some things I've noticed: Mobil Safari seems to be using the search bar to hijack my google search (Particularly for locations which open in apple maps)
Although I'm mostly linux these days I went to install an alternative browser on a windows machine (using edge to download). I mentioned this in another post, but edge seems to watch for "chrome" or "firefox" downloads and politely reminds you that 'Edge is a great browser with added "trust of microsoft"' (A company who happen to be watching when you download a web browser).
https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/2/22813733/microsoft-window...
Linux seems like an OS that is way more respectful.
Battery throtteling on the iPhone 6s; The sandboxing / sideloading discussion; The no-iCloud experience; The way that regular bluetooth headsets work fine, but AirPods work even better; How unauthorized Apps on MacOS must be opened with a right-click.
Safari suggestions are also a great example: So far, I like them in iOS 17, since they can also provide direct links to useful sites such as Wikipedia. But don't doubt for a second, that taking traffic away from Google was the primary goal here.
Microsoft isn't so smart. Most users, including non-technical, can see through their attempts.
What do you mean by this? I have an iPhone but don't have airpods, just "regular" BT headphones. Under windows, they're hit or miss (sometimes they don't reconnect), but they work pretty well under iOS and mac os. They work best under linux (!), especially since it's the only one to support LDAC (though I understand some non-sony android phones may support this now).
So, if somehow apple came out with a way of making BT headphones work even better (what do they do better?), I don't see why you'd hold that against them. Should they not innovate just so that the competition doesn't get upset?
AirPods are always accesible via the AirPlay-menu, which is prominently featured in many media apps.
Again: still fine, but just bad enough to partly influence my next buying decision.
But once they're paired, they connect automatically to my iphone, and I can select them easily from a list when e.g making a phone call, though they're usually selected automatically when connected.
Some headphones support connecting two devices simultaneously, which is great... unless you have 3 devices :)
Anyways, if I was Apple, I would have added paired headphones to the speaker menu.
You can’t do this with a regular Bluetooth audio device that doesn’t have the W2 chip, because according to the Bluetooth spec, you can only be paired to one device at a time; there is no separate concept of “known” devices; devices that auto-connect stay auto-connected on sleep+wake; and devices that connect (therefore devices that auto-connect) must stop announcing themselves as available over BT discovery. (BT is essentially a protocol state machine — a device can be either idle, in pairing mode, searching for its paired device to auto-reconnect, or connected, and none of these states can overlap.)
These are all limitations of the audio device, not of the host OS. Limitations required for Bluetooth conformance! Apple can only work around these limitations by having the device and host both run a completely separate, second discovery protocol over completely separate hardware, that just forces the BT hardware into certain states as a result of its own negotiation. They can’t magically make audio devices that don’t have a W2 chip do this out-of-BT-band negotiation.