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Comment by applecore | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that AirPods didn't support automatic device switching until now.

I assumed a lot of people with AirPods would want to switch the audio seamlessly between their iPhone and an iPad or Mac.

Any idea why it took so long to ship this feature?

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Because ever since the first Airpods I was able to jump on any of my devices and change it from Speaker to Airpods and it would instantly switch. I didn't need to unpair or disconnect from one device before it was usable by another like I do with my Sony 1000MX3.

Yep. I had this experience. It was for some reason, REALLY good when AirPods just came out, and seemed to degrade with subsequent macOS updates (In particular, I had more trouble switching between phone and laptop later, but not much trouble between phone and iPad).

I recently got some bone conducting headphones which have the dual bluetooth built in, and that is even more seamless - literally just plays the audio from the active device, though it's not perfectly accurate, and gets really confused by Spotify doing off-device play, but it's clearly nicer than even having to choose the output channel.

Looking forward to trying this out w/ my AirPods though.

They've had this with Beats for a while as well, definitely since before Airpods, it works really well.

It wasn't a big deal because manual switching is almost instantaneous, unlike other headphones on other platforms.

My Bose Soundsport and Jabra 75t support simultaneous connections. Faster than "almost instantaneous"...because it's connected to 2 devices. I can watch a video on youtube on my laptop and immediately pickup a phone call. I never understood why Apple didn't support this. My Soundsport also annoucnes on startup which devices it's connected to..which is helpful when you have more than 2. My Soundsport is several years old, and Jabra had it since 65t, at least.

Edit: Also apparently this device switching feature for Airpod Pro is good only for Apple devices, and Apple devices on the same iCloud account.

Two simultaneous connections unnecessarily drains the battery of whichever device is not currently being used. It would also provide an inconsistent user experience when using more than two devices (say an iPhone, iPad, and a MacBook). I can see why Apple prefers to make actual switching as seamless as possible rather than support simultaneous connections.

Do you have to choose which device you are listening on by interacting with the headset, or is there a way to toggle that from the source devices?

I am really looking forward to this feature. Maybe I'm alone in this but I have constant connection issues switching between my Mac and phone when using AirPods (especially frustrating when answering calls).

You're definitely not alone. Switching my airpods from phone to laptop is always a frustratingly long process. First have to select my airpods in the audio list, wait 15 seconds until my airpods make a boop noise. They're not connected yet though, my mac will switch back to internal audio almost immediately. Need to repeat the process again before they will actually connect.

At least going the other way I only have to select the airpods once in the phones bluetooth device list.

I saw this and was surprised because I’m pretty sure I don’t need to do anything to switch between my Mac and my iPhone.

I don’t think this works until the new MacOS is released also.

I'm not exactly sure what it does because my Airpods always seemed fairly good at switching between devices as required. We will see.

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