Archive for January 15, 2025

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4 Pushed Into Transparency Mode

Spencer Dailey (via Hacker News):

A couple of weeks ago I noticed my pair of AirPods Pro 2 aggressively switching me into Transparency mode. It seemed like a bug. Again and again I would have to manually switch back out of Transparency mode. Annoying.

Then a few days later, Apple removed the ability for me switch out of Transparency mode altogether!

There are ways to reverse each of these changes (the force switching and the Off removal), but the whole process was a major pain as a user to figure out, it wasn’t simple to reverse even once I knew how to, and there wasn’t any heads up that I remember getting from Apple explaining the changes. This led to me and a lot of people being confused.

Well over 100M people own AirPods. Here are some reddit posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) made by users frustrated over these AirPods changes. Notably, none of these reddit posts contain in their comments all of the steps needed to revert the changes.

iOS 18 and macOS 15 have a new Off Listening Mode setting:

For AirPods Pro 2 paired with compatible devices, enable the setting called Off Listening Mode, which allows you to turn off all noise control technology.

If you don’t enable the Off mode, the AirPods will only show the Transparency, Adaptive, and Noise Cancellation modes. The regular mode, without extra processing, is gone.

In frustration, I eventually Googled myself down a rabbit hole where I learned: all of this is likely tied to a relatively new feature called Loud Sound Reduction that only works if AirPods are in an active “Noise Control” mode. So Apple perhaps recently decided that everyone needed this feature enabled, and that’s why they made all these annoying changes to Noise Control? I can only speculate.

This is odd because I find that unwanted sounds are much louder in Transparency mode. I’ve always found this mode off-putting and rarely use it.

He also points out that the Loud Sound Reduction setting looks like it can’t be turned off. You have to find the toggle in elsewhere in Settings ‣ Accessibility.

But you know what? tvOS still did not show an “Off” mode for my AirPods 2! I ended up needing to hard reset my AirPods, change all the settings mentioned above on iOS for a second time, and then let tvOS rediscover them before “Off” would appear there.

Previously:

AirPods Pro Case Chime Sound

Juli Clover:

If you’ve been hearing a chiming sound from your AirPods Pro 2 case when the AirPods are charging, it’s a feature that Apple added with the launch of Hearing Health last year.

[…]

Apple says that the AirPods Pro may play a sound every so often while in the case to ensure the microphones and speakers are working as intended.

[…]

Information on the mysterious chime was highlighted on Mastodon after Apple’s unclear AirPods sounds were discussed on today’s ATP podcast.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

Years ago, Apple was a successful company and documented how their products work. These days, Apple is struggling financially, and alas can no longer afford to produce something even as simple as an interactive web page with examples of the sounds that AirPods make and explanations of what those sounds mean.

Previously:

Tony Fadell Wanted Apple to Buy Sonos

John Gruber:

I asked Tony Fadell and he confirmed to me it was him, saying it was back in the very earliest days of Sonos, when Sonos was set to debut with a device featuring an obviously iPod-like scroll wheel for input. Jobs wanted to sue (of course). But Fadell, after meeting with the founders, wanted to buy them, and made his case to Jobs, to no avail, several times circa 2003. Fadell said his pitch was basically “Seriously, we are all about music. Customers want this. I want this.” And Jobs’s response was, according to Fadell, “No one wants what they are selling.”

Needless to say, Apple is no longer all about music.

Previously:

PyObjC 11

Ronald Oussoren:

This release has two major features:

  1. Support for the macOS 15.2 SDK, including new bindings for the frameworks MediaExtension and DeviceDiscoveryExtension

  2. Experimental support for GIL-less operation in the free-threaded build of Python 3.13

The latter feature is an important reason for the delay: Supporting GIL-less operation required reworking parts of the internals of PyObjC, both to rely on other locks than the GIL and to avoid CPython APIs that are known to be problematic when the GIL isn’t present (“borrowed references” for anyone familiar with the CPython API).

Previously:

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