AirPods bring out Apple's weaknesses

AirPods are Apple's latest release, an accessory for our devices that represents an important advance over conventional wireless headphones due to its ease of configuration and connection, its autonomy and its perfect integration with the Apple ecosystem. But the AirPods have also exposed some of Apple's weaknesses in different areas: Siri, watchOS, tvOS ... These are shortcomings or bad implementations that until now had not stood out much but that the AirPods have made shine.

Siri, the eternal apprentice

More than a virtual assistant, Siri always seems like a poor student. Yes, it has progressed but at a too slow pace. The AirPods almost require us to start using Apple's assistant, but it turns out that when we do we realize that there are things we cannot achieve and we have to take the iPhone out of our pocket. Do you want to listen to a podcast on Castro or on Overcast? Well, from the Apple headphones invoking Siri you will not be able to do it. Do you want to turn up the volume without internet coverage inside an airplane? Well, you won't get it with Siri either.

Yes, it is true that we can use our Apple Watch, whoever has it, to do all those things without having to take the iPhone out of the bag, but that is not what we want. If our AirPods force us to use Siri to control everything, Siri should do just that: control everything. Integration with third-party applications arrived this year with iOS 10, but it is not complete, and it is a pending issue that Apple must solve. The same as the need to use the internet even for such mundane tasks as turning up the playback volume. A query to wikipedia requires a connection, but many other tasks that are performed directly on our device, for which having an internet connection is completely unnecessary. It is a price that Siri can work offline, it was before and it is even more so now.

Music on Apple Watch

Yes, Apple boasts that its Apple Watch can store up to 8GB (somewhat less) of content and that thanks to that we can listen to music directly from the watch without having to use the iPhone. With the Apple Watch Series 2 and its GPS we can even go out to do sports without the iPhone and not lose any data from our journey, including plotting on a map. And it is true, but the way it is done is quite improvable.

Something that is incomprehensible is that we can only synchronize lists with the Apple Watch, and not lists, but "a single playlist". This is a limitation that no one understands and that is further aggravated by the fact that the synchronization of that list on the clock is slow, extremely slow. If we also add the fact that you do not always find the changes you make in the list synchronized with the Apple Watch, certainly the conclusion is that this aspect of watchOS 3 is still very green.

Limitations with the microphone

Something that has negatively surprised me is the fact that the microphone of the Apple Watch can hardly be used as a hands-free on your iPhone, and not as an input source. If you have the AirPods attached and you want to record a video, the microphone is deactivated and the microphone of the iPhone is used. The same is true when you use other applications to record a podcast. The microphone of the AirPods is not the best on the market, far from it, but why can I use the mic of the EarPods and not the one of the AirPods? Why won't Apple let me choose which audio input I want to use at all times?

And the Apple TV?

Why has Apple left Apple TV out of the ecosystem that seamlessly integrates with AirPods? It brings together all the necessary features for it to be inside, and it is certainly a device that would benefit a lot from what the AirPods offer, but incomprehensibly the "magic" of the AirPods does not reach the Apple TV. Yes, it is compatible, but you have to configure them like any bluetooth headset. An oversight? Does Apple still consider Apple TV a mere hobby?

The good news: everything is fixable

The best thing about all this is that it deals with software problems, and therefore with a simple solution, as simple as an update. A product launch like this that marks the beginning of a new category for Apple (they are the first Apple-branded wireless headphones, outside of Beats) could not have been done without a roadmap marking the necessary improvements, and these failures must be more than spotted by their engineers, or so we hope.