DRMacIver's Notebook
Yelling at the problem usually doesn’t work
Yelling at the problem usually doesn’t work
Let me tell you a little debugging story I’ve had, or rather mostly failed to have, for a few months.
I got some airpods pro. This is a somewhat questionable life choice because although I have a mac, I also have an android phone, and as such Apple considers me a second class citizen of the airpods ecosystem. To add to my crimes, I don’t even use iCloud (this will be relevant later).
At some point, my airpods developed the most absolutely infuriating bug: They would just randomly make chirping noises. Usually when I opened or shut the case (it wasn’t charging noises - I’d turned those off) but sometimes just for the hell of it with no particular prompting, rhyme, or reason.
I did some googling, asked around, and nobody seemed to have any ideas as to what was up. It was generally concluded that probably the solution to this was to connect them to my iphone and see what the info there said.I’m actually not convinced it would have said any more than connecting them to my mac would, but I don’t know for sure. This was, of course, unhelpful.
So, I adopted a reasonable and sensible debugging strategy in which I systematically appraoched the problem and, err… OK that’s not what happened. What actually happened is that I gave up on trying to fix it and got angry at the fucking stupid unreasonable behavior of this shitty device that Apple had inflicted on me, and cursed the name of every Apple developer, and shouted at the airpods to shut the fuck up.I have a reasonable and proportionate utter loathing to the point of murderous rage of devices that make noise when they shouldn’t, but this is a particularly egregious example because the entire point of headphones is that you want to listen to something without making a noise that bothers other people, and also because I’ll often want to have headphones in my bedroom and, well, I do not appreciate random chirping in the middle of the night
It seems to be a recurring theme that I run into the most absolutely cursed behaviour from Apple and every Apple user I talk to swears blind that this never happens and I probably shouldn’t have spat on the grave of Steve Jobs that one time or whatever dreadful sin it was I must have committed to get some egregious behaviour from the near-saintlike level of quality you get from products produced by Apple, and this just felt part of that pattern, so I didn’t do anything about it.
Anyway, this went on for a few months, because I do not always practice what I preach.
Then, yesterday, I tried to connect my airpods to my phone (I’ve done this before, but for reasons I no longer remember had dissociated them from it) and saw that the name of the bluetooth device was “Airpods - Find My”.
At that point I realised what had happened and swore a lot.
At some point relatively early in my use of the airpods I was trying to find where I’d left the case, so I turned on Find My mode on them on my mac. Except, I didn’t, because as a non-iCloud user I got half way through trying to do this and discovered that I’d have to log into iCloud and I couldn’t be bothered to do that, so I started the process and gave up. Apparently my airpods had been in Find My mode ever since and the stupid chirping was a way of saying “Here I am! Here I am! I’m not lost! Look over here!”.
I spent about 30 seconds of thought at that point about trying to figure out how to dissociate them from Find My and then realised what I should have done all along: I factory reset the airpods, and the problem went away.
When I described the bug, the response I got was “Oh yeah, that makes sense, that feature is super buggy”. This is also what happens every time I figure out the cause of the allegedly uniquely cursed behaviour that only I experience with Apple products.
The frustrating thing about this from a personal level is that I let this problem go on for so long when the solution is so easy, but it’s interesting to realise that it would have forever remained a mystery if I hadn’t. Factory resetting the airpods would always have worked, but it would also have destroyed the information that I only later acquired by chance. This still would have been a huge net win, but it’s not obvious to me how I could have accelerated the process of acquiring this information and fixing the problem.