I love my AirPods for many reasons. They sound good, hold a charge, fit in my ears, and are surprisingly drop resistant. My AirPods also reliably hold a good connection to whatever device that is playing. That being said, switching that connection, say from my iPhone to my iPad, has been less than ideal. While certainly much better than the downright Byzantine pairing and unpairing process required by traditional bluetooth headphones, switching a connection via AirPlay is still much less intuitive when compared to just unplugging and replugging wired headphones. Enter Automatic Switching, introduced in iOS 14 and Big Sur:

Seamlessly move between devices without manually switching your AirPods.10 If you finish a phone call on your iPhone and pick up your iPad to watch a movie, AirPods automatically switch over.

Automatic switching was something Apple attempted when AirPods were first released in 2016, but it never really worked for me despite being limited to the iPhone and a paired Apple Watch. Given this prior experience, I wasn’t optimistic that this second attempt would be any better. At first glance, my skepticism seemed justified. Regularly I would see “Jack’s AirPods Pro connected”, only to disappointingly find that they weren’t yet connected in AirPlay. For weeks I thought automatic switching was just as broken as before, but then I had a thought — instead of manually connecting after distrustingly checking AirPlay status, what if I just started playback? Sure enough, sound played through my AirPods as expected. That’s when I realized that I had it backwards.

Throughout my life, using headphones has been a two step process:

1. Connect headphones.
2. Press play.

In that order.

In theory, I could press play before connecting the headphones, but that would be a bad experience. I might miss something, and if it didn’t annoy others near me, it would certainly annoy me. All headphones, even wireless headphones including AirPods, need to be connected first before playing.

Switching headphones between devices involves the same process, but with the added prerequisite of disconnecting them first. Duh. But while AirPods more-or-less consistently follow the same steps as all other headphones for connecting, the same can’t be said for switching. Assuming there is nothing playing, here’s how to switch AirPods from one device to another:

1. Press play.
2. AirPods connect.

What I had backwards was a mental model informed by decades of manually connecting and switching headphones. I assumed AirPods switched devices by connecting first¹, but they don’t actually switch until playback is just about start. This makes total sense given user intent. It doesn’t make sense for AirPods to automatically switch to an iPad that isn’t playing anything.

Having tested out automatic switching since my realization, I gotta say while the feature doesn’t work all of the time, it certainly works often enough² that I have stopped manually switching AirPods in most scenarios. Understanding that it’s based on intent is crucial. For example, just yesterday I was listening to a podcast on my iPhone before doing a workout on my iPad. My AirPods automatically switched specifically because I paused the podcast on my iPhone before starting the video on the iPad. It would not have switched if the podcast was still playing or if the iPad was locked, because intent would not have been clear enough. Without understanding intent, it’s easy to get frustrated when automatic switching doesn’t always surmise what you want. My hope here is that future versions of iOS and macOS will get smarter at discerning intent.

Automatic switching, now that I understand how it works, might be one of Apple’s best features of 2020, and is quickly becoming yet another reason I love my AirPods.