(If you want to skip directly to the fixes, click here. If you want to skip to some genuine praise of Apple, feel free to jump to the next section.)
A couple of weeks ago I noticed my pair of AirPods Pro 2 aggressively switching me into Transparency mode. It seemed like a bug. Again and again I would have to manually switch back out of Transparency mode. Annoying.
Then a few days later, Apple removed the ability for me switch out of Transparency mode altogether!
There are ways to reverse each of these changes (the force switching and the Off removal), but the whole process was a major pain as a user to figure out, it wasn’t simple to reverse even once I knew how to, and there wasn’t any heads up that I remember getting from Apple explaining the changes. This led to me and a lot of people being confused.
Well over 100M people own AirPods. Here are some reddit posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) made by users frustrated over these AirPods changes. Notably, none of these reddit posts contain in their comments all of the steps needed to revert the changes.
Quick summary of Noise Control modes: Transparency, Adaptive, Noise Cancellation, and Off:
If it’s Off, that means your AirPods pipe audio into your ears without any extra processing or special sound alteration. This conserves battery and sounds better to me than Transparency. Great! I prefer this.
When Transparency mode is enabled, it “passes through” some of the noise around you, so you can have higher awareness of your surroundings. Neat! But this means that, whenever it’s enabled, I hear a hissing sound (at a minimum) that I otherwise wouldn’t. It also burns more battery.
Noise Cancellation is self explanatory — it cancels out annoying sound. I use ANC sparingly because it makes my inner ear feel different, but I think it’s great on a plane or train. Adaptive tries to intelligently switch between Transparency or Noise Cancellation. All of these active modes burn through your AirPods’ battery at a faster rate.
To recap, it aggressively started switching me into Transparency, then the “Off” option was removed by Apple altogether. (On both iOS and tvOS.) With no warning — just, poof!
After Googling about it, I learned that others were hitting this issue. Apple had indeed removed “Off” but buried the means of bringing it back. Some Googling, tap tap tap, and here’s the first buried setting I had to find:
Now the Off option had returned… But not on tvOS? Anyway, I was just thankful to have fixed… oh wait…
The AirPods still kept switching me from Off to Transparency mode. So: all this Googling and time researching this, and I was merely back my initial problem! Here’s how I was feeling at this point:
In frustration, I eventually Googled myself down a rabbit hole where I learned: all of this is likely tied to a relatively new feature called Loud Sound Reduction that only works if AirPods are in an active “Noise Control” mode. So Apple perhaps recently decided that everyone needed this feature enabled, and that’s why they made all these annoying changes to Noise Control? I can only speculate.
Anyway, so surely Loud Sound Reduction can be disabled (so my AirPods would hopefully stop switching to Transparency mode)?
There it is! But guess what? Nope – that’s a read only field that looks like a button but isn’t one. Hm. So… I returned to more Googling!… And found that to disable Loud Sounds Reduction you must go to: Settings -> Accessibility -> AirPods -> <Name of your AirPods> -> disable Loud Sounds Reduction.
Wow! That’s a lot of time, taps, and user frustration to merely get something back to how it originally was!
But you know what? tvOS still did not show an “Off” mode for my AirPods 2! I ended up needing to hard reset my AirPods, change all the settings mentioned above on iOS for a second time, and then let tvOS rediscover them before “Off” would appear there. PHEW!
Finally! I was able to get things back to how they were before. What a journey!
Kind of random, but for those who enjoyed this tale, you may enjoy this email from Bill Gates to leaders at Microsoft, about how hard it was for him to install a piece of software from Microsoft’s website.
Why gripe about Apple products?
I love to write about Apple. Why?
For the most part: Apple productively listens to users, reporters, podcasters, other creators, etc. Obviously they can’t please everyone (they have long-running disagreements with lots of developers over things like App Store cuts etc., and don’t always positively respond to what some think are reasonable suggestions (especially if you’re a regulator) etc.). Apple is not without its own problems and hypocrisies, but it still does a better job of listening to feedback than many tech companies.
And Apple is in stark contrast to a handful of childishly spiteful big tech companies. They shall remain nameless in this post, but they have been known to kick users off their platforms, brick users’ products, shadowban users (while simultaneously preaching the evils of shadowbanning), or sic fanboys on you if you publish opinions (or facts) that they don’t like. It’s been happening frequently since mid-2022. It’s straight up targeted censorship (despite the same companies gaslighting on this issue).
Apple seems to be run by adults most of the time and it remains rewarding to write about them.
Case in point, here are a few examples previous posts on Apple that got significant attention (1, 2, and 3). They generally lambasted Apple over product decisions. These “negative” stories about Apple garnered huge traffic (up to the top of reddit). But nowadays, having a similarly negative and popular story about certain other tech companies would come with serious potential downsides. This means, it may turn a best case scenario for a blogger (getting a lot of traffic) into a worst case scenario (being targeted with retaliation). So the ROI for me writing for free about Apple is comparatively much higher, especially as someone who is deeply invested in their platforms (as a user and app developer).
[The iOS UI/robocalls post may have affected some change, as it got to the top of reddit and came out about a year before Apple fixed the issue. I’ve written some positive things about Apple too (1,2).]
Furthermore… Whether for business reasons or not, Apple has at least preached [Steve Jobs clip] about believing in a strong free press in the US for a long time. That stance is refreshing, in an era where anti-press rhetoric and physical violence against reporters has hit a high in the US and prevailing big-tech-supported political movements are categorically painting the press as an enemy of the people. It has become popular for leaders of some other tech companies to broadly bash members of the “legacy” media (a pejorative term for traditional journalists doing their work).
Apple has also historically preached restraint [Steve Jobs clip] in its responses to (what they feel are) biased stories, and the company is better for it.
The leaders at Apple have simply been adults acting like adults, most of the time. This simple fact has led to better products and was part of its journey to becoming the world’s most profitable business in 2021. It sounds obvious but bears repeating [in light of what’s become the rage in culty tech circles these days]: Acting like childish brats toward users, creators, and the press was not a part of Apple’s recipe to becoming the world’s most profitable business. Apple understands the value of keeping critics in their own feedback loop.
These are the reasons I still like to write about Apple in 2025.
Steps to revert the late-2024 changes to your Airpods Pro 2 or Airpods 4
In the last weeks of 2024, Apple changed its newer Airpods to remove the “Off” Noise Control and (separately) push users into Transparency mode all the time. This seems to be because of their forced roll out Reduce Loud Sounds feature. These are the steps in software needed to revert the changes. If these changes aren’t reflected in other devices like Apple TV, I found that I needed to hard-reset my Airpods Pro 2, perform these settings changes (in the video), and then have my Apple TV rediscover them.