I’d suggest the “off” function on AirPods is used by… almost no one reasonable. I don’t know why an audiophile would use it, honestly. It sounds measurably worse than turning on ANC or Transparency. The only use is if you truly truly need the extra battery life. If ANC bothers your ears, the much cheaper regular AirPods should be your buy… or any number of cheaper non-ANC buds.
I use "off" most of the time when in single ear mode(which is most of the time if I'm on calls or listening to a podcast). Transparency mode gives me weird artifacts and I have never liked it, for me the only two modes I use are "off" and ANC.
The new change in iOS 18 was highly annoying for me and took me about 20 minutes to figure out how to get the previous behavior back.
I used “off” when my AirPods had a broken microphone that caused the other modes to make weird noises. Only necessary until I could get them replaced by Apple.
Sure, that’s a valid reason for a broken use case … but it’s still a broken use case. If your mics weren’t broken then the other modes would be better.
Agreed, but quality products are designed to continue operating as best as possible when components fail. You can definitely take that overboard to extreme level, but a basic think through of especially common failure causes (like ear junk buildup) and design around it is what great product designers do.
Based on the noises I experienced that time, I think the microphone was detached and hanging by a wire. The sound was rhythmic and depended on my movement, kind of like what would happen if you had a bell hanging on a pendulum inside a cylinder. I don’t think this was caused by debris buildup on the device. To Apple’s credit, whenever I had a defective AirPod, it was easy to get them to replace it. Happened to me multiple times in the first few months of the AirPods Pro release.
