TWEAK YOUR AIRPODS
Fine-tune your AirPods audio in iOS 14
iOS 14 brings some great new features to your AirPods
IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes
YOU WILL LEARN How to use the new AirPods features in iOS 14
YOU’LL NEED iPhone or iPad; AirPods, AirPods Pro, or AirPods Max; iOS 14
Apple now has three sets of AirPods in its range, and the features it added to make the most of them in iOS 14 show how serious it is about its headphones.
Perhaps the most technically impressive of the new features is spatial audio, available on AirPods Pro and Max. Enabled by default on apps that support it, spatial audio is like surround sound for headphones, with a twist. The twist is that your AirPods Pro/Max now know when and how you move your head and use that data to anchor the sound stage, so the virtual ‘speakers’ stay in the same place in the room, even if your head doesn’t.
Device switching
The most useful of the new additions though is automatic device switching. Before iOS, while you could connect your AirPods to multiple devices, you had to manually switch from one device to another. Now, if you are watching a movie on your iPad and pick up your phone to play music, the AirPods will automatically switch to your iPhone. It works the other way around, too, and with macOS Big Sur.
AirPods also now support battery notifications and optimised charging, so they learn how you use them and then charge your AirPods to 80% until you need them. When it gets close to the time you would normally start using them, the charge is then topped up to 100%. Kenny Hemphill