Ok, can you explain to me how you do it? I have AirPod pros and the only way I can switch between devices is to go to the Bluetooth menu on the device I want to listen to and tell it to connect to the AirPods. That’s fine, and it doesn’t bother me much, but it doesn’t seem especially fast or magical to me. Is there a better way?
That's right. It's just not that easy with other devices.
Not sure how apple devices "just switch", it might be that they have multi-device bluetooth; or they have custom hardware.
But other devices are very "sticky" with their BT connections. My approach is mostly to turn off bluetooth one one device when I want to switch to another.
I have a pair of Jabra 65T active earbuds that I bought for $50 and they connect to multiple devices at a time and "just work". If they are connected to my computer and I am watching a video and my phone rings, they switch over without any intervention. At the end of the day when I hop on my Peloton they connect to that without intervention, too.
I am sure the Apple stuff works well too but let's not pretend that they are doing anything unique in this space.
With most BT devices the problem would be if someone else tried to use your Peloton, it'd steal audio from your PC or phone
But Peloton remembers your previously paired audio devices per user; so if someone else uses the bike and has never explicitly paired that set of headphones, they'll show up as an option, but won't automatically pair
If your devices are on iOS 14 / macOS Big Sur then you can just start playing music or a video on one device and the audio automatically switches to that device and pauses on the one you had previously been using.
Each device has a native place you select the Airpods from (MacOS: sound menu; iOS: the playback widget in the Control Center). Still a menu, but a little easier to going into the bluetooth menu.