With Mac OS 27, did Apple improve the behavior for managing audio source priority and audio selection?
ASKED BY · Craig McFarlane · BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS · 26 SEP 2026 · ▶ 00:22:46
Apple's auto-switching philosophy favors automatic decisions for most users. Recent macOS updates add Bluetooth device prompts, which can be disabled after repeated rejections. Manual input/output selection within apps like Zoom remains the most reliable approach.
Apple did not improve audio source priority in macOS 27; the random auto-switching behavior persists. The open-source Audio Priority Bar tool may provide a workaround for users with multiple audio inputs.
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22:42And he has noticed that alone would get me to switch. yeah you could you know you'd have to get me at gunpoint to be able to switch to a new operating system that is untested and unproven go ahead craig yeah so like a lot of people there's things i love about apple and there's things that just drive me crazy and the whole
23:02nonsense of and i appreciate somebody plugs in a mic and it auto switches to that you know for for probably 60 or 70 percent of the population that that's a handy cool thing it's like oh great it now it's selected for those of us that have multiple inputs and multiple outputs i would love to just be able to rank them i've got a bunch of monitors and randomly zoom or teams or some
23:34other thing. We'll just start piping it because it randomly picked out of the list. And if I can't prioritize, it's just, it makes, it grinds me on a daily basis. So I see there's a audio priority bar that is an open source tool that covers that. So I'm actually going to give that a try but i was hoping it was fixed in the os looking up through google where it doesn't seem
24:06like they made a change so what what kind of what kind of problems have you had because i don't i mean i've i don't recall having very many problems with you're talking about setting the default input and output for the audio interface that or or whatever you're using in that computer is that what you're talking about correct okay yeah so i don't i don't like ever leaving things on any kind
24:29of automatic setting so for me the first thing i do on mac os or and windows the first thing i do is just immediately select the interface that i want now i've had for me even disconnecting and reconnecting usb interfaces like that i've never had an issue with it just go back to the internal uh the internal interface on the computer so for me that's worked really well but yeah i don't i
24:55I don't trust things to try to make decisions for me typically. So I like manually setting that stuff, and that's worked pretty well. Even inside of Zoom, I just always go manually select that interface, and it always seems to remember it. Go ahead, Bill. Yeah, that's one of the things that Apple tends to do, and I think for a lot of their customers, the fact that you've plugged in a mic,
25:16you know, there is a huge number of people, because you plugged it in now, you probably want to use it now. So they default to that. I got to tell you, it's been annoying me lately because after the last OS update I did, suddenly it's telling me when I'm sitting here, you have different Bluetooth devices. Do you want to hook up this one? Do you want to hook up that one?
25:36And it's like trying to get ahead of the decision that he thinks I want to make, but I don't really want to make it. So one of the things I have noticed, though, is that after two or three times when I say no, suddenly it will give me a, okay, you really don't want to do this because let's shut it off. And I just think they're continually trying to put a certain amount of intelligence.
25:56And until I figure out how they're implementing that, it drives me nuts. And then it usually goes away. I'm not saying it's not an annoyance when they first pull one of these things. But a few of those, to me, have been persistent enough to bother me for a long time. Your mileage may vary. Yeah. I know Apple intelligence is integrated into macOS in a much deeper way in macOS 27.
26:20So obviously now they have Gemini or a customized version of Gemini as a model. But I don't think what we need is like the last thing I would want is Apple intelligence, like making suggestions, like kind of like Clippy in Microsoft Office. Like, hey, I noticed you're trying to connect this interface. Would you like me to help you? No, I don't need that.
26:39Thank you. All right. Next up. Henry Ramos in Yonkers, New York comes up next. So many folks making apps with AI now for production. anyone seen anything truly useful go ahead tony so i made a quick list uh chris sabato ken jordan john wallace rabbi david paskin uh lord zoom uh john drinkwater and And beta, I want to say alpha tester Tony Mobley is working on something.
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