Comment by coryfklein | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coryfklein | Hacker News Reader

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Try pairing your AirPods with your laptop as well. Now when you put the headphones in to listen to Podcasts on your phone you hear the chime and think you're good to go, so you turn on your podcast and hear nothing.

Wait, you can hear it, it's just really quiet. So you turn up the volume. Ohhhh it's coming out of my iPhone speakers. Now take headphones out to confirm, then put them back in. The AirPods found your laptop somewhere thirty yards away and had connected to that! Don't mind that the lid is closed and its asleep, and your iPhone is activated, in your hand, and playing audio.

Now on your phone:

0. Pause Podcast

1. Home button (close Podcasts)

2. Home button (first press didn't work)

3. Home button (get to first app page)

4. Settings App

5. Home button (because your finger slipped downward 1 pixel when you pressed the Settings App and iOS thought you wanted to search your phone instead)

6. Settings App

7. Bluetooth

8. Tap "AirPods"

9. Wait about 10 seconds

10. Double tap Home button

11. Find Podcasts app

12. Rewind 30 seconds

13. Hit Play

This happens to me all the fucking time.

When moving from my laptop to my phone, I just open the settings tray, 3D touch the media control, tap the AirPlay icon and select my AirPods. Sure, that’s still a few taps but your flow is about as roundabout as you can get.

I do the same thing. Where I think Apple could improve is by helping you understand that you can do it this way. I accidentally figured this out a while back.

Duly noted and that will certainly help me in the future, but I have to point out that plugging in 3.5mm headphones never required knowledge of a super-secret shortcut. You just simply had to plug them in. And even that takes less time than the 3d-touch-media-tray method.

That's the best case scenario, when it pairs as expected to, with the 10 seconds of spinning wheel.

One improvement is that if you're in the app, the mystery meat to look for if the concentric circles with a triangle on the bottom. That is the secret code for selecting the output source, which allows connecting to the AirPods.

I'd be mostly ok with this if:

1) it connected reliably when selecting the AirPods, and

2) pairing only took 2-3 seconds, rather than 10-15 seconds. 10-15 seconds is far too long for electronic devices to waste of a human's attention, especially for something that happens several times a day.

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