AirPods Pro Beta Firmware Update Brings Improved Audio on Calls

When it comes to talking to my Mac, the audio quality for me is feast or famine. I’ve got a great podcasting microphone that I can turn on at any point and start talking to my Mac with very high-quality audio.

The flip side is that I’m using a Mac Studio, which does not have a built-in microphone. Neither does my Pro Display XDR, and I’ve never been particularly excited about putting a USB microphone on my desk when not talking into my podcasting mic. So, I’ve been solving this problem for the longest time by using AirPods.

If you put an AirPod in your ear, it records your voice to your Mac just fine. Well, let me make that sort of fine. The audio quality has never been anything worth writing home about. Making calls is particularly bad.

However, while making a call on my Test Mac running macOS Sequoia the other day (using AirPods Pro) I noticed the voice quality was much better. After a little sniffing around on the Internet, I discovered that this is thanks to a new beta firmware update on AirPods Pro.

Historically, the max audio quality would turn to garbage the moment you’re on a call using AirPods Pro’s microphones. But this latest beta firmware update allows for a sampling rate of up to 48 kHz.

I’m not sure how they pulled that off, but it is a vast improvement if you pay attention to that sort of thing.

If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them

The new Microsoft Surface Arm laptops are in the wild now and getting properly tested. The Verge did a full set of benchmarks that conclude with a few relevant points:

  • It runs a little faster than a MacBook Air and quite a bit slower than a MacBook Pro. These really are aimed at the MacBook Air.
  • Battery life is behind the MacBook Air’s. This isn’t a surprise, as I suspect they have a lot of experience with the MacBook Air.

Together, these two points make sense. They upped the clock cycle count to outperform the MacBook Air — which is an admittedly sexy headline for Microsoft — at the expense of some battery life. Regardless, I think it’s great news that people running Windows now have an option that’s competitive with MacBook Air performance and battery life. Now, if it just ran a better operating system…

Apple Mail and Flags

apple's mail icon, aligned right of the text it is next to.

For years now I’ve had a secret struggle with flag count in Apple Mail. Every year we get a new set of betas and every year I try again, hoping that I can reliably use flags in Apple Mail. However, before long, the count always gets off.

What I mean is I may show 17 flagged emails on iPhone, 6 on my Mac, and 22 on iPad. For whatever reason it has been very difficult for Apple to keep that flag count reliable and in sync. I hesitate to make this post so early but so far, throughout beta 1 and now beta 2 of this year’s operating system updates, Apple Mail’s flag count has remained consistent.

Assigning flags is a lot easier than moving emails to separate folders. Moreover, since I have a few different email accounts, flags can work across all of them very easily. So my idea is to use flags as a sort of triage mechanism — but only if I can rely upon the flag count to work.

This year, for the first time, so far so good.