AirPods poor sound quality on Mac?

I was having this same issue, tried changing the sound setting on the input mic to no avail. The poor sound quality was due to the airpods being stuck in a "chat" mode. I quit my internet phone app Dialpad and it reverted back to good sound quality. Double check you don't have anything running that wants to use the mic.

There are two methods that at various times work for me:

1) simply changing the microphone to internal microphone sometimes works immediately.

2) sometimes I have to first change the microphone to internal microphone. Then I have to change the speaker/output back to internal speakers. Then I switch the output back to airpods. I do this when (1) doesn't work.

Yes, I agree: this seemed to have taken a big backward step in 10.13.6, which is maybe not coincidentally the hastily-submitted patch for the new Macbook Pros' throttling issue.

I documented the Airpod low sound-quality issue by MacOS version number here:

Re: Airpods mic sound quality is bad on Mac?

Briefly, AirPod sound quality seemed to be fixed by MacOS 10.3.3 and sound quality was robustly high through 10.3.5 — but is broken again now with 10.3.6.

Based on these two data points it seems like last-minute fixes are based on an older build. In our case, AirPod sound quality went bad on MacOS 10.13.2 (Spectre/Meltdown) and 10.13.6 (i7/i9 CPU throttling) when it was working just fine up until those MacOS updates.

This just emphasizes how little Apple pays attention to MacOS, which is incredibly depressing giving how nice MacOS is and how powerful Macs would be if it reliably integrated with the iOS environment (Photos, AirPod, FaceTime, etc). But the way it is now fundamental features break on a regular basis, not as one-offs (which would be bad enough), so I can't rely on MacOS for any serious work, try as hard as I might to give it a corporate boost here in the office to provide continuity with my home environment.

Same thing happened to me. One second everything was fine and then the quality dropped. As of this moment I don't have a solution. I just wanted to share my issues with AirPods as well.

I'm using 2017 15" MacBook Pro on macOS 10.13.6. Updated two days ago. Didn't have issues at first. Quality dropped today.

Thanks for the comment. So you think the only solution is to wait for Apple to release next macOS software? It doesn't sound good. It could take days or weeks, meanwhile we are stuck with ***** AirPods quality on Macs.

It’s worse than that. Even if Apple fixes this, they may break it in the future. They’ve broken it twice already, in pretty rapid succession no less.

In fact, they've broken it so badly this time that when I try the usual fix of switching to my Macbook Air 13's internal microphone, the sound volume drops to a barely audible level. By coincidence, I have a Griffin iMic USB adapter attached to the MBA: switching to its microphone "fixes" the AirPods sound quality. I think we'd all agree this is a ridiculous workaround.

Don't expect Apple to maintain AirPod integration in MacOS, particularly not with new AirPods on the horizon.

On a tangentially-related note: Apple Photos just wiped out a big album across all my Macs and iDevices because a single MacBook Air 13” decided for some reason the album was empty. I work with databases every day and this kind of wishy-washy cloud behavior counts as gross negligence to most serious developers. iCloud integration is poor in MacOS.

If MacOS issues were just one-offs like AirPod integration problems, that would be maybe acceptable. But unfortunately, as many have noted the neglect is rampant.

Like many serious users of MacOS I’ve reluctantly concluded there’s not much in staying in the Apple family, outside of iPhones and iPads. It pains me to say this because I’ve been trying to promote Macs in my work environment, but there is barely any functionality that can be relied upon.

Don't get me wrong: AirPods are awesome. In some respects, they are the best thing Apple has "invented" since the iPhone (admittedly, nowadays that bar is set quite low, post-Jobs). So if Apple can't support it, well: come to your own conclusion ....

I started having this same issue, but as soon as I updated to macOS Mojave everything was fixed.

Now just yesterday everything went back to the crappy quality out of the blue. I updated my macOS version to see if that would fix it, but it didn't.

I even reinstalled the software and still nothing. It's honestly annoying to have to manually change the sound input everything I use my AirPods with my Mac.

Thank you, I quit some apps that tend to output sound and it fixed the problem.

🙂

also worked until today when i updated to the latest macOS Mojave 10.14.2 (from probably 10.14.1)

now the expensive airpods sound like an old radio.

Apple gives a **** about mac os once more