zlacker

To connect regular bt headphones, you must go to Control Center > Hold on Bluetooth > Hold Bluetooth again > Select the headphones > wait > tap once to exit > tap twice to exit > swipe up from the bottom.

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.

>>Sebast+(OP)
But that's how bt heaphones work everywhere, right? I have to go and manually pair them.

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.

>>vladva+g1
I have this issue sometimes. If switching doesn’t work automatically when my Bluetooth speaker is turned on it’s not an quick option to select them.

Apple has a “select audio out” menu thats on a lot of music and video apps. It shows “Apple airplay enabled” devices and makes switching easy. If it’s just Bluetooth it’s harder (you have to go into setting…)

>>Sebast+(OP)
I don’t think this is a case of Apple crippling non-Apple headphones but more a case of Bluetooth being pretty limited.

Either way, the user experience is still better than on Windows. Whenever I start up my PC it steals my headphones, even if I’m currently listening on another device (or worse, making a phone call). I’ve searched online and it seems there is no way to switch this off. The only solution seems to be to manually unpair or disable Bluetooth after using it.

>>vladva+g1
No, this is for connecting headphones that are already paired but disconnected. For my Sonys I had to do this every time I activated them, because I use them with multiple devices, and its not guaranteed that they connect to the right one.

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.

>>vladva+g1
Nope. Google's Pixel Buds have first party integration with a custom UI to connect them as soon as they're out of the box. So are Samsung's Galaxy Buds, and both of these use regular Bluetooth.

>>Sebast+f8
The W2 chip or whatever it’s called, inside the AirPods, allows it to detect the closest “known” (not “paired”) device when it’s removed from its case, and if it’s not the one that it was connected to when it last went to sleep, then the headphones will avoid automatically connecting to the device they were previously connected to on last use, instead going into an implicit “trusted pairing” mode that allows the first known device to express an audio intent to become the BT auto-pair + auto-connect device.

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.

>>Sebast+(OP)
BT headphones are certainly less reliable at auto-switching, but that process you're going through isn't the norm for me. I just click on the output menu and select my Sony WH-1000XM4 headphones if I want to use them instead of my airpods. I don't have to pair them every time.