The problem with this trick is that it's very important for your callers to hear you clearly, and laptop mics usually suck, and pick up fan noise.
Maybe not a problem with Macs, but call quality on most laptops using the built in mic is bad enough that people on the other side will have a bad impression of you.
I have a friend who works in sales and business development. He was fighting with his Bluetooth headset and his laptop all the time. I told him to just get a simple USB podcast microphone. You can get a decent one for next to nothing. Problem solved. Those are designed to make you sound good. And if you do sales, you should want to sound amazing.
I actually told him many salespeople get this completely wrong and sound like an absolute Muppet on their expensive headsets without even realizing it and explained to him that anything Bluetooth is basically never going to sound amazing. There’s a lot of snake oil in the market. I got some nice Sony earbuds recently. Tried it once and I was barely audible apparently. That’s supposedly a high-end option. It’s OK, I got them for music and podcasts and wasn’t expecting much for calls. But it managed to underwhelm me on that front. The weakness is Bluetooth and the standard codecs supported on Mac/Windows. You are basically screwed no matter what BT headset you use. For phones, it depends.
Apple fixes this with AirPods by doing a proprietary codec and probably quite a bit of non-trivial sound processing. None of that is part of the Bluetooth standard, and what little is supported in some newer codecs typically does not work in Windows/Mac. So it will still fall back to that low-bitrate codec that distorts your voice and makes you sound like a Muppet.
If you need to use a phone, getting a USB-C headset can be an alternative. Not that many wired headsets these days, sadly. Even Apple now uses USB-C. And both Android and iOS support most USB-based sound equipment.
I take most calls with my Mac. I configured an aggregate device with the MIDI tool so that my headset doesn’t hijack the microphone. Nice little hack if you have some decent BT headphones. On a Mac, the microphones in the laptop are likely way better than the vast majority of headsets. And that’s before you consider the latency and heavy compression Bluetooth adds to the mix.
> Apple fixes this with AirPods by doing a proprietary codec and probably quite a bit of non-trivial sound processing. None of that is part of the Bluetooth standard
Do you have any sources for that claim?
As far as I understand (and based on what I've seen in some Bluetooth debugging menus at least a few macOS versions back), for HFP they just use regular mSBC.
That's an optional codec for HFP (while SBC is mandated for A2DP), and a step above absolute potato quality G.711/PCM u-law, but still part of the regular Bluetooth HFP specs.
Yes, see my comment about their proprietary codec that is exclusive to Apple platforms only. Won't work on Android. Won't work on Linux. Won't work on Windows. Only works with Apple headphones with Apple phones/laptops.
Maybe not a problem with Macs, but call quality on most laptops using the built in mic is bad enough that people on the other side will have a bad impression of you.