> Much like with the speakers, Apple are trying way too hard to be fancy here, and implement an adaptive beamformer in userspace to try and isolate the desired signal from background noise.
That’s a rather unfair characterization. I’ve found the array to work very well in practice. It’s hardly trying to hard.
They are atrocious, IME. I continually get near muted. I.e., if I record the signal, my voice is there, but extremely faint. Unusable for VC audio, and I've moved completely to a headset mic because of it.