A story from the “careful what you wish for” file. Remember how excited people were for AirPods that switched automatically from one Apple device to another? It seems that some are over that. A piece from Cult of Mac says, “Sometimes the feature is useful, but other times it’s really frustrating.”
While earbuds smart enough to know what you want to listen to and switch to that automatically sounds like a great idea, they’re not actually smart enough to know what you want, working instead on a sort of “if this, then that.”
“So,” says the Cult, “if you find that the feature is more of a frustration than a blessing, you’ll want to disable it and return to switching manually.” Here’s how to to it, per the Cult:
Disable automatic device switching for AirPods
Connect your AirPods or AirPods Pro to iPhone.
Open the Settings app.
Tap Bluetooth.
Find your AirPods in the list of connected devices, then tap the i button.
Tap Connect to This iPhone.
Change this setting to When Last Connected to This iPhone.
“Unfortunately,” the piece says, “you’ll need to disable automatic switching on all Apple devices running iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 (and macOS Big Sur when it rolls out later), so repeat these steps on your iPad, too.” Do that, though, and you’ll once again have earbuds that are probably just smart enough.
