Have you used Bluetooth headphones this decade? And airpods in particular? There’s not really any problem with audio quality they sound pretty much indistinguishable from wired headphones in real world use (sure if you’re sitting alone in a quiet room with an audiophile setup listening to FLAC files because 320kbps mp3s aren’t high quality enough, then you may want something else).

This is just demonstrably not true. Bluetooth Hands-Free mangles the sample rate to 16 / 24 kHz. See this video for a collection of pretty much all common devices from "this decade". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifmGS_WWk7o

Saving others the time: this link doesn't cover any Apple headsets.

My AirPods reportedly sound like shit on calls and the same is true for any AirPods [Pro] user I've been on a call with.

I use FaceTime Audio for calls to family because it sounds so much better than VoLTE. FT Audio sounds like you're in the same room as the person, even over non-Pro Airpods.

You are referring to listening, but the recording quality of all of Bluetooth earbuds is abysmal.

call quality still sucks because of HFP. That hasn’t changed for over a decade.

I have a co-worker who moved from Bose to AirPods. I wish he still had the Bose headphones - he sounded better, and they filtered out his swallowing noises.

Whatever protocol Apple uses for calling with Airpods + Apple devices isn't the same as the usual bluetooth call codec.

Yeah, they use their own proprietary protocol over Bluetooth Low Energy (which you can basically use as a raw packet transport).

For some reason the Bluetooth consortium was years behind the ball in standardizing a high quality bidirectional audio transport, versus the phone-quality "Hands Free Profile" and "Headset" Profile using 90s era codecs (uni-directional is fine since it uses a higher quality "Advanced Audio Distribution" profile).

The consortium launched Bluetooth Low Energy audio last year (or maybe this year?), but I'm not sure if it's actually shipping in anything yet.

Yeah, whenever I use Bluetooth headphones that have a microphone with my PC I have to be sure to disable all of the headset profiles so it doesn't switch to dial-up quality as soon as an app requests microphone access.

An update to that spec would be much appreciated.

I'm skeptical if the protocol makes that much difference, the experience with Beats X basically felt the same as any normal BT headphones, AirPods definitely felt less fussy and more seamless despite them both using the same W1 chip.

My theory is the AirPods start getting ready for syncing as soon as you open the case/detects you touching them, while the Beats X had a traditional on button and were entirely unimpressive to me.

I was referring more to audio quality. Airpods seems to be able to act in headset mode (audio + microphone) without killing the quality of the audio you are listening to. Most headphones switch to a very low bitrate mode when you activate the microphone.

I did hear Rumours (I never looked into it) that there will be an upcoming feature in bluetooth that will allow for higher quality. I believe currently the tradeoff is audio quality vs latency. My bluetooth headphones (Sony) switch between high quality but ~500ms latency (guess), to low quality but no noticeable latency when doing calls.

True, Bluetooth 5.2 is introducing LE Audio that will use a new codec (LC3) and should enable higher audio quality also for calls when microphone from the headset is in use.