The benefit of a headset is not solely the improved microphone, it's also that the headphones mean your microphone is only picking up your speech, and not your meeting's output audio.
If you are using both your laptop's microphone and speakers, then Teams/Zoom has to decide whether to play audio to you, or pick up audio from you. If you're talking at the same time as someone else, the audio quality for everyone in the meeting suffers.
Modern systems don't work in a half-duplex mode like this.
All laptop speaker/mic combos use AEC[1], where they can both playout and pickup at the same time. There is actually 2 layers of this in many systems, one provided by your device, and a 2nd layer provided in software by Zoom/Teams/Meet etc.
What can happen is that the meeting audio is a mixture of the top-N loudest participants. N+1 people talking will conflict badly.
Your comment is phrased as though you think you're correcting me, but your point seems to be agreeing with what I said. My point is not at all about the technological ability of a computer to simultaneously process audio input and output.
The "limitation" arises because Teams/Zoom/etc all have mechanisms to prevent audio feedback. Participant A, using their laptop's microphone and speakers, will cause unpleasant audio cutouts for every other participant whenever they talk, even if Participants B-Z are all wearing headphones that prevent their microphone from picking up their audio output.
Frankly, I hate apple audio products. Apple has a veneer of “industry leader” which makes people think they’re the best they can get, so they don’t look for alternatives. But oh my god apple mics are my bane on a day of calls. They’re “acceptable” in that, yes, can understand you. But their grating low quality is just uncomfortable. Like, I fully expect apple to rope out an AI model that reconstitutes people’s voice to sound normal just so they can keep trying to convince people they don’t need a headset or a boom mic.
Agreed. I've been using them for the better part of a decade (and full time since 2020) and I've listened to recordings of myself - sounds absolutely acceptable, and better than a bunch of USB mics I've tried.
