With iOS 17, I was really impressed by how well my AirPods were handled. Gone were my frustrations of having the AirPods connect to a seemingly-random device, and having trouble manually switching to the one I actually wanted to use. With iOS 17, it seemed as if the AirPods would connect to multiple devices simultaneously, and just “move” to whichever one of them was generating sound actively. So I could watch something on my laptop while my phone sat inches away silently and my Mac mini sat a half-meter farther away also silently, and if I wanted to interrupt the movie to watch a YouTube clip, I could just hit ‘Play’ on the Mac mini, and the movie would pause on the laptop, while my AirPods started giving me the audio from the desktop. It felt magical!
A few days ago, I updated to iOS 17.2 If I could go back to whatever I was running before, I would.
Now the two computers still work the way they did before, but only if I manually disconnect the AirPods from my phone. Otherwise, the phone grabs the AirPods after about 30 seconds, despite the phone sitting silently in StandBy mode. It will pop up a widget so that I could play music if I wanted to, which I don’t. I have to manually connect the laptop to the AirPods again, which works. Then I have to hit Play on the laptop again, which works. And then about 30 seconds later: BOOM. The video pauses, I hear the tone that tells me I’ve connected to something new, and I see either the aforementioned paused music widget, or a little tiny indicator in the top center of the StandBy face indicating that it has audio output. It doesn’t. It’s silent.
It will do this at least four times in a row, which is how long it took me to give up and manually disconnect them from the phone.
This is worse than it was prior to iOS 17, which I was unhappy with at the time!
