zlacker

In terms of unique OS-level integrations: Airpods are not paired with a device: they're paired with your Apple ID. If I pair the airpods with my iPad, I can seamlessly switch them to iphone, to Mac, to my Apple TV. They'll even auto-switch if it detects you've stopped using your current device.

Airpods automatically try to pair with a nearby iphone when opened, if one of your own devices isn't around. All of this is through a pretty fancy UI, just for Airpods and Beats

>>mholm+(OP)
But is there a way of making this work with regular bluetooth headphones? AFAIK whey you pair them, the HP will remember the device's physical address, so the random apple devices you may have would have to present the same address to the headphones. Hell, this doesn't work on its own, even between a Linux and Windows install on the same PC. You have to manually move some connection information between the two to get e.g. a mouse working in both.

So if Apple figured a way of bypassing this limitation, it's really not clear to me why that should be considered "bad", even if it's clearly better than what the competition does. It's on the bluetooth standard to do better.

Or is your point that apple should have standardized the protocol they use to make this happen?

>>vladva+P1
I don't have any particular problem with this feature existing, it helps me as an apple user. Though I can imagine a standardized protocol would be what the OP of this thread wanted.

>>vladva+P1
Very often when Apple decides to go in its own direction, you can criticize them for not improving standard ways of doing things instead. File transfers, contact sharing, etc.

But with Bluetooth I believe Apple is right to forge its own path. The standard is convoluted, built on old methods, still cannot pair two buds in a sane manner, and can’t provide enough bandwidth for Apple’s uncompressed format.

I expect Airpods to leave Bluetooth behind sooner rather than later.