

Rhe sweat problem is interesting! I haven’t experienced this degradation, but I think my head’s sweat mostly runs off my nose. Is it because of how your hair is styled?

To be fair I wore them 2-3 times a week running. Sweat definitely roles off my ears onto the airpods. I bet sweat is particularly corrosive. The Apple store tried to brush off the rust and it worked a little better, but not consistently.

I would recommend buying cheap exercise headphones instead of using airpods.

I also sometimes prefer having the over ear headphones for some sound cancelation. You can buy reasonable headphones plus a mic-in cable for less than $50.