Apple rolls out features like the loud sound reduction feature that only work if you're in a non-OFF state.
Exactly how it should work really depends on the expectations of the average user. If they turn on loud sound reduction, for example, are they just going to be confused when nothing happens? How many people really understand how to toggle between the 3+ states and that additional processing might only apply to a subset of them?
And airpod state is already confusing: You have Off | Active cancellation | Transparency | Adaptive. My parents who have used airpods for years didn't even know about the airpods menu that shows you these states. They understood pinch-and-hold to change state but didn't know the third state was the OFF state. It just kinda sounds like a crappier unwanted state.
The TFA trade-off might have been the most sensible decision given these complexities. Replace OFF with one of the other states as the default and then give more techy users a switch to add OFF back into the possible states.
Granted, TFA points out there's a bug with this impl.
Yeah. There were clearly difficult decisions within Apple about which tradeoffs to make for people, but the big misstep for me was: Not communicating the changes to me. In a way, I was somewhat happy when they removed the Off option because at least it showed me that there were intentional changes occurring. Before they removed it, I thought iOS' switching me incessantly into to Transparency mode (for days on end) was just a really bad bug. It appeared that they had zero respect for users who preferred one of the four Noise Control options they were providing. (I'm not saying that was the case, but that's what it looked like as one of those users)
> If they turn on loud sound reduction
People are opted into this. No one gets to "turn it on". Apple turns it on. Which is why this has blindsided users.
And on its being tied to the feature, from the post: "All of this is likely tied to a relatively new feature called Loud Sound Reduction that only works if AirPods are in an active “Noise Control” mode. So Apple perhaps recently decided that everyone needed this feature enabled, and that’s why they made all these annoying changes to Noise Control?"
Apple rolls out features like the loud sound reduction feature that only work if you're in a non-OFF state.
Exactly how it should work really depends on the expectations of the average user. If they turn on loud sound reduction, for example, are they just going to be confused when nothing happens? How many people really understand how to toggle between the 3+ states and that additional processing might only apply to a subset of them?
And airpod state is already confusing: You have Off | Active cancellation | Transparency | Adaptive. My parents who have used airpods for years didn't even know about the airpods menu that shows you these states. They understood pinch-and-hold to change state but didn't know the third state was the OFF state. It just kinda sounds like a crappier unwanted state.
The TFA trade-off might have been the most sensible decision given these complexities. Replace OFF with one of the other states as the default and then give more techy users a switch to add OFF back into the possible states.
Granted, TFA points out there's a bug with this impl.