AirPods disconnects on calls

I completely agree with you. I think Apple Support is great. I'm not blaming them. I'm blaming product development. The iPhone 6s and the AirPods are both Apple products. They should have tested with their own products, including Apple Watch, before it was released. There is really no excuse for this. It is clear that there is an issue with iPhone 6s and Apple Watch. What is amazing is that they haven't officially addressed this.

I'm wondering if disabling Handoff in iPhone Settings might have an effect.

Ultimately, if I had to choose between my Watch and the AirPods, I'd have to keep the Watch. I use that every day and find it an indispensable part of my routine. I can always go back to wired headphones (Bose QC 20i's are amazing), although the wire and battery module will be that much more of an annoyance now that I've gotten a taste of truly wireless earphones... sort of like going back to driving a gas car after driving electric.

I would like to add to this discussion that while I do not have an Apple Watch, I do have a Fitbit Blaze. I am experiencing the same issues with the AirPods disconnecting briefly during calls. After unpairing my Fitbit I do not experience the issue.

I've been working with apple advanced support for the week trying to troubleshoot and get to the bottom of the issue. Loading profiles and sending them log files. 2.5GB of log files.

One of the elements of the testing is to capture a log snapshot when it happens.. on my phone 6s (yes 6s) this is done by pressing the sleep/wake button and the two volume rockers simultaneously (there is a haptic feedback when doing this) and this writes a time stamp or log flag to the ever growing log file that I send over.

that said, what I HAVE found out while doing this process is that by DOING this funky action, it RECONNECTS the airpods nearly EVERY TIME.

so give that a shot next time and see if it works. This shouldn't be required, but till we get to v1.0.1 at least for FW, some of us may just have to live with the issue.

I'm hoping that is isn't something to do with the BT radio on the 6s, or with the actual pair of airpods that I have (having given away five pair as xmas gifts it would be pretty ironic if MY pair were the bad pair)

apple will resolve it soon enough though i believe. The folks I have been working with are very professional.

using with iphone 6s, 10.2.1 (beta) aw2 3.1.3 (beta)

Agreed - everyone I've talked to at Apple has been very professional and enjoyable to work with.

After using my restored-from-backup 6S all day today, but not having yet paired my Watch, I had several calls go just fine... until this evening, when during a FaceTime Audio call both AirPods disconnected and audio shifted to the handset. It was an important call, so I didn't mess around any further and just talked on the handset.

So not pairing the Apple Watch may have reduced the problem, in a similar way as using just one AirPod on calls... but it didn't completely eliminate it... which has been my experience so far with the various work-arounds. Symptoms reduced, but still occasionally happen.

Contemplating upgrading to an iPhone 7+, but sounds like some people have experienced the symptoms even with it. Could it be that the 6S and Watch combination is simply most common for the AirPods early-adopter demographic...

I just uploaded another 2.8GB of files..what I am going to try for the next couple days is turning off my watch, leaving it at home and seeing if the call dropping stops. I have the FEELING that the problem MAY lie actually, in the WATCH and not the airpods or the iphone. I have had some funky bluetooth pairing issues with the WATCH, things won't pair till a reboot, airpods can't be found till a reboot, that sort of thing. COULD be the watch is the culprit in the mix.

We'll see

What I also haven't seen mentioned here is how each AirPod is an independent connection. When a Bluetooth watch/fitness tracker and the AirPods are communicating with the phone it is essentially managing three Bluetooth devices. I wonder if that is contributing to this issue and if so how Apple plans to deal with it. Call me cynical but I find it hard to believe that this wasn't seen during prelaunch testing.

The question is does the fix require a firmware update on W1 chip and can it be done without sending them in?

I am concerned that the fix will have to wait for 2.0 hardware but it will be too late to return ours.

I would suggest if you are concerned about a fix requiring new hardware, either return them and repurchase when its fixed, or at least open a support case so you are in the system of having problems with them. The warranty is one year from date of purchase, so there's always that.

I do have a case opened and I worked with support to upload multiple logs to them. The last reply on Tuesday was that they still didn't know what was going on and was also told to install updates on phone when prompted in future.

Also maybe I missed that but I don't see major blogs covering Apple reporting this issue which many of us are having.

Good. I think having the case documented would make it straightforward to get a refund should we desire. Personally, I plan to hang on to see if a software update is released to address the problem. I'd rather do that, than return the AirPods, and find out a week or so later an update comes out to fix it and then have to wait until February or even March to acquire another pair.

Apple arranged for a replacement set of AirPods for me. In fact, it did sound like due to the backorders, it might be awhile. As luck would have it, when they contacted my local store, they had one pair just received in stock, so they put my name on it as part of the case. I traded my pair in and picked up the new pair last night.

So far, so good, but we'll see. My first phone call out the gate where the new AirPods disconnected and immediately reconnected to the phone, but then were fine for the rest of the conversation. I then realized I still had the Tile and Kevo apps loaded as part of my backup restore. I deleted those and restarted the phone just to be sure I'm running without anything like that for now (and I still haven't paired my Watch since restoring from backup the other night). Today, I had a 40 minute phone call without interruption. About to go for a hike, and we'll see if my music / podcasts pause.

Also of note, the replacement AirPods have slightly better finish quality: the join where the two plastic halves are glued together is much better - still a visible seam as in the marketing photos - but not offset like the previous pair. And, it could be my imagination, but I'd swear these have a noticeably fuller sound than the previous pair. AirPods firmware is on this new pair is still listed as 3.3.1 and hardware as 1.0.0 in iPhone Settings > General > About > AirPods.

As to this being news, sure, or this could be a fairly limited set of users. I'd think there would be many more pages on this and other forums if the problem were truly widespread, let alone it would be surely brought up in some of the more balanced reviews by now. There are a lot of very happy users out there, and you'd think that wouldn't be the case if everyone was running into this. Time will tell.

Just wanted to add that I am having these issues as well. AirPods work fine listening to music, watching videos, and playing games, but when I either receive or make a phone call, the connection constantly drops and I have to manually reconnect, usually at least once a minute or so. I have tried restarting the iPhone, forgetting the AirPods and re-adding them, resetting the AirPods, all to no avail. I have already submitted feedback to Apple (why doesn't their feedback form have the most recent iOS and macOS versions?).

I am also experiencing this issue. I have the iPhone 6s now running the latest beta (10.2.1) and the Series 1 watch on version 3.1. I was previously running 10.2 on the phone but thought I might try the beta to see if it made things any better. It didn't.

I can listen to music and podcasts for hours on end with no problem at all. If I take a phone call, within the first 1-2 minutes it disconnects and the call goes back to the handset. This happens pretty reliably every time I take a call. I can force reconnection to the AirPods and they may work for a few minutes more but repeat the whole pattern over again. As others have mentioned it does seem that using only one AirPod for calls seems to work without issue. Placing the watch into airplane mode also seems to help though I haven't had a big enough sampling of extended calls to know for sure.

I just want to add that I've had the same exact issue. I have an iPhone 6s, 1st gen Apple watch. Both running latest OS. I had just reset my iphone before adding my Airpods and for the first day they worked magnificently. The second day I added my watch back into the mix and from then on they experienced what I would describe as degraded audio quality in general, and especially the issue of disconnecting during calls. Disconnects happened every 2-3 minutes for me on average. Eventually I decided to return my Airpods before the return deadline because making phone calls is a critical feature for me....these were the first Apple hardware product that I've ever returned in over a decade of being a loyal customer. :-(

Here's a video of the disconnect happening if it's useful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZeRhbB1Xkw

I have this problem too. Exceptionally frustrating - calls drop completely randomly. I have a Gen 1 Apple Watch, and an iPhone 6s.

Anyone figured out a fix? Seems like the common thread amongst our issues is ab Apple Watch paired with a 6S...