I guess it took me this long (almost 2 months) to recognise in plainer terms that my new AirPods Pro (2nd generation) have consistently had severe connection problems and overall really poor performance overall. There are multiple and distinct examples of this.
- Constantly, randomly disconnecting, then reconnecting (on iPhone) - almost on a loop, until / unless you start playing music or something.
- A very weird behaviour I had not seen before where when you are listening to some music on Spotify, it starts getting chopped up and sent in little pieces, like a "shutter" effect, constant breaking of the sound; it tends to go away after less than a minute, as it seems the music had to load or sync up or something (but I have only had this behaviour with my newest AirPods).
- Another weird behaviour one time watching Netflix where the sound out of nowhere became extremely robotic and metallic. The sound was steady in terms of timing, in sync with the show, but the voices became unintelligible and sounded sort of like alien garble or something.
- I have regularly been unable to connect to my Mac with the AirPods. It should not be so difficult, but for some odd reason, they connect willingly to my iPhone, but seldom and totally unpredictably to my Mac. I have done an understandable level of troubleshooting like turning Bluetooth off on my phone and on on my computer. The computer says they are connected in the Bluetooth menu, but audio does not go out through them much of the time. Sometimes, without it being clear why, they work just fine on my computer.
Maybe I got a single faulty instance of this product, but I have googled online and it sounds like a lot of people are experiencing this, without it becoming a very well-known, or acknowledged, finding. Most of the review sites I have seen are giving it 5 stars, no mention of severe performance issues in sight.
Does anybody know anything more about this and what is the appropriate way to respond? If I document the details of these performance issues and send them to Apple via a bug report or at the Genius Bar, or over the phone, can I expect Apple to acknowledge their fault on this incident and possibly make amends, by recalling the product, substituting it, or some other form of customer assurance / making good with us?
