It's wild how much money Apple has made from Bluetooth headphones that don't suck. That's literally it. They're portable, pair easily and (somewhat) work with multiple devices. I have top of the line Bose Bluetooth headphones that still, in 2022, have issues with multiple devices. I can't count how many times I've started playing music on my iPhone only to realize that the headphones think my laptop is playing, so they just silently suppress my phone. And the only way to fix it is to go into the inane Bose app and disconnect the laptop. Why the hell can't you just tell the headphones to play from the phone and keep the laptop connected? It's so bad.

Yeah. I remember my reason for switching to AirPods Max.

My Sony xm3 kept connecting to the laptop in my backpack - which was asleep - when I was getting on my bike.

I had to unpair my phone and re-pair it to force it to "own" the headphones. It was such a pita.

That really was the biggest value add of the Apple headphones, and it works absolutely great. It almost (a 99.5%+ kind of almost) always connects to the device I want it to connect to, right away.

It's a pity though that they have the common issues of Bluetooth, and turning on the microphone immediately kills the sound quality... It's one of the cases where I'd appreciate them just using a proprietary protocol. The headphones basically only work well with Apple devices anyway.

Bluesnooze[1] mostly resolved this issue for me on MacOS. I also own the XM3s, as well as non-Apple Bluetooth earbuds (Edifier X3), neither of which support multiple devices.

>Bluesnooze prevents your sleeping Mac from connecting to Bluetooth accessories.

[1] https://github.com/odlp/bluesnooze