AirPods Pro 2 Spatial Audio volume drops softly whenever MacBook notification chimes

[Hannah Brooks]

Even when connected only to my iPhone, macOS Handoff briefly grabs audio focus for half a second when Slack notifies on my Mac. Where do I disable automatic AirPods switching cleanly on macOS?

[Marcus Reed]

Diagnosis: APFS snapshot rollback or First Aid is irrelevant here—the symptom is a live bluetoothd/coreaudiod IPC race condition, not filesystem corruption. Verify the active Handoff policy persists across reboots by checking defaults -currentHost read com.apple.Bluetooth AudioSwitchBehavior (expect 0 for manual); if it reverts, inspect ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.Bluetooth.*.plist for write failures via log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.bluetooth"' --last 1h. Time Machine restores only reintroduce the stale preference plist causing the race.

Mac mini M4 Pro (48GB) | Studio Display

Chicago, IL | "Local Time Machine snapshots save every .0 upgrade week."

[Rachel Kim]

Diagnosis: WindowServer focus changes (kCGWindowWorkspaceNotification) do not drive audio ducking; coreaudiod owns the kAudioSessionInterruption duck triggered by Slack’s NSSound playback. Audit login items for legacy launchagents injecting code into coreaudiod (sudo launchctl list | grep -i audio), but the root cause is the Mac advertising kBluetoothHandoffCapable=true to the AirPods firmware. Mitigate by killing coreaudiod (sudo pkill coreaudiod) after setting the manual connect preference to flush the cached Handoff token.

MacBook Pro 14″ M4 (32GB) | iPhone 15

Vancouver, BC | "Read crash logs bottom-up from the faulting thread."

[Sarah Mitchell]

Diagnosis: AirPods Pro 2 firmware (6F7/6F8+) enforces mandatory Handoff handshake via the BLE mesh; DFU restore of the case won’t disable the Mac-side advertiser. Confirm iOS 17.4+ / macOS 14.4+ version parity (system_profiler SPBluetoothDataType | grep -A5 "AirPods Pro"), then disable the Mac’s BLE relay for this device: sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist DontPageAudioDevices 1 (requires SIP disable or MDM profile). USB-C power delivery negotiation on the case is electrically isolated from the 2.4 GHz coexistence logic causing the half-second duck.

iPhone 16 Pro (256GB, iOS 26) | iPad Air M2

Austin, TX | "Always try Finder Update before touching Restore."

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