Help Lemmy, Air Pods Pro 2 won't connect to my Steam Deck and I'm at an Airport about to hop on a 4 hour flight!
Not sure whats going on, I open the case with the buds in hold down the button and put it in pairing. The Steam Deck sees it but won’t pair with it. Idk what’s going on. I have reset it, disconnected it from the iPhone, idk what else to try. Desktop mode and Game mode won’t pair :-/
Restart the Steam deck.
Disable bluetooth on your iPhone just in case it is connecting to the headset while you are trying to pair.
Then try to pair it again.
Every time I end up with a finicky bluetooth pairing process, I turn off bluetooth on all devices other than the one I'm trying to pair to. Usually fixes any problem.
I had the same issue with mine, also in an airport. I ended up renaming them from my iPhone and was then able to pair them.
Edit to add: I thought pairing them from desktop mode may give me better luck, but it actually made things worse for some reason. Even after renaming them, I wasn’t able to pair them in desktop mode. Immediately after switching back to gaming mode, I was able to pair them.
Dozens of people reports issues, most commenters are able to pair but experience various stability issues on top of the headphones not connecting automatically.
With no visible response from Valve, the hope is that kernel and relevant Bluetooth and pipewire packages upgraded in the upcoming SteamOS 3.6 contain some fixes.
I've never used a steam deck, but I know SteamOS runs linux. If you have the terminal easily available, try:
sudo systemctl restart bluetooth.service (might be bluetoothd.service)
If that doesn't work, this almost always resolves my bluetooth issues:
rmmod btusb
rmmod btintel
modprobe btusb
modprobe btintel
If none of that works, your bluetooth card could be disabled due to static discharge, in which case you should hold power button / hard shut down, unplug charger, boot again, plug in charger again.
These are only issues ive encountered on the Linux end. I would recommend troubleshooting the airpods by tapping the "i" button next to them and forgetting them, then attempting to pair with the Steam Deck
Forget the device and pair again. If you paired your airpods with too many devices it won't connect using the old pairing and AirPods simply forgot the Deck. Not sure if it's possible to do fron deck ui, but you can do that easily in desktop
I have a similar issue with a pair of bone conduction headphones I have. Often (maybe every couple of days) I have to go to desktop mode, go into the Bluetooth manager, tell it to completely forget the headphones, and then repair them. That consistently works with mine, but I have no idea if it'll help with air pods.
This is what worked for me. Put your deck on desktop mode and from there go to the Bluetooth icon in the taskbar and connect them from there. If you can’t see your AirPods restart the deck on desktop mode. Once connected obviously switch back to regular mode. This worked for me, I had tried all the tricks I saw
On some Linux distros you need to edit /etc/bluetooth/main controller mode and change it to bredr to pair, then restart bluetooth, then change it back to dual and restart it again and it should work.
It won't help you on this trip, but for anyone else reading this, you can get decent wired earbuds for $30. They're a good thing to carry with you (along with a USB c to 3.5mm dongle) for situations like this.
Air pods are known to have connection issues with non apple devices. The solution to that problem is to just get headphones that are made with other devices in mind.