Do your AirPods stop playing music from your phone every time you open a link on your Mac? Here's how to stop that
Multi-point pairing is really great when you want it, but extremely frustrating when it interrupts you mid-song because of some stupid pop-up video.
Earlier today, I was sitting there, jamming away at my keyboard while listening to the new Counting Crows album on my phone. I needed to search for something quickly, and when I hit the link from DuckDuckGo, my music stopped.
Why? Because there was a video playing on that web page, and my AirPods Max switched to my Mac automatically, expecting that I wanted to hear whatever that video was playing.
It's intended behaviour, and sometimes it's pure genius. But sometimes, it bugs the hell right out of me, so I went digging on how to turn that feature off.
If you've ever felt my frustration, here's how to fix it.
Step 1: Open the Bluetooth settings on your Mac
You want to scroll down to your AirPods, and hit the information icon next to the name. It will give you a little popup window.
Step 2: Adjust when the headphones connect to your Mac
By default, you should see the "Automatically" checkbox selected in the "Connect to this Mac menu item. All you need to do is choose the other option: "When last connected to this Mac".
The downside
The downside here is that if I want to listen to audio from my MacBook Air now, I need to manually connect the AirPods. That's probably going to annoy me at some point in the future, but today it was the interruptions to my tunes that drove me over the edge.
I suppose the other alternative is an ad-blocker, but that's just not my kind of solution...
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