Airpods Pro

▼ It's insane. I already spent nearly 800 euros on bluetooth headphones this year. And then Apple released the Airpods Pro, costing € 279 here in the Netherlands. And I couldn't help myself and bought a pair. So let's see how they compare.

My current bluetooth headphones / earbuds lineup is as follows:

Master & Dynamic MW60. These are big over-ear headphones that are bluetooth and wired.

Plantronics Backbeat Go 410. These are in-ear earbuds that connect to kind of a plastic horse shoe around your neck. This has the advantage that you can take them out and not lose them. (Which I actually had happen with some Jaybirds once.) They can take a wire, but that's pretty messy. And they have noise cancelation.

Jabra Elite 65t. These are "true wireless earbuds": one for each ear. As is usual for this type, they come in a charging case.

Now obviously these three are all very different in obvious ways. But they're also very alike in how the bluetooth works. You can pair them with a bunch of devices, and they'll stay connected to the last two devices. You can then play audio from either of those devices, and you'll hear it. When you stop playback and then start it on the other device, you'll hear audio from the other device. So you don't have to do anything to switch between those devices. However, using them with more than two devices means you have to go into bluetooth settings to reconnect to the headphones/earbuds, which gets old fast. (Although I think on iOS devices you can use a Shortcuts shortcut to make this easier.)

The MW60 has an actual switch to turn them on and off, which is great because it's fast. The others require a long press on one of the buttons. Speaking of buttons, they all have a play/pause/Siri button and volume up/down buttons. You can skip forward and backwards with a long press on the respective volume button.

With the earbuds there can be audio dropouts when I'm using them outside with the iPhone in my pocket, especially if there are no buildings close by.

The Airpods Pro

(Or Airpod Pros or simply APs.) What's really nice about these is that they're easy to put in and take out. You don't have to push them in as much as the other earbuds, I think they get a lot of support from your outer ear. Then again, if you take them out you pretty much have to put them in the charging case, because you can't turn them off. What?? When you do that, they are charged extremely rapidly, which just can't be good for those tiny little batteries.

When you press the button on the back of the charging case you can use the batteries widget in the today view of your iPhone or iPad to see the charge of the APs and the charge case. (When the charge of the left and right Airpods differs by more than 10% they show up separately.) Strangely, the little battery icon next to the headphones icon in the iOS status bar that you get for other bluetooth headphones/earbuds isn't there with the Airpod Pros.

The charge case hooks up to a lightning cable for charging, or you can use a wireless Qi charging pad. Unfortunately, that means you can't press the button to see how far along the charging is, but there's a motion sensor that lights up the LED on the front in you tap the case, which lights up amber when the charge is below 80%, green when above.

Apple has come up with a very nice way of pairing the APs: you simply open the case close to an iPhone (or iPad, I assume) and the iPhone will take it from there. The pairing is then synced to your other devices, including Macs and Apple TVs, using iCloud. Although Apple says you need the latest software to be compatible, all of this worked without trouble on my Macs that still run last year's Mojave. I guess under Catalina you get to turn on/off noise cancelation and transparency mode. You can also pair with non-Apple devices manually. On my iPhone 6 that runs iOS 12, I did that, and interestingly, the iPhone 6 can actually turn on and off noise cancelation through the bluetooth settings. Noise cancelation

I think especially people who are used to Apple's regular or "amateur" Airpods or similar earbuds that don't create a seal will be blown away by the noise cancelation, as they're used to hearing everything around them. Yes, the active noise cancelation is pretty good, but that only works on lower frequencies. For the high frequencies you need passive noise isolation. And that's something that the half a millimeter of silicone that the tips consist of just don't do very well. Same thing with the Plantronics. So basically all cars turn electric: you don't hear the engine anymore, but the road and wind sounds are still very prominent. Maybe that will get better if/when ComplyFoam comes up with foam tips for the APs.

I compared the passive noise cancelation of the Airpod Pros against that of the Jabra Elite 65t using the noise generator on mynoise.net. The Jabras blocked all the high treble and most of the mid and low treble, with the ComplyFoam tips doing slightly better than the included silicone tips. I then put a Jabra in one ear and an Airpod Pro in the other (with noise cancelation and transparency mode turned off). They both reduce the white noise significantly, but when I turn up the mid or high treble, it sounds like it only comes through on the Airpod side. For anything lower, the sound seems a bit off-center towards the Airpod Pro ear, but not by much.

Then I tried the active noise cancelation with an Airpod Pro in each ear. For the treble it actually seems to get a bit louder when you turn ANC on. The mids get reduced with ANC on and the low mids and anything below that are filtered out by the ANC increasingly effectively.

For now, cycling with a good headwind with cars zooming by is far from ideal: a lot of noise gets through. But the noise cancelation works very well when walking or riding public transit. The transparency mode where you hear outside sound through the microphones is very nice. But it's not new: the Jabras have it, too.

How the Airpods Pro are different form other bluetooth earbuds

The big difference with other current bluetooth headphones/earbuds is that the Airpod Pros won't connect to two devices in the same way. When you take them out of the case, they'll reconnect to the last used device. However, the good thing is that if you want to use them with a different (Apple) device, you simply select them as an audio target. The difference is that you don't have to set up a bluetooth connection first, so this is nice and easy. If you only use your headphones or earbuds with two devices, the behavior of the competition is better, because you don't have to do anything. But if you want to use them with three or more devices, the Apple way is better: yes, you need to tell each device to start using the APs, but that's pretty easy on all of Apple's OSes. The new device will break the bluetooth connection with the previous device if needed. (On old bluetooth headphones you actually had to disconnect from the previous device on that device first...)

On the iPhone I set up a shortcut that selects the APs as the audio target and then starts playing back the current episode in my favorite podcast app. That shortcut then goes in the today view, so it's only a few taps to go back to playing a podcast over the APs after using them with another device.

The APs have no volume buttons. Not a big deal, as I can just use the volume buttons on my iPhone. This also means that skipping forward/backward isn't done with a long press, which makes skipping part of a podcast really slow and thus annoying. Instead, this works the same as with wired earbuds: two clicks to skip forward, three to skip back. Where "click" means giving the stem of either Airpod Pro a quick squeeze. A long squeeze changes the noise cancelation / transparency setting and/or triggers Siri.

My verdict

They are expensive. I worry about the batteries. But they sound very good for earbuds and for wireless. They're comfortable to wear, and integrate well with the Apple ecosystem. It's also really nice that you can use either Airpod by itself while charging the other. They automatically go into transparency mode when you take one out, a really nice touch. With the Jabras, you can use the right one by itself, but not the left one.

In my experience, bluetooth headsets and earbuds are basically consumables: they last two, maybe three years. Of course not everyone listens to audio (mostly podcasts) as much as I do. But if you want wireless convenience, true wireless earbuds are really nice. And to me, an open design makes no sense: you'll be playing audio way too loud to get over all the background noise. Apple's Airpods Pro are a good choice, but if you don't want to spend that kind of money, the competition is certainly not half bad, either.

Permalink - posted 2019-11-26

The Touch Bar: why it makes sense

▼ The introduction of the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pros has kicked off a lot of discussion. How is this better than the function keys, those are touch typable, unlike the Touch Bar which pretty much requires looking before touching. And how is the Touch Bar better than a touch screen, where you interact with the stuff on the screen directly?

That's missing the point. The Touch Bar isn't a replacement for function keys—in functionality, that is. Nor is it a replacement for a touch screen. It's something completely new!

Until now, we had the following classes of input devices:

• Keyboard
• Pointing device (mouse, trackpad, trackball)
• Touch screen
• Dictation

And now we have the Touch Bar.

Each of these has their strengths and weaknesses. In theory, you can enter text with a mouse by clicking on a virtual keyboard or move around objects on the screen with voice commands, but that's clearly not workable. It doesn't look like the Touch Bar can perform functions that the other input methods can't reasonably handle. So it must earn its place in our computing lives by being able to do something better or more efficiently than the existing input methods.

There doesn't seem to be much direct competition between the Touch Bar and dictation, so let's skip that comparison.

A touch screen or a pointing device can be used to select objects on the screen and click/tap or drag them. The Touch Bar can't do that. A touch screen or pointing device can also be used to activate buttons. That's something the Touch Bar can also do. The mouse has an advantage here because it can handle very many very small buttons on the screen. Touch screens need larger buttons so there can't be too many of them or there won't be room for content on the screen.

Using a mouse or trackpad isn't particularly fast, especially for users who aren't proficient with them, because it requires a feedback loop between moving your and seeing the pointer move. There's also the overhead of having to move your hand from the keyboard to the trackpad or the mouse. On a small device like an iPhone, tapping the screen is quick and easy. On a larger touch screen things get harder as you need to use both hands and move your hand around to reach different parts of the screen. On a computer this becomes unworkable quickly as you have to lift and stretch your arm to reach the screen. Hence Apple's refusal to include touch screens on their computers.

So in situations where there's only a handful to a dozen of relevant buttons, the Touch Bar has a clear advantage: you can hit those buttons by just stretching your fingers. Another advantage is that these buttons don't have to be on the screen so they don't obscure the content, which can be important for working with photos and videos and the like in full screen.

But what about the keyboard? Wouldn't it be more efficient to bind these functions to a key?

As with most things in life, it depends.

There are different ways to use the keyboard. Ideally, you don't have to look at the keys at all to type (touch typing). This requires that you know where all the keys are along with muscle memory to be able to hit them in the blind. I'd say that you can't really do this on a virtual keyboard such as on the iPad, but apparently there are people that are pretty good at this even though there's no tactile feedback to let you know that you're starting to drift away from hitting the keys dead on.

Very few people can hit all the keys on the keyboard without having to look, and most people can't even hit the letter keys without having to look as they only use a few fingers and thus need to move their hands more. However, experienced typers who are not (full) touch typists still know where the keys are. It's just that they have to look at their fingers to be sure they're going to hit them. Let's call this typing strategy look-before-you-leap typing. (So remappable keys with e-ink keycaps are never going to work for the main keys.)

Last but not least there's hunt-and-peck typing. With this strategy, the typist doesn't have the keys memorized, so he or she needs to scan the keyboard to find the desired key and then type it. With close to a hundred keys, this is very, very slow.

Obviously, the fastest way to activate a function is touch type a key that has that function bound to it. I'm pretty sure that's why Apple's Touch Bar human interface guidelines say often used functions such as copy and paste shouldn't be put on the Touch Bar, but used with keyboard shortcuts instead.

The trouble is that it's very hard to remember lesser used keyboard shortcuts. This is where the Touch Bar comes in: it presents a limited set of context relevant options within easy reach. So if you want to print you're still going to type ⌘P, but if you want to want to change text formatting while typing in Pages, that's probably easier and faster to do by looking down at the Touch Bar and tap the relevant virtual button there than it would be to use the mouse/trackpad. Then at some point you can move from the hunt-and-peck strategy to the look-before-you-leap typing strategy and get even faster using the Touch Bar. Unlike memorizing keyboard shortcuts, this will happen automatically simply through repetition. Interestingly, Pages is one of the relatively few modern applications that still uses the function keys. You can bind up to eight text styles to a function key, and then change a paragraph to that style by hitting that function key. My old Model M keyboard has three groups of four function keys well above the number row, and with the Model M changing styles as I'm typing this is actually very quick and easy. I did have to manually go in and bind a function key to the styles I'm using, though.

On my MacBook Pro's internal keyboard, this doesn't work nearly as well, for two reasons. First, by default, the function keys are bound to system functions. If you want to use these keys as function keys, you have to type them together with the fn key in the lower left corner of the keyboard. Or you can change a setting to make this such that they're function keys by default and the system functions are activated in combination with fn. But even with this setting, hitting the function keys isn't very convenient because they're only half height and it's hard to keep the ones in the middle apart by touch. (Many touch typists can't even touch type the keys on the number row very well or at all.)

What I found by taking the function keys for a spin for the first time in a while is that hitting one in the middle of regular typing isn't very convenient, because they're out of the way. But if you have to type a bunch of function keys in a row, the Model M layout with groups of four function keys works very well. However, you either need to know them dead or you have to be able to correct hitting the wrong one by simply hitting the right one. I can certainly imagine some people with specific needs using external function key pads the same way we have external number pads these days. But I doubt many people are going to miss the current vestigial function keys from their MacBook Pros.

In conclusion, the Touch Bar occupies new territory between (function) keys and a touch screen, without duplicating either's function directly. It remains to be seen how useful it'll turn out in practice, but there's absolutely a lot of potential in having a way to activate some commonly used functions quickly without taking your hands off the keyboard.

Permalink - posted 2016-10-29

Keyboards, trackpads, mice

▼ There have been rumors for a while that Apple would be releasing new keyboards and/or mice and/or trackpads soon. The rumors were right: a week or two ago they released all three. I had actually been waiting for the new keyboards because the Apple wireless keyboard I got in 2008 no longer wants to pair with anything. So that one is a paperweight now. The big white one introduced in 2003 that I also have still works, but that one won't talk to iPhones or Apple TVs.

So enter the new keyboard, mouse, trackpad. So I went to www.apple.nl to check them out. And nearly fell off of my chair as I saw the prices: € 120 for the keyboard, € 90 for the mouse and € 150 for the trackpad. So that's 360 euros for all three. For 20 euros more you can buy a Dell Inspiron 15 3000 laptop!

To add insult to injury, the new laptop really isn't very good from the looks of it. I've heard some people comment that the new full-size left and right cursor keys are actually worse than the old half-height ones because now they're harder to identify by touch. The key travel is also quite shallow, shallower than that of the old one, I believe.

None of this would be a deal breaker by itself, as was looking for an extra keyboard, as I already have a big IBM Model M that covers my daily typing needs.

I had heard about Logitech bluetooth keyboards that will let you switch between three different paired devices quickly and easily before: the Logitech K810 illuminated keyboard for Windows and the Logitech K811 for the Mac. These get rave reviews. The K811 looks a lot like Apple's wireless keyboard, but adds backlighting like Apple's laptop keyboards have. At around 100 euros, this already looked like a much better deal than Apple's new wireless keyboard.

But it turns out there's now also the Logitech K380 multi-device keyboard. I got mine for € 50.

It comes in two colors: dark blue and dark gray. I got the dark gray one, which has three yellow keys that switch the keyboard between the three paired devices. Unlike the K810 and K811, one keyboard adapts to both the Windows/Android and Apple worlds. As such, the alt and command keys as well as the keys left of 1 and Z have white labels, which apply to Windows and Android, as well as gray ones, which apply to MacOS, iOS and the Apple TV. The keyboard automatically adapts to the type of device it's used with, there's no need to set up special key mappings.

Paired with a Mac, the keyboard layout is very close to that of Apple's wireless keyboard or a MacBook keyboard. The only real annoyance is that the control and fn keys are reversed. Other than that, the differences are found on with the function keys on the top row. I think F1 - F7 are all different from Apple's keyboards, but I can't be completely sure as those have been subject to change anyway, so no big loss there. F1 - F3 select the host device and F4 - F7 all have at least somewhat useful functions such as home and back on iOS and Mission Control on the Mac. From F8 to the right are the media keys. Interestingly, on Apple's keyboards these start at F7. However, the Logitech keyboard has one extra key, so the second key from the right is volume up on both the K380 and Apple's keyboards. On Apple's keyboards this would be F12 with the fn modifier key pressed, but on the Logitech this is the insert key under Windows and it triggers Spotlight on the Mac. The top right key is del (deletes to the right) rather than eject.

The keys are round, which is a bit strange, but typing on it is fine. Not great, but more than good enough. There's an on/off switch on the left side of the keyboard, along with a battery status light. The keyboard takes two AAA batteries, which are supposed to last two years. At 415 grams, the plastic K380 is actually a bit heavier than Apple's old metal one at 275 (around 350 grams with three AA batteries). For less than half the price this keyboard is much more useful than Apple's, because you can switch between three devices with just a keypress. Apple's is probably a bit nicer than the K380, but if you want a nicer keyboard then there's still the K811. I probably wouldn't use the K380 to type on all day, but as an extra keyboard to get at some extra devices quickly it works really well. (It's surprising how much more responsive the Apple TV is to bluetooth than to an infrared remote.)

As I was ordering the K380, I also started to think about my mouse and trackpad. A year ago, I got the opportunity to use the magic mouse for a bit. For a long time, I've been using the mighty mouse, the one with the little trackball at the top. The problem is that the little ball that's used for scrolling gets dirty and then works unreliably. Cleaning it is really hard. The newer magic mouse fixes this by having a touch surface instead, which allows for swiping sideways or up/down to scroll as well as to swipe with two fingers to switch between spaces and tapping to zoom in Safari, similar to how tapping to zoom works on iOS.

So I got a magic mouse. For the most part, it's really nice, but it has a downside: it very easily registers unintended scroll events. This is rarely a big deal, except in applications or websites that use "scroll to zoom". Many mapping websites do this. Using the magic mouse with those is really annoying, as the maps keep zooming erratically unless you're really, really careful. It's also really easy to move various types of elements in Keynote when you only want to double click them.

I really don't need the gestures anyway, as I also have an Apple bluetooth trackpad on the other side of my keyboard. The trackpad allows more gestures than the magic mouse and it's also helpful to be able to "mouse" with whichever hand is free. So I got an old school Logitech mouse along with my Logitech bluetooth keyboard, with the idea that I'd use the Logitech wired mouse for mousing and the trackpad for gestures. However, I'm not sure that's going to work out, as the Logitech mouse tracking speed is way faster than that of the Apple mouse, but changing the tracking speed of one in the settings also changes that of the other. So switching back and forth is rather painful.

I guess I could also try to use the trackpad as my main external "mouse", but so far that hasn't felt natural... Not entirely sure why that is, because using the trackpad on a laptop is just fine. Perhaps it's because the cursor keys and numeric pad on the Model M push the trackpad too much to the side? It would be nice to have a Model M style keyboard without a numpad. Yes, a numpad is also good to have, but that could be a separate device that I can then move around as needed.

Permalink - posted 2015-10-24