I hear the latency is high, which is a challenge for all wireless earphones. So good for music and calls, but not for videos, games, singing. Do I understand correctly? :-)
“It depends”, it’s not high latency enough to notice on calls, music is obviously fine- but it’s not going to be able to keep up with a graded DAC+Mic in a professional setting (like a recording studio).
I haven’t tried it for video editing, though I suspect it might cause your scrobbing to stutter because macos will “pause” media playback until the headphones have been instructed to play, so you don’t have desync issues.
But that’s not what it competes against.
There’s no noticeable latency when using the phone/iPad, Mac as a normal consumer, calls, music, video conferencing.
The basic AirPods are the lowest latency Bluetooth headphones I have tried. In A2DP mode the latency is somewhere around 30ms that is almost good enough for playing an instrument through them but certainly good enough for games or phone calls. The theoretical minimum for AAC is around 21ms. For calls the problem is that somehow Apple didn't invent a proprietary extension so you're stuck with HFP sound quality.
Replying to myself since I can't edit the post above: I can't reproduce the low number any more. With current iOS I get 197ms which is not worse than competition but not that good either.
My numbers are from measuring round trip latency through headphones and phone's built in mic and then basically guessing which part is input and which part output latency (they're both small). 200ms is certainly in line with most Bluetooth headphones. I'm not sure what the guy is doing differently from the app I'm working on, but for us AirPods are clearly the lowest latency choice.
EDIT: Ignore what I wrote below and see the update. I'm getting similar latency numbers.
Generally, the guy is getting so massive latencies that I suspect he's doing something wrong. The app I'm working on has MIDI to wired audio latency around 10ms when audio buffer size is dropped to 128 samples, so 70ms sounds really excessive. Touchscreen is both slow and the timing is all over the place (try playing drums in GarageBand to see) so it might explain some of it.
Ok, I'll take back what I wrote above. I tried the measurement again and got 197ms round trip for the same 2nd gen AirPods and iPad Mini4 running current iOS. It's not the worst, but certainly not better than most of Bluetooth headphones. I'm not sure why I got the low number before and whether it was a measurement error or changed in a software update.
From what I am reading, the best of the Bluetooth headphones are claiming say 120 ms, and some have as high as 300 ms.
I just hope manufacturers keep making wired ones with active noise cancellation (ANC). Already it seems ANC is seen less often for wired ones than for the wireless ones.
I haven’t tried it for video editing, though I suspect it might cause your scrobbing to stutter because macos will “pause” media playback until the headphones have been instructed to play, so you don’t have desync issues.
But that’s not what it competes against.
There’s no noticeable latency when using the phone/iPad, Mac as a normal consumer, calls, music, video conferencing.