Airpods with old versions of OS X?

[Wowfunhappy]

I recently bought the Airpods Pro (gen 2). They work with my modern iPhone and Apple Watch, and my Nintendo Switch.

However, I can't seem to make them consistently work with my desktop or laptop which both run OS X 10.9 Mavericks. I of course don't expect the automagic Apple ID syncing stuff to work, but I'd thought the headphones would function as normal bluetooth devices.

I'm able to pair the Airpods, and they'll play audio for somewhere between 2 seconds and 30 seconds, and then inextricably cut out and refuse to play audio, even though they appear to still be connected to the computer. They won't work again until I disconnect and reconnect them from my computer.

Has anyone had a similar experience with Airpods, or even other Bluetooth devices, and old versions of OS X? I know there's a lot of different versions of the Bluetooth protocol and audio codecs and I'm not really familiar with them...

 

[f54da]

Debugging tips:

* Check system logs? Assume you already looked in there and there's nothing
* How are you playing audio? Does it happen with everything (including system sounds)? Try very simple low-level CoreAudio playback: https://gist.github.com/gcatlin/0dd61f19d40804173d015c01a80461b8

* Look at IORegistryExplorer. Any state or property change before/after plackback freeze?
* Since this is a bluetooth issue, go to more specialized tools
* Grab additional hardware tools from xcode dev tools for below
* Use bluetooth explorer (like wireshark for bt packets) to see if anything is even being sent to the device
* Bluetooth explorer in Tools has specific options for audio graph and audio options. Mess around with those.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

As of this morning my Airpods seem to consistently work with my Macs, whereas before they consistently did not.

I think they might have done a firmware update over night. I'm glad it's fixed, but it's not particularly reassuring that those can just silently break/fix functionality and I have no control over them.