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I'll happily pay the premium for "it just works", especially device switching iPhone to iPad to MacBook to Apple TV, it works first time, every time. I have a pair of Sony XM5s, and even at that price point, pairing and device switching can be a crapshoot some of the time.

Bluetooth honestly feels like a non-deterministic stack sometimes, it even took Apple 4 years to support it on the iPhone, how they have the AirPods working is close to magic.

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> how they have the AirPods working is close to magic

They control the entire ecosystem and keep the variants and with it, the testing complexity, down as far as possible. That's how Apple stuff works so damn seamlessly.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world has to contend with dozens if not hundreds of Bluetooth chipsets, driver combinations, OS stacks... and each of these has their own quirks, and even if a bug gets fixed in a Bluetooth driver or controller firmware, good luck getting that distributed to users...

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