I recently had an issue pairing a set of Beats Studio Buds to my laptop. The Apple website suggests that pairing the headphones was as simple as pressing the system button until the LED started flashing white. However, this wasn’t happening. Instead, I was seeing three red LED flashes each time I opened the case and pressing the button did nothing. Attempting to reset the headphones by holding the system button for 15 seconds didn’t help either. After 30+ minutes of messing with various bluetooth headphones, I realized the issue was neither the Linux Bluetooth stack (for once!) or a defective button in the case: I simply needed to charge the case. Three red LED flashes indicates a dead case battery. Having put the case charging (yay, USB C), things paired just fine. TIL.
Leaving this here since Google wasn’t all that helpful when I tried looking for similar issues.