AirPods FAQ

Susie Ochs reveals everything you need to know

The AirPods are here. After a couple months of delays, Apple is taking orders for the £159 AirPods. But even though they’re technically on sale, the AirPods will be scarce for a while – the Apple online store is estimating six weeks’ delivery time, but you might be able to track down a pair at an Apple retail store. Maybe call ahead first.

How to pair AirPods to an iPhone and Apple Watch

Pairing your AirPods to an iPhone or iPad for the first time is ridiculously easy. If your device is running iOS 10, all you have to do is flip open the lid of the AirPods’ charging case, and you’ll see

a message on your nearby iPhone asking if you want to connect. (If your phone is locked, you have to unlock it first and then tap the Connect button. And if nothing happens at all, check your iPhone to make sure Bluetooth is turned on.)

That’s it, you’re done. Your AirPods will stay paired to this iPhone – and a paired Apple Watch, if you have one of those too. If you start playing a song on your iPhone, and then you start another song playing on your Apple Watch, the AirPods will switch to the Apple Watch.

How to pair AirPods with a Mac

If you’ve already paired the AirPods to your iPhone, and it’s signed into the same iCloud account as your Mac (running macOS 10.12 Sierra), you don’t have to go through the pairing process again. Just click the Bluetooth icon in your Mac’s menu bar and you’ll see the AirPods there.

Mouse down over them and click the word Connect when it comes up. Or you can Optionclick the volume icon in the menu bar (System Preferences > Sound > Show volume in menu bar if you don’t see it already) and choose AirPods as your Mac’s output device.

How to pair AirPods to anything else

What if you want to use the AirPods with an Android phone, or a Kindle Fire tablet, or even an Apple device that isn’t running the latest and greatest OS? You can! The AirPods don’t have a pairing button on them, but the charging case does. Stick the AirPods in the charging case, and then look for a round, white, barely visible button on the back of the case. With the case’s lid open, press and hold that button, and you’ll see the teeny-tiny LED inside the case turn white. That means the AirPods are in pairing mode, so you should be able to use the menus on the device you’re trying to pair with to get them connected.

How to check the battery

There are a couple of ways to check the battery level on your AirPods. You can ask Siri, by doubletapping either AirPod, and then asking, “What’s my battery level?” when you hear the Siri chime.

Siri will tell you if any of your devices – iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods – is running low on battery. If both AirPods are in the charging case, you can flip open its lid and you’ll see a pop-up on your paired iPhone that displays the battery life of each AirPod, plus the case. You can also check on your iPhone itself, with the battery widget in Notification Center’s Today view. (You get to Notification Center by swiping down from any page, or swiping right from your home screen. If the Batteries widget isn’t active, scroll to the bottom of Notification Center’s Today view and tap Edit to add it.) Or, swipe up from any page to bring up the Control Center, and swipe to the pane that shows your Music app. If your AirPods are connected, you’ll see “Now Playing on [Name’s] AirPods” at the bottom of this pane. Tap the downward-facing arrow next to that, as if you were going to change the playback device to your iPhone’s speakers, and you’ll see how much battery each AirPod has left.

How to invoke Siri

The default way to invoke Siri is to double-tap on either AirPod with your finger. If you hate Siri, though, you can change the double-tap behaviour in Settings.

Start in Settings > Bluetooth, and then tap the lower-case i icon next to your AirPods in the list of Bluetooth devices. On the next page, in the section

labelled Double-tap on AirPods, you can choose Siri, Play/Pause, or Off.

How to control playback and volume

You can take one AirPod out of your ear to pause the music, and then stick it back in your ear to start it playing again. Assuming you keep the default behaviour to double-tap an AirPod to talk to Siri, you’ll need to use Siri for the rest of your playback tasks. Here are a few commands you can use, and these work whether you’re listening to the Music app, or another app like Spotify.

Turn it up

Turn it down

Skip this song

If you are listening to the Music app, you can ask for specific songs, albums, artists, and playlists (in your library if you aren’t an Apple Music subscriber, or across the whole Apple Music service if you are), and you get more commands.

Start this song over Rewind

Play more like this

Add this to my collection

Shuffle on

Obviously, using Siri to control playback has some lag. First you have to double-tap the AirPod and wait for the chime that lets you know Siri is listening. Then you have to speak your query and wait for the iPhone to parse it.

It’s a lot less convenient than other wireless headphones that put more controls right on the headphones themselves. But the AirPods are a lot smaller, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t have buttons. Apple could perhaps add support for a second gesture, but what is here is a good start.

How to charge the AirPods and their case

The AirPods will last about five hours per charge, according to Apple. Their case holds a battery too, and you stick the AirPods back in the case to charge them. The little light inside the case glows orange when the AirPods are charging, and magnets keep them snug in the charging case, even if you turn it all the way upside down. Each AirPod fits exactly in one of the two openings, so as long as they’re in there and you can close the lid, they should be properly seated for charging. To charge the case itself, connect a Lightning cable to the port on the bottom. Then connect the other end to an AC power adaptor or a USB port on a Mac.

What does the light inside the case mean?

If your AirPods are in the case, you’ll see an orange light if they’re charging, or a green light when they’re nearly fully charged. If no AirPods are in the case, the light still goes on when you open the lid, but it indicates how much battery life is left in the case itself: orange for needs charging and green for good life left. I’d like it if there were multiple lights, say five of them that lit up in increments of 20 percent. Right now, the case is showing a green light, but my iPhone says it has 62 percent of its charge left.