I just want a pair of airpods that allow me to have a conversation outdoors. I'm always getting feedback that the ambient noise makes it difficult for people to hear me talk. I can't even do the dishes while on a call without people complaining.
I believe iOS 15 includes a little-touted feature: "Voice Isolation" mode; I haven't tested it comprehensively, but other similar technology (e.g. RNNoise [1]) has very impressive results in the scenarios you allude to.
I wish I could upvote this 10x. I don't know what Apple does with their processing, but the quality of the Airpods microphone is very poor (the worst I've ever heard). Especially outside, but even indoors.
I'm commenting to see if that's everyone's experience, or if we're outliers.
By chance I bought a Sennheiser headset for Zoom calls, and the real killer feature is a high quality mic with firmware noise cancellation. At the time I was in a hurry and bought the most expensive Senn's I could find on Amazon, and lucked out. I've had two people at work ask me what I use. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00J8ME6QA
I assumed this as well before I had an issue with the device where the firmware somehow got corrupt and I had to update it. Without the firmware noise cancellation, people complained that they could hear everything, the creaking of my wooden floor every rustle of every piece of paper and so on. But once I fixed the firmware all of that went away. That said I think you're right and putting the mic closer to your mouth is probably a good thing in general
I've had better luck with the Jabra Elite wireless earbuds. Less complaints of background noise or muffled voices than the AirPods I tried using for a very brief period.
Try to pair them again! My girlfriend said the same thing, as if my voice was attenuated instead of the other way around. All it took was re-pairing them.
Google relies heavily on advertising revenue so needs to interject any time there's a threat to that. Doesn't matter if it's a web browser that defaults to bing or an ISP that interjects their own ads.
On the other hand, Apple relies heavily on hardware sales for revenue.
The new MBP 2016 annoyed me (until I went back to my 2015 model) by making the left/right arrows the same size as the up/down and the other surrounding keys, which means your fingers can no longer find them by touch alone; I kept hitting shift and option instead.
I once hired a designer to create a logo and only months later discovered he had poached it from somewhere else. Not all of these companies are "logo thieves", some simply didn't know that the designer they paid to create something original had copied something.
I wanted to love these guys, I really did. I had a b2b operation all set up and just needed some help with the payments. After going through their API I realized I could technically do everything I needed.
But they insisted that each customer have their own account which didn't make sense in my circumstances. I couldn't even get them to return emails or have a phone call to discuss.
Pro tip to startups out there: it never hurts to talk to potential customers.. they may be your next pivot.
