Recently Apple updated all its systems, as it tends to do fairly frequently. I generally update my devices as soon as possible in order to take advantage of any security updates or any improvements that have been made.

In this case I was pleasantly surprised that a long-standing annoyance with Siri on the Watch was fixed. Ever since I got the latest Watch back in the fall, the Raise to Speak feature hasn’t been working reliably. The way it’s supposed to work is you raise your Watch to your mouth and issue a command to Siri without having to mention Siri’s name and the command will be acted upon.

But it hasn’t been working very well. A call to Apple support didn’t produce any meaningful support. The easy workaround was to just mention Siri and then it would work, but of course, what’s the point of Raise to Speak if you have to say Siri anyway?

In any case, with the latest updates, Raise to Speak works reliably again.

There’s only one hitch.

When I tell Siri to lock or unlock the Front Door, it does so, but it says it might not have worked, even though it did. Very strange.

Then there is The Peculiar Case of the AirPods.

I have two sets of AirPods, one of which I use exclusively with my iPhone, and the other I use to watch videos either on my iPad or on my Apple TV.

I have that second set configured to connect to the device that they were last connected to. So when I’m watching videos on the iPad, I can take them out temporarily and when I put them back in my ears they automatically reconnect to the iPad.

When I want to watch on the Apple TV, I have to one time tell them to connect to that device, and after that they do so automatically. They’ve been working fine like that for some time.

But after running the latest update, I discovered they were no longer doing the automatic connection correctly, and when I was watching videos on the iPad, I’d have to manually reconnect them every time I took them out.

Very annoying.

I was all set to complain to Apple.

And that’s when I looked up from my iPad and noticed something. 

My M1 MacBook Pro was up and running.

I had bought it shortly after Apple came out with their M1 chipset, just to see what the performance was like, but after a little fiddling around, I realized I didn’t have much use for it on a daily basis, so I’ve been keeping it in hibernation most of the time.

Just a few days ago, about the same time that I updated all my systems as a matter of fact, I discovered a use for it, and since then, I’ve had it up and running most of the time.

And I had never told it not to connect to the AirPods. [The AirPods are weird in that you need to go to each of your devices and configure them for how you want them to work with the AirPods.]

So the MacBook Pro was still configured to Automatically connect to the AirPods. So every time I took the AirPods out of my ears and then put them back in, the MacBook Pro was Automatically connecting to the AirPods just like it was still configured to do.

Duh!

Fixed it.

Problem solved.