<story><title>AirPods don&apos;t “just work”</title><url>https://philip.design/blog/airpods-dont-just-work/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>I generally enjoy my AirPods. They are occasionally quirky, but most of the time they really do “just work” for me. The annoyances are annoying when they happen, though.&lt;p&gt;The strangest part is that the annoyances aren’t getting any better over time. At first I assumed that they were growing pains of an early product launch. Yet now we’re years into the AirPods experience and they continue to be just as quirky as when I first got them.&lt;p&gt;Apple seems so hot or cold on fixing their own bugs. Certain bugs get rapidly patched in the next iOS or Mac software release. Other bugs languish for what feels like forever. Do Apple execs just not use AirPods? Are they using a different configuration or hardware combination that doesn’t have these bugs? Have they just trained themselves to overlook the bugs because the workarounds have become a reflex? I can’t imagine working at any tech company where one of the flagship products had such a high rate of annoyances without having a lot of engineers diverted to replicating, diagnosing, and fixing it ASAP.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nsxwolf</author><text>I like &amp;quot;workarounds become a reflex&amp;quot;. This is a very succinct way of describing one of the causes of why people often claim to have no issues using something that universally has issues.&lt;p&gt;A great example is the gaming PC vs gaming console war. PC gamers often seem to refuse to admit there&amp;#x27;s untold little quirks you have to deal with when using a general-purpose operating system and modular hardware to play games. They don&amp;#x27;t notice the workarounds they are continuously employing, because it&amp;#x27;s become a reflex.</text></comment>
<story><title>AirPods don&apos;t “just work”</title><url>https://philip.design/blog/airpods-dont-just-work/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>I generally enjoy my AirPods. They are occasionally quirky, but most of the time they really do “just work” for me. The annoyances are annoying when they happen, though.&lt;p&gt;The strangest part is that the annoyances aren’t getting any better over time. At first I assumed that they were growing pains of an early product launch. Yet now we’re years into the AirPods experience and they continue to be just as quirky as when I first got them.&lt;p&gt;Apple seems so hot or cold on fixing their own bugs. Certain bugs get rapidly patched in the next iOS or Mac software release. Other bugs languish for what feels like forever. Do Apple execs just not use AirPods? Are they using a different configuration or hardware combination that doesn’t have these bugs? Have they just trained themselves to overlook the bugs because the workarounds have become a reflex? I can’t imagine working at any tech company where one of the flagship products had such a high rate of annoyances without having a lot of engineers diverted to replicating, diagnosing, and fixing it ASAP.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Nextgrid</author><text>In my experience, the annoyances actually get worse over time.&lt;p&gt;I got my AirPods back when the original ones were released and the experience probably was as good as physically possible (short of including multiple radios so they can maintain connections to multiple devices in parallel and simply mix the audio client-side).&lt;p&gt;They then (2 years ago?) released this new feature where AirPods could automatically switch between all your devices which is just too slow and is more of an annoyance in practice, but even disabling the behavior made the existing experience much worse: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=30085538&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=30085538&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>