Apple AirPods: iPhone accessory or the next big thing? | Hacker News Reader

Apple AirPods: iPhone accessory or the next big thing?

kevinrooke.com

699 points123six671 comments

As always, none of the numbers are official, so take all of them with a huge grain of salt. The article also doesn't link to a single source, not even an unofficial one.

> Assuming an even split of sales between Gen 1, Gen 2, and AirPods Pro, Airpods revenue was $12 billion in 2019

This itself is a terrible assumption. AirPods Pro launched in November 2019, so had just 2 months of sales. Even otherwise, there is never an even split between the lower and higher priced versions of any product, especially when the higher one costs nearly double.

Another source (https://hypebeast.com/2019/12/apple-airpods-stats-third-larg...) estimates the sales at $6 billion, half of what the parent article says.

Correct, these are all estimates. And the sales split is unclear, but both Airpods 2 and Airpods Pro have the benefit of launching before the holidays. They got a disproportionate number of sales from those 2 months. Even if everyone went with the $150 version (which is impossible), Airpods revenue would still be $9 billion at 60 million units. The point still stands though, Apple is making a killing off Airpods. Whether the exact number is $9 billion or $15 billion isn't as important.

I am of course not debating that AirPods are successful. However,

- If one random sales estimate is $6 billion and the other is $12 billion, it is clear that there isn't enough information out there, or something else is amiss. This isn't just a margin of error difference, and would completely change the graph in the parent article.

- There is nothing useful to be taken away from comparing its sales numbers against a bunch of SaaS companies. Here's a better idea - put it on a graph along with sales of Echo, Fire TV, Philips Hue, Chromecast, Roku, Ring, Tile, Duracell AA Battery, GoPro etc.

1) I don't know the estimates but I see it on the streets. Everyone and their dog has AirPods. I already have seen people with Pro version as well. I do not see people walking with their GoPros. If I go skiing I don't see people with their GoPro (people mostly just go skiing and then do some pictures with their phones from what I noticed), Chromecast I have seen some but not as many. There is no comparison.

2) There is one interesting thing. Everyone would say "make software" because it is easily scalable and you want scalable business. You don't want to make physical things, because making business on physical things is not scalable. Now Apple is showing that making physical things makes loads of money if you are Apple. So still making physical things can make more money than making SaaS.

It’s already a meme on college campuses that you aren’t cool if you still have the ‘long stems’. I’d say pros are doing well.

Interesting.

Am college student, have not heard of this yet.

"If you are Apple" is the key part of it. A software company can be successful with a bunch of programmers and their laptops, and can go head-to-head with Google, Facebook or anyone else. That describes all the startups on the list. To emulate AirPods' success you need:

- a chip design/fabrication team

- a battery design team

- procurement specialists and high-volume vendor contracts in Asia, with assembly lines ready to go at moment's notice

- a logistics, operations and distribution pipeline in every market in the world

- the most successful product in the world (iPhone) which you can attach your sales to

- billions in marketing and advertising budgets

- premium retail locations across the world

AirPods are NOT a startup, and should not be compared to other startups. "Make software" is definitely still good advice for the vast majority of entrepreneurs out there.

Or, build hardware for business verticals. Where market sizes are just double digit billions and Apple will not play.

This is the big takeaway. The article saying “AirPods are X single digit percentage of apples revenue” (even if slightly wrong) means that there are probably other single-digit-billion-dollar verticales not worth it to Apple to exploit.

I have an ex-coworker who did a consulting contract for Apple Air Pods Pro design.

You will not believe how low key was that project. It could've easily been a design from an average if not a lower tier OEM.

Including the W1 and H1 silicon?

Given that the man is an analog extraordinaire, there shouldn't be any reason for them to hire him for anything but that I believe.

Are you saying the H1 and W1 could have been designed by a lower tier OEM?

Yes, that's a walk in the park ASIC

Odd that nobody did it before Apple.

Perhaps it was (relatively) easy. What made it easy was precisely that it was Apple: full & willing integration with the iOS ecosystem. A couple UI clicks/taps, if not outright automatic, and your AirPods are happily talking to the device you want to hear from.

All competitors have to cope with interface limitations and API inadequacies. Even one extra obligatory UI step can practically ruin the experience (as compared to AirPods).

Getting to the point where deep integration is easy ... is hard.

+ some of the best product and interaction designers in the world who lead the definition of the product specs from a user perspective

You should make software because you're not Apple, and don't want to compete with Apple.

Of course you can make money making physical things.The only problem is you either make them premium or you have to sell zillions of units to make profit. We have "Apple" in every industry ( fashion, automotive, catering,etc.), however that's still only a handful.Making software is probably more likely to earn you tons of meney.

Which companies in the fashion industry are Apple-like?

Its a conglomerate and many brands, but LVMH is probably the closest comparison of an Apple to fashion.

It’s a luxury brand group, but has price points that go from attainable to stratospheric.

If I had to pick one label, I would choose Burberry (fitting, since Apple went on a Burberry hiring spree a number of years ago, and not just for retail but in design) or Marc Jacobs (which is part of LVMH).

LVMH.I believe it was Bernard Arnault who said that only luxury products can command luxury margins.

The difference between 9 and 12 billion matters absolutely nil for the main point of the piece. Seems like you just feel the need to somehow dismiss it? Why?

I would find an estimate like "AirPods make more money than Spotify" interesting; its a sort-of poetic "the hardware you use to listen to the music is worth more than the music itself", at least in a limited scope (of course, the entire audio hardware industry is larger than Spotify, but is the entire audio hareware industry larger than the entire music recording industry? idk).

> "the hardware you use to listen to the music is worth more than the music itself"

...at which point it's reasonable to maybe stop conflating price with value.

I guess you haven't met an audiophile?

I have met audiophiles. The impression I get is that having nice headphones "on the go" is not a priority and people live with the low quality of small-and-wireless headphones.

Very few audiophiles are sitting at their desk using Airpods, though. In that market, wired headphones rule supreme. (Many people are using wireless noise-cancelling headphones, however, not for audio quality but because "work" is too loud for people to work. At my last job, they even had Sonos speakers around playing music all day. It was crazy!)

Music fans buy stereo/audio equipment to listen to their music.

Audiophiles buy music to listen to their stereo/audio equipment.

> the hardware you use to listen to the music is worth more than the music itself

Which still isn't a useful comparison.

One is an outright purchase, and the other a subscription service.

True. But $10 x 12 = $120 subscription per year. That's a decent buck and a fairly large market.

And on a long term, more profitable probably. We won’t see Spotify disappearing for a while.

Spotify rents music that it itself rents from 3 companies that own most of the music. Why would those 3 companies not just raise their rents if Spotify starts making a decent profit?

Spotify has been around since 2006 and just eked out a tiny profit last year. Unless they plan on owning music themselves, I don’t see why the music owners wouldn’t try to capture most of the profit.

Or. Flip that over. What happens to the music owners if one of their primary distributors goes under?

As long as Apple, Google, and Amazon are willing to forgo margins on music, not much.

I never said it would be Useful. I said it would be Interesting.

It tells you that one hardware product is worth more than one streaming service. Hard to draw any conclusions about the music business as a whole.

I primarily use airpods for making calls, and over the ear headphones for music.

And none of those have high profit margins. So while the revenue may be good, the profit isn’t.

We know that Roku doesn’t make much of anything from hardware sells - the CEO said they aren’t trying to make a profit from the hardware, but ad sales and subscription revenue.

> If one random sales estimate is $6 billion and the other is $12 billion, ...

... then it still sounds like they are making billions of dollars on mere headphones. Fascinating.

We also have no idea what the margins are on AirPods. It's not at all accurate to apply overall Apple gross margins (which include high-margin offerings like their services and iPhones) to AirPods, which are likely one of their lowest margin products.

We have a decades of prior history knowing that Apple doesn’t sell much of anything without a large profit margin.

Besides there are plenty of almost as good knock offs st half the price.

Also this is revenue numbers too. No mention of margins over expenses.

Apple infamously has high margins on its hardware.

If we were to consider that, the comparison is guaranteed to be dramatically worse (in the favor of Apple).

Shopify, Snapchat and Spotify have yet to earn a single net dollar in profit. They're all still losing money as of their most recent quarters. And their lifetime losses are epic to say the least. Twitter also may still be negative for its lifetime, given its very substantial past losses.

If Apple has even modest 10% margins on the Airpods (it's more likely to be 2x to 3x that), it's at least a billion a year in profit right now. That's probably more than Spotify could earn on its zero margin business even if you gave them $20 billion in sales.

They have high margins on products that retail for multiples of their relevant competition. The same is not true for AirPods. I find it extremely unlikely that their margins are greater than 10%.

Here is an airpod knockoff for $40 [0]. I bet their margin on airpods is higher than even their iphone.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Bluetoooth-Headphones-Sweat...

As a favorite ad opined: "Sure you can get a hamburger for $1. But then you'd have to eat it."

Given Apple’s absolute dominance in supply-chain, I find this very unlikely.

The reality is, Apple (either through the Apple brand or through Beats), was the only electronics company that could realistically achieve the economies of scale to sell truly wireless earbuds at this MSRP in 2016, but that doesn’t mean the margins don’t get bigger every single month. It’s true that the margins might be lower for another company, but audio is an insanely high margin industry. Even in retail, the markup between retailer cost and MSRP is often at least 50% — it Is often higher. And if you have the scale and supply chain to own literals every part and churn out a headset, it’s even higher.

Also, sources are updated in the article. Thanks for mentioning the lack of links.

It's not just the numbers, there are other wild assumptions going on.

> That means almost all iPhone users are still either using wired earphones or none at all.

I'm sorry, what? Non-Apple branded Bluetooth earphones (including AirPod knockoffs) are ubiquitous, and far outnumber wired earphones (in part thanks to Apple and many Android OEMs dropping headset jacks).

Yeah this line alone also made me do a double take and question everything else he said

Likewise. I just closed the article after that; his credibility was gone.

> (in part thanks to Apple and many Android OEMs dropping headset jacks).

That only happened on high-end smartphones. Low-end and mid-range still have 3.5 mm socket.

(Also, I actually look around regularly at the train station, and I still see mostly wired headsets. I'm using a wireless one, btw.)

> I actually look around regularly at the train station, and I still see mostly wired headsets.

I see the occasional default Apple headphones, but the vast majority of people are using Airpod-alikes.

Maybe an American thing. Look around at Amsterdam CS or Utrecht CS or Rotterdam CS. Mostly wired.

Berlin still has Walkman in the wild.

I saw them everywhere in Rome last summer. Lots of tourists of course, but I try to go off the beaten path and I saw quite a few locals wearing them too.

That might be a dutch thing, dutch people are notoriously tight-fisted

Indeed. Here in SE Asia, everybody still uses 3.5mm jack smartphones. It's a rare occurrence to see wireless earpods, and almost always these are cheap Chinese AirPod knockoffs.

Some of the cheap knockoffs are getting really good. Mine get 4.5 hrs battery life, have the optical sensor on the bud that pauses when taken out and wireless charging case including an cloned (stolen) apple SoC that gives the real battery life of the "airpods" and case when the case is opened.

Interesting! Have a link?

https://a.aliexpress.com/_coFTZK

> Here in SE Asia, everybody still uses 3.5mm jack smartphones

This does not match my experience at all, but SE Asia is a diverse place.

Doesn't match mine either. Here in Japan (at least in Tokyo) it's uncommon to see wired headphones. Most are random wireless headphones, I would estimate 20-40% only being AirPods.

Japan is technically NOT in SE Asia.

Singapore, I see a lot of airpods though it probably depends on the area.

I should have been more specific. Probably should have said, "everywhere in SE Asia outside of Singapore."

I was thinking Bangkok, where almost everyone is rocking some kinda wireless headphones. Lots and lots and lots of cheap AirPod knockoffs

I'm in Hanoi, I see airpods everyday (and no, I don't go to tourist areas). I myself use Huawei Freepods 3, which cost about the same as Airpods (~180 usd).

Go to a random rural town in a midwestern US state and I'm sure you probably won't see people wearing Airpods, which is probably what people are picturing when someone says SE Asia.

We have paved roads believe it or not, as well as a large class of people who use the newest iPhones.

In NL, I see mainly AirPods. less wired. and some other wireless brands.

I think the number of wireless phones in Brazil is astounding. At least one in ten people.

Which means that almost everyone still uses wired phones.

Imagine thinking that AirPods were the first wireless headset.

Well technically, most others had a "wire" connecting left part to the right part :P

100% of the world calls those "wireless" not "wired":

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wireless+headset&ia=images&iax=ima...

Every headset has some amount of wiring.

So they have wires but they are wireless...

Yet half of HN has a fit anytime the word “Serverless” is uttered.

Imagine thinking the AirPods are a "headset."

Aren't they?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/headset

In my environment we tend to call "Headset" something that is set up for quality conversations (think gaming or office headsets - large earmuffs and microphone boom being defining quality) and "Headphones" things that are intended primarily for consuming/listening (which may incidentally have a microphone, typically inferior).

Understanding that may not be wider usage, I feel there exists a need (or at least benefit) for two words - something which is good/intended for listening, and something which is good/intended for conversing.

AirPods are intended (and great) for talking

They are absolutely great... for person with the AirPods. For the rest of the poor suckers on the call, it's headache time.

As I'm currently in operations, vast majority of my team spends 4+++ hrs a day on calls and conference calls. We'll take a $20 3.5mm Logitech with a boom over a $100 bluetooth with a boom over $200 bluetooth without a boom in a heart beat. Anybody with airpods [or Samsung etc equivalents] has been taken out to the back alley and shot by now.

The terminology "true wireless" became popular because of the wire linking the two sides on older bluetooth headsets.

When you think about it, the new usage (wireless = no wires at all) is more accurate than the old (wired, but not connected the the phone itself by wires)

When did I say or imply that?

Reporting from Toronto:

You see a lot of AirPods (I was gifted a set myself) but you see even more wireless over-ear headphones. I probably notice those the most. And wired are still common, though not necessarily 3.5mm.

I dunno... I was watching an NBA game* the other day and 4/5 players had AirPods in as they entered the arena and the other singleton had over the ear headphones. This totally caught me off-guard, and was so noticeable I made a mental note of it.

* I know, not representative of the general population, and USA-centric, but the A list tends to be representative of what people want and, if they can afford it, what they have.

I wouldn't be surprised if they were given them by apple for free - that's pretty good marketing.

Have you watched The Defiant Ones[1] on HBO? I can't exactly recall if they were giving Beats out to players for free, but there is a segment of the documentary where they talk about how ubiquitous Beats became because players were shown wearing them in the pregame. You could be pretty spot on with your assumption.

1 - https://www.hbo.com/the-defiant-ones

> And wired are still common, though not necessarily 3.5mm.

What do you mean by not necessarily 3.5mm?

Apple issues wired headphone with each iPhone. They connect through Lightning (the same slot you use to charge and sync the phone).

And Google Pixel phones (and presumably other jackless android phones) come with USB-C headphones.

Interesting, I had no idea such headphones existed.

Non-Apple branded Bluetooth earphones (including AirPod knockoffs) are ubiquitous, and far outnumber wired earphones (in part thanks to Apple and many Android OEMs dropping headset jacks).

Do you mean they are ubiquitous with people using iPhones? Because here is Australia I would guesstimate that 80% of in-ear wireless earphone used with Apple devices are AirPods.

I think probably 50% of people I know who've bought an iPhone in the last year have bought AirPods at the same time (if they didn't already have them).

Over/On ear headphone are a different story, as is Android.

> I'm sorry, what? Non-Apple branded Bluetooth earphones (including AirPod knockoffs) are ubiquitous, and far outnumber wired earphones (in part thanks to Apple and many Android OEMs dropping headset jacks).

Maybe in new sales, but not in deployed use.

I’ll buy a quality headset or in-ear and it might last me a decade.

I mean sure? Does that really change the point of the article?

Even 25% of those numbers gets us to really impressive revenue numbers.

Additionally the author's conclusion that although Airpod revenue is relatively good for a technology company, it's small compared to Apple's total revenue and as compared to the future value of services revenue this hardware enables.

I bought my wife AirPods gen 2 earlier this year, and then bought her the AirPod pro with noise cancellation for Xmas. Not common I’m sure but everyone said that noise cancellation was a godsend for taking meetings via phone and she concurred.

>As always, none of the numbers are official,

Not only were they unofficial, the guess work was wrong. And even the facts were wrong. What annoys me is the blog is actually for investment. ( With Email Newsletter suggesting sign up for insight )

>Since 2017, Apple has sold roughly 215 million iPhones per year. These phones cost roughly $1,000 each, and therefore generate $215 billion of revenue for Apple each year. This makes up 81% of Apple’s total revenue

There is no need to guess. Apple actually report ASP when they were reporting Sales Unit Number. In 2017 their iPhone ASP were 618 - 697 depending on Quarter. In 2018 their iPhone ASP were 728 - 793. They stopped reporting unit and ASP in 2019.

Apple Fiscal 2017, 2018, 2019 Revenue was $229.234B, $265.595B, $259.97B And iPhone Revenue was $141.29 , $166.8B, iPhone % of revenue was ~62% to of their revenue.

Not 80%.

The blog post could have been so much better if he spend 10min actually looking up those number.

Amazing how Apple managed to make the first cool MP3 player, then the first cool smartphone and now the first cool bluetooth headset. For almost 20 years now, Apple has owned electronic fashion. Sony for example was unable to parlay its Walkman dominance into similar positions with new devices.

And make no mistake about it - a huge portion of these sales are people buying Apple's marketing - not buying the tech itself.

Which I think may bode well for Apple in that we are only scratching the surface of what the tech can do.

Don't forget about first cool smartwatch.

Dick Tracy, eat your heart out!

The Pebble? Still no decent replacement for it.

I loved my Pebble, but it was certainly not cool. Also didn't work as well as my Apple Watch, which I waited until my beloved Pebble finally died before buying.

Apple Watch is 4+ times the price. It still can't do some of the things a Pebble can. For starters, a Pebble can run a week without requiring recharge.

And yet it's still way cooler than the Pebble. Funny how that works.

And the Pebble couldn't reliably tell me the weather outside, for a whole week.

1) always-on, sunlight-visible screen 2) week-long (plus) battery life 3) good, simple notification + calendar support 4) ecosystem of apps (developer mindshare)

Heart Rate, Sleep Tracking, Mic/Phone, Payments are all wonderful, but the drawbacks of "machine-learning-shake-to-wake", one-day battery life, and trying to fiddle with a tiny touch screen make the Apple watch less of a watch and more of "everything but a watch".

Long Live Pebble / Rest in Peace.

Don't forget also: tangible buttons for user input, so you can change music tracks without having to look at or tap on a specific spot on a touch screen! Probably the #1 thing I miss from my Pebble OG :(

The value of hardware buttons without having to look on your screen is underrated. You can put a Pebble alarm off in your sleep. You can change a track without even seeing your watch.

Pebble was such a cool platform, and it is a damn shame that FitBit was allowed to purchase the company and immediately shut it down. Predatory competitor-purchasing like this should be illegal.

> Pebble was such a cool platform

The only true part of this sentence

> it is a damn shame that FitBit was allowed to purchase the company

Pebble failed financially and put its assets up for sale, some of which were bought by Fitbit.

> and immediately shut it down

Fitbit kept servers running for years that supported Pebble devices.

I'm a Fitbit employee but don't speak for Fitbit. An official response wouldn't be so terse; I'm just annoyed that this falsehood keeps going years later.

Sincere thanks for clearing this up, I only saw the big optics on this (pebble 2 successfully crowdfunded, then later Pebble is shutting down while FitBit acquires it).

I don't own either but I do know this, I can tell when someone has an Apple Watch at a glance without having owned one and only seen pictures, I cannot say the same for any other smart watch.

The tech is cool too

Zero people have been swayed by the observation that the components can be acquired for cheaper

And the non-iOS phone users that are married to “how much control they have” have touched an iphone since 2014.

Sorry to burst your bubble, I'm a long-time Android user who switched to the iPhone 6S for about a year and a half, then back to a Pixel 2. Following its release, I bought the iPhone XS expecting to love it and be done with Android.

Oh, how wrong I was. Siri is still garbage, CarPlay is terrible compared to Android Auto. And there's nothing even similar to Google Home. Apple's hands-free story is completely nonexistent which is fine if you've never used a decent hands-free ecosystem, but it's very hard to switch back to.

Can Android today handle voice dialing non-English names in the address book? If not, their hands-free story leaves a lot to be desired as well.

Yes, with phonetic names, an optional field like the pronunciation name in iOS.

Interesting use cases, the Google variant is still a good choice but a sliver of the android market that I cant really consider it meaningful

Its one vs many variants

You get that on any modern Android phone, not sure when the cutoff is but my Oneplus from years ago still gets the modern crap.

I was an android hold out for a good while because I didn't like the lack of control iphones had. At some point it flipped and I got sick of how much fiddling I constantly had to do with my phone to get it to work the way I wanted. And even then by the time I got it working well, it wouldn't get updates anymore. I switched to iphone, and while once in a while I'll miss being able to tweak everything, I'm much less frustrated at my phone than before.

This has been my experience. I bought the original iPhone and thought it was cool but extremely limited. I recognize the huge impact it had on the industry, though. As much as I loved fiddling with my Nexus, at some point I realized that I was fiddling too much with it and would get frustrated that basic functions wouldn't work without issue. Android has changed a bit since then but I'm still on an iPhone now. I'm less frustrated and can count on my phone reliably doing what I need it to do even though sometimes I can't do what I might want to do. Who cares if I can install video wallpaper functionality and tweak the icon spacing/grid if I have to wait 30 seconds to answer the phone because it's freezing up?

I agree, but iPhone hardware is a lot more expensive than the Android phones I buy. Be on the Moto x4 for a couple of years. Messaging is a mess (Hangouts, Messages, etc) and yeah, there are things which are just buggy.

I've been thinking of jumping to iPhone for the watch and privacy features. It really grinds my gears how much Google has sold out its users.

>And the non-iOS phone users that are married to “how much control they have” have touched an iphone since 2014.

I don't even tinker that much and my foray into iOS lasted only 1 year with the 10S Max. The inability to arrange items freely on the desktop (leave a blank space) was frustrating. The lack of control over default apps was occasionally problematic. The inability to natively link to a Windows computer and transfer files is also something I use.

That said, there are a ton of benefits of iOS over Android that I recognize (iMessage, Apple Wallet, the screen responsiveness, etc).

>now the first cool bluetooth headset [citation needed]

Honstly every time I see someone wearing earpods I can't take him seriously anymore, they look _so_ bad. There's a lot of options on the market, and airpods are the ugliest of them all.

When you talk to people, you're supposed to look at their eyes, not their ears.

You don't have to talk to someone to judge his looks

I tend to agree with you, I find them pretty ugly and weird looking, but it's also clear that we're outliers here. Those things are hugely popular.

As somebody who really likes Airpods, I think they look ridiculous, but they work so darn well that the looks are totally irrelvant.

The cell phone Bluetooth headsets produced plenty of eyerolls when they were the thing a number of years back too. Probably for similar reasons--you never know when I may get a phone call that's more important than you.

Personally, I don't wear these sorts of things in public but that's mostly because I hate being isolated from even relatively benign environments.

If you are in public you can hear anything through EarPods or AirPods they don’t cancel any noise. If I’m on the subway I can’t even hear the music haha. Interestingly, that’s a primary reason why I like it - I can roll with my e-scooter and hear bikers and cars at the same time.

Not sure about the marketing swaying people these days. People are going for the easiest devices to use that get out of the way and are high quality.

Which I guess would explain why there are Android phones that crush the iPhone on tech specs but make a minuscule (and sometimes negative) proportion of the industry’s profit?

crush is a strong word here, which Android phones would that be referring to? I got bored after they released the X, but at least up to and including that generation iPhones dominated benchmarks while at least being top 3 in photo quality.

At this point no matter how amazing the Android is, I would find the iPhone easier. I've been using an iPhone for so long it's just second nature. At one point I was forced to use an Android for a month. I could just never get used to the interface.

You find the iPhone easy to use because the iPhone is easy to use and more or less consistent in every iPhone device you’ve used. A five year old can use an iPhone.

That’s competitive differentiation, which is very much part of marketing. An iPhone isn’t easy to use in the same way that git is easier to use than svn for someone who has been using git for a decade.

When I had my six month affair with an Iphone 6 it took me a month (I don't get many calls) to finally get frustrated enough to google "How to reject calls" because I was so used to Android giving me a big red X that I never even considered pushing the power button to reject a call (I think that even just mutes incoming calls on Android, I forget), that X let me mute or reject based on the direction I swiped it. I could only figure out how to mute the rings which means my car radio would just be silent until the caller finally gave up.

I know a lot of iphone users think it's the most intuitive machine in the world and a 5 year old can get it, and I'm obviously heavily swayed by my decade or whatever with Android but the amount of hidden/unintuitive-to-me/impossible-to-do things I found was what moved me back to Android after that trial.

I spent a LOT of time searching on Google for how to do things with that phone.

It's actually quite remarkable to me that I can have such a different experience as a longtime Android device user and both of these experiences can coexist. I could never go back to the iPhone interface, and every time I have to use someone else's phone I'm always astounded at how hidden away the (few) options still available to me seem.

Discoverability of UI features is atrocious on iOS.

It really is. I don't know where anything is in the settings submenus anymore.

Really? In my view it's just a phone, just use whatever you prefer but I can't relate to getting used to an interface as per se

It’s muscle memory. Imagine how inefficient you’d be if someone moved the vowels to a different spot on your keyboard.

While both keyboards are nearly the same, everything you type would be wrong for quite a while.

Is it though? Ignoring the fun stuff, I just email, read (datasheets and text)books (i.e. PDFs and phone people on my phone - how much muscle memory is there in the first place?

Unless you mean the wider ecosystem, in which case I agree.

It’s simple to explain in the same way that Apple even in the 90s made the most profit of any personal computer manufacturer even though PCs clearly had superior hardware and much more software.

The answer is monopoly pricing vs competition. Apple is the only iOS manufacturer, just like they were the only MacOS Manufacturer (excepting the brief period of Mac clones)

That means all Android manufacturers compete and split their market driving down prices and margins and divvying up market share.

You saw the same thing in PCs when they were almost sold at cost or razor thin margins because they were commodified: a pc from dell vs hp vs compaq vs gazillion other vendors was basically the same experience.

> The answer is monopoly pricing vs competition. Apple is the only iOS manufacturer, just like they were the only MacOS Manufacturer (excepting the brief period of Mac clones)

I don’t disagree with this, but it only matters at all because iOS (and access to its user interface, Safari, lock in on iMessages) is a distinct value add. BlackBerry also had a monopoly on their OS as did Palm as did Nokia. None of them exist anymore.

> there are Android phones that crush the iPhone on tech specs

This is largely not true anymore. (In fact, in certain areas it would be appropriate to say that it's iPhone doing the "crushing".)

I am like you but with the Android. Every time I use my wife iPhone I want to toss it across the room. I think primary because it doesn't have a dedicated back button.

You mean "swipe in from left of screen"? Sure it might only apply 80-90% of the time but I'd say that's about on par with the back button behaving like I expect it to..

> I think primary because it doesn't have a dedicated back button.

Why is this an issue? Do you need dedicated back and forward buttons to browse through your pictures? Of course not, you just swipe left and right. That’s how the iPhone handles the “back” movement.

Back as in "go back to the previous screen".

The musician in me makes me yearn for a "physical" button

facepalm

I just clicked on an album in "Photos", I could scroll through them swiping left and right to go through the photos but now I have to rely on the arrow at the top left of the screen to go back to view all albums. I like having a back button always present on the buttom of my screen in Android for this.

Of course you don’t need to reach that far, my fingers are not even that long. Grab the middle of the photo with one finger and swipe down. Most (all?) navigations on iOS are swipe based. On another note, if I’m being honest I still miss the “main” button of iPhone after using iPhone 11 since it came out (3months).

Swipe from the very edge of the screen, and it takes you "up" (or "out", however you want to term it) a page.

So if you've selected a photo, a swipe down dismisses the photo. From there, a swipe in from the very edge of the screen brings you out of the current album and back to viewing all albums.

I will make a video demonstrating it if you would like.

Initially, this behavior may seem weird to some from outside the iOS ecosystem? But dismissing photos by pulling down seems to be common UX with modern apps. And swiping from the side feels so natural, that apps that don't implement it (10%?) are jarring. It could be said that a weakness here is that Apple does not enforce universal usage, but most apps have implemented it well. When it does work (90%?), my thumb appreciates not having to reach the bottom left of the phone.

There's a high possibility that many people haven't discovered that feature because covers often interfere with the swiping from outside gesture. Or anything related to touch at the edge of the screen, like dragging apps onto the next screen.

> facepalm

Sorry if it sounded sarcastic, this was a sincere question.

Apple’s design language is to put the ‘back’ item at the top left of the screen, usually as a < symbol.

...which makes it far harder to reach than the button(s) on the bottom.

I know this, but when an app goes fullscreen and hides this button I have to think to long about how to get out of it especially being that I am not a regular iPhone user

Actual specs don’t mean much with phones, I learned. Somehow my old Galaxy S8+, that had specs crushing iPhones on paper, after just a few months of use, would be way choppier and slower to use than an iPhone 7, which was both older and had way worse specs. And mind you, i am not the kind of person who installs tons of random apps and runs them in the background all the time.

That seems odd, you reset it after encountering that? I still have an S8 in my drawer but upgraded to the S10 when it came out last year and I honestly can barely tell the difference in their performance (I don't really mobile game so no idea there). I was actually really disappointed that it didn't feel like I'd just upgraded to a new model Corvette but felt like I got a car wash, which is how I'm sure all my phone upgrades will feel after the S7 now.

I had a big performance problem on my s7 way after putting in a high speed SDcard that apparently was corrupted or damaged. I was only, as far as I know, who knows what Android was storing on it, putting podcasts/images on it and it still brought my entire OS to its knees until I removed it. That was a huge trial in my Android loyalty because I went months with this incredibly slow phone until I finally was packing it up to sell, remembered "oh I don't want the buyer to have my SDcard!" pulled it out and it felt like a new phone again, I got another 2-3 years out of it. Eventually tossed it at the ground on accident thus the s8..

Yep, I tried full reset without restoring from backup. After a few months, it got back to the choppy and sloppy level of performance again, not even mentioning battery lasting a bit less than a day. Which was a dealbreaker to me, since dealing with battery anxiety is not fun. My current phone easily lasts me 1.5 days without charging, so even with very heavy usage, I am never worried that it won't last me through a full day.

A monster V8 engine with a stiff clutch in a lightweight chassis isn’t much use if it’s undrivable by the majority of the population. Honda sells a lot of Civics, not so many track cars.

Beats invented the first cool bluetooth headset.

Agreed. I'd be more specific and say Apple invented the first fashionable wireless earbuds. I owned a pair of the first Jabra earbuds (of which the latest edition I still use and love) and plenty of those horrid looking, wrap-around, sports ones before Apple came along; I never had anyone say "I want a set of those" until I wore my AirPods for the first time though. They just seem to nail the aesthetics every time.

They don’t look good. They are a status symbol that says you’re willing to spend money on a premium product and drink the Kool aid.

Your speaking objectively about something that could not be more subjective...? Is part of it a status symbol? Yes of course. I dislike the rabid Apple fandom as much as the next person - but that does not detract from the fact that they have comparatively decent sound quality, a white colour-way that looks clean and distinct, are compact enough to carry in a very small pocket, all while staying affordable enough that the average first-world person could buy a pair.

Great point. Furthermore, how much have AirBuds eaten into Beats sales? Is this more revenue for Apple or just shifting the exact product.

So of course Apple bought them.

Wonder how much influence that had on current AirPods.

Bluetooth headsets were a status symbol for a while (and then mocked) during the BlackBerry days.

> Sony for example was unable to parlay its Walkman dominance into similar positions with new devices.

Sony WF-1000XM3 are a popular in-ear Bluetooth headphones with noise cancelling. 80 EUR cheaper than Apple Airpods Pro.

.. Which you rarely see stuck in people's ears. You do see those little white airpods everywhere though. People have them stuck in their ears even when they're not playing any audio.

1) Honestly, they look ugly (like toothbrushes), just like the white iPhone looked ugly.

2) There's a lot of copy cats who look akin to Apple Airpods because Apple is a premium brand.

I have both. If the AirPods Pro didn't make my inner ear sore after wearing for 3+ hours, I would sell my Sony's immediately. I might sell them anyway. They are inferior in everything apart from comfort.

The other nice thing is that it appears it might be possible to change the batteries in the WF-1000XM3. (https://hifigo.com/blogs/tws/deep-dive-teardown-of-true-wire...)

Stupid name and impossible to distinguish from their other wireless headphones. This is the Dell XXHBE 34-9q276d.snfd2 vs Macbook Pro all over again.

Agreed on the name. Don't want my headphones to distinguish themselves (why would I? Certainly not as "toothbrushes").

Yesterday I was looking for the name of the old Sony mp3 player I had in the early 2000's. It took ages to track down with any certainty: "Sony NW-E105". Like, what does that even mean? I just remembered it's this circular thing and it was purple. I'll never remember that model number and I had to rely on my browser history to even paste it in this comment just now, even though I was just reading about it yesterday! Brutal.

My guitar is an Ibanez RG2570...EZQWEUIBLAKUSJBDA-something (I can't ever remember, great guitar btw) but does that matter? It's still a brilliant piece of (hand)craftsmanship.

If people want quality (or at least guarantee of quality in what they buy) they'll tend to whatever is better. N.B. "Better" can mean ease-of-use/experience too (Apple)

If the name is the main criticism you can come up with, it's probably a really good product.

I've wondered if Sony's music ownership interests played a large role in losing that market due to their fear of piracy.

> Sony for example was unable to parlay its Walkman dominance into similar positions with new devices.

Actually the Walkman (which was arguably Sony's second breakout product, the first being a transistor radio) Sony was definitely the cool kid. And don't forget the Playstation or the Trinitron.

In fact Steve Jobs explicitly emulated and admired Sony for their (then) sense of style, customer appeal and quality.

The Sony of today is a different company. Despite the PS2 success I date the decay to when they bought United Artists.

It's odd that you say decay. IMO Sony's products are still quite good! I have a Sony-WM1A sitting next to me right now that's well-made, and I'm using Sony WF-1000MX3's as headphones, which are also well made. Not only that, but the Sony MDR-EX1000's that I own that are quite old are still buzzing. I can't quite say that for many Apple products I've purchased in the last decade.

When did Sony stop naming things the simple way (Walkman, Vaio...) and started naming stuff like that (WF-100MX3 and the like). Im saying this as half joke only :D

They've always named things this way. It was once cool to have stuff like "WF-100MX3" because it reflected the kitsch of the space age.

This is the company that made ‘Walkman’ and ‘PlayStation’. They sometimes use terrific names.

VAIO name/logo was genius, when I learned the VA form a wave represeting the analogical world and IO part is the digital world, I was like ...wow!

It's telling that the WF-1000XM3s have been brought up multiple times but nobody has gotten their name right so far

My MDR V6 might be the perfect headphone. It's the only pair I've tried that are pretty flat and have perfect separation. Shitty mastering can't hide from these cans.

The only problems are the original pleather earcups wear off ($15 replacements are everywhere online), and the cord is pretty long since these are studio headphones. Some people cut the cord by the earpiece and splice a female end, but that's a little beyond my skill set.

No doubt that Sony becoming a major media company has hurt their consumer electronics business.

OP wasn't saying walkman wasn't cool or have a significant market position, in fact he's saying the exact opposite. That Sony had the position an failed to use it to position new devices. Apple turned the iPod into the iPhone and iPad and now they have AirPods coming off of the same train using each product brand to push the brand of the next.

Sony had the Walkman but missed the mp3-player market, didn't bring out a walkman phone, and now they have a product competing with AirPods that's naturally completely disconnected from the walkman both directly and indirectly because "walkmen are ancient" which is not some universal truth, that's just what they let their previously powerful brand degrade to. They've wisely chosen to brand their Airpod competitor the Sony WF1000XM3, who doesn't want products that sound like version of cruiser missiles, or shipping container dimensions? Ironically I heard a friened describe his pair as his "Sony AirPods", because that's what they are to him, the equivalent of Apple AirPods but cheaper and made by Sony, because even the people who own the product can't remember the name. So naturally friends ask why not get "Real" AirPods? And his answer was price, which makes the product sound like a cheap discount version. But it's in the same price range and same quality and even beat out the AirPods in some reviews. Talk about a branding disaster.

> didn't bring out a walkman phone

They actually did, the Sony Ericsson W800. But if you didn't know about that, it kinda proves your point, the branding wasn't a resounding success.

He’s saying it should have been named the “Walkman Distance” or some inspiring name that evokes phone and walkman. Not the number that sounds like a container dimension or like the lubricant WD40.

I loved my W800i, it was a revelation to me, although it had no headphone jack but a clunky adaptor, i used it way longer than I needed to. Simply an outstanding device at the time.

I didn’t understand Sony’s strategy back when the iPod was big and I still don’t now.

At roughly the same time I got an iPod, and an Apple-hating housemate bought a Sony MP3 player with a name only a barcode scanner could love. Also it couldn’t play MP3s, instead a weird proprietary format that didn’t work anywhere else. Songs had to be converted using their crappy software.

He swapped it for an iPod within weeks.

Even now, the conversation is ‘what are those?’, ‘oh, they’re AirPods’. Compared to ‘what are those?’, ‘oh, they’re Sony WC-31... err, Sony headphone things.

Good work guys.

The worst part, sony manages to screw this up even when they are in the lead. They have a line of Bose QC35 competitor over the ear headphones that legitimately beat Bose (in terms of sound quality; for fit and such, the opinions seem to be 50/50, but pretty much every reddit thread on headphones with active noise canceling within that price range will recommend them), while maintaining the same price. As of today, they are my favorite over the ear headphones that feature noise canceling.

So far, they have 3 generations of those (over the past 5 years iirc). You know what the naming scheme for each generation is?

MDR-1000X (that’s the gen i have and love; heard that the 3rd has some great improvements over the first two as well) -> WH-1000XM2 -> WH-1000XM3

To add an insult to injury, it is literally just one character away from just as poorly named “sony airpods”, which is WF-1000XM3.

Sony’s bet was that they could overcome the strategy tax by sheer talent. They could for a while (2 decades ?) but ended up losing when software became a major part of the business.

Software has always been their Achiles heel.

Their laptop where cool but running widows with super custom drivers. Their music players were cool but running weird formats with proprietary interfaces. Anything that needs software intercompatibility has been basically doomed under Sony.

In contrast Apple has decent software and overcomes the strategy tax by canibilizing itself restlessly and letting third parties eat their lunch where they’re not good enough (to a point. Apple still clings at default apps on iOS for instance)

Sony's PlayStation is a popular consumer software platform, showing they’re not completely incapable of providing usable software.

I'd point more towards the competitiveness of the digital music market making their aggressive attempts to lock customers into their own narrowly focused music platform much less appealing. In game consoles, proprietary content is the point; not so much in audio gear.

Playstation is basically embedded software though, and everything that runs on it has been custom made for it (it’s also interesting that it spun from a Nintendo cooperation, which makes it a very special division compared to the others)

In that respect their MD player was also running decent software, it just didn’t talk to anything not Sony produced.

Anecdotally, they also have a joint venture with Docomo that worked on NFC payment solutions that was super successful with genuinely strong software.

On the music market, I think the lockin wasn’t so much an issue (iPods also locked you in to some extent) than Sony’s desktop software being utter garbage.

I actually bought a Net Walkman at that time because I liked the hardware more, and it was hell: I’m not even sure there was any mac support, I might have run a VM for that, and even in a proper windows environment it was still buggy, extremely time consumming to move tacks to the player, yet limited and low quality. I personally think Sony lost to itself, more than the competition coming for Sony.

Sony, exept their Playstation division, are terrible at marketing. You can sense there's an old guard there that is clueless about how to market a product in this modern age.

At the time Sony owned record companies and, foolishly, thought that they would make more money from IP than hardware. So they crippled their music players.

I had a Sony MP3 player in 2000. It only played atrac files and I had to specially rip and encode my cds to be able to play. The hardware was neat, it was like a thick pencil. But the software was purposely horrible because Sony wanted to not allow mp3s or songs bought outside their ecosystem.

I literally just had this conversation with a friend. He was interested in the WF-1000RX3 and I thought it was the over-the-ear phones, but it turns out that's their buds; the over-the ears are WH-1000RX3. (I may have those names wrong, they're just so stupid I don't care, but the point is, the only difference between earbuds and massive over-the-ear cans is the 2nd character in an alphanumeric soup)

"That Sony had the position an failed to use it to position new devices."

But Sony did use its previous products positioning to produce and market new ones. The arguably owned the "portable audio" market from their first transistor radio in 1955, through the Walkman brand dominance up until the first iPod.

They were no longer really able to compete after the key differentiator became software.

Amusingly the Sony WH-1000XM3 are absolutely superlative noise-cancelling over-the-head headphones. They're really a damned good product. But lots of Sony stuff seems driven by random PMs being good at stuff but not being able to make it part of the culture or something.

They also seem technology-driven.

As a Sony ex-fanboi: another fail was the painful bare achievement of stated specs. Sure product did X, but did so relying on weird tech stacks, or not X.00001, or cut corners in presumed but not actually stated specs. Result was that when pushed to a reasonable limit, it often either hit a brick wall or fell off a cliff, to painful results.

Variant: UI is all too often painful. Extra steps, easy invocation of dangerous mistakes.

Finally, the sense of abandonment. You bought it, WTF do you think you are - you want updates for years, or compatibility with other devices?

Vs...

Apple doesn't give much re: specs because they're mostly irrelevant in use. UI is nuanced. And everything is built to keep you smoothly progressing deeper into the ecosystem.

>didn't bring out a walkman phone

This isn't true but maybe that verifies exactly the point you're trying to make. Sony had a whole line of Walkman phones including a Walkman brick phone, a flip phone, and an awesome switchblade-style phone. They were able to sync music to your computer directly, without any software, and stored it all on a Sony memory stick. Unfortunately, they also did not have a standard headphone jack and relied on connecting headphones through the same data/sync port which meant that you had to use and buy the Walkman-branded headphones from Sony.

They were soooo close but a few key decisions made them fail miserably.

In my experience, the cool Japanese hardware company these days is Nintendo. The Switch is just about the neatest consumer electronics product I've ever bought (at least among the non-Apple branded ones).

> And make no mistake about it - a huge portion of these sales are people buying Apple's marketing - not buying the tech itself.

By definition all of the businesses that survive are good at marketing - Apple has managed to drive extraordinary value through positioning and differentiation and left everyone else to compete over the collapsing middle market.

Sony’s precise problem was underinvesting on positioning and brand and relying on their technical advantage ... which proved a problem when everyone else caught up with the tech and they couldn’t repeat the trick with other devices.

People say marketing like it’s something to be ashamed of, and that Apple should deliberately hobble itself by being bad at it. It’s really critical.

Sony's problem was never the hardware or the design. The problem was, special in the beginning of the MP3 / Smartphone age, they tryed to lock everything so hard with DRM (because other parts from Sony does sell Movies and Music). The even installed something like an trojan already very early in the MP3 market. So al lot of tech guys said "bye, bye Sony" when the market still was very young. I think they lost a lot because they had been so aggresive with there software in a such young market.

Apple had DRM on iTunes with FairPlay and AAC for around six years until the courts forced them to remove it. iTunes was still a huge business for them at the time. Sure that DRM was the real issue?

Likewise, claiming that the Root Kit business (by which time the iPod had been around for a good 5 years) sunk Sony’s business seems like a bit of a reach.

During that same era, Apple's slogan for the iPod was, notoriously: "Rip. Mix. Burn."

They were the first company to crack the nut of digital music sales, and getting those deals with the recording industry absolutely required DRM at the time.

> During that same era, Apple's slogan for the iPod was, notoriously: "Rip. Mix. Burn."

So the argument that Apple didn’t outcompete Sony on marketing rests on a marketing slogan from 20 years ago?

That slogan makes pretty clear to me what Apple’s priorities were and had been all along - put the customer’s needs at the forefront of their positioning.

Apple actually had a product for this too (itunes), which integrated with the ipod, and allowed you to seamlessly rip your existing CD collection and sync it to your ipod in one relatively simple piece of software. You can tell how important this was by the fact that apple produced a windows version of itunes.

I believe CD ripping software was relatively niche before that due to legal concerns. I don't think it was just marketing.

I bought an iPod in that era, and didn't buy a single DRMed song -- ripped all my CDs, that was more than enough. If you look at iTunes revenue vs iPod sales, most people did what I did. Sony didn't support that. And the smaller companies that pioneered ripping+mp3 players had less-attractive products and interfaces.

Ipod+rip in the west, was probably equivalent to cd rentals + minidisc "single digital copy" of Japan.

Sony wanted to keep the minidisk ATRAC codec (arguably much better than mp3, unfortunately while mp3 became ubiquitous despite patents, ATRAC never did) along with the draconic drm.

I lived a year in Japan in 1997-98 - I recall a fellow high school student had racks upon tracks of "pirated" MDs at home. It was a similar price model to streaming; less pr cd/disk, but "at least something" - as everyone would rent a CD and buy a blank mini-disk - and rip at home. No digital/lossless copy from a copied MD to a blank.

Classic example of the west being slow at adapting some tech, then "jumping" to the next (here, using a computer to rip cds, not dedicated hw, like an MD deck and cd player, linked via digital coax/optical cable). And then skipping cd rentals in favour of first pirated music, then streaming. Much helped by by free software like Winamp that AFAIK ignored the licensing on mp3 in most cases.

The iPods were certainly helped by mp3 file-sharing - that probably wouldn't have happened if they could only play back aac or whatever - if they weren't mp3 players not merely music players.

You don’t have to guess. Jobs himself said in his famous “Thoughts on Music” essay that only 3% of music on iPods were bought from iTunes.

https://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_pos...

Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats.

You should probably blame the music labels (for example, Columbia/Sony) for the DRM.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070207234839/http://www.apple....

>until the courts forced them to remove it

Citation needed. Steve Jobs was incredibly anti-DRM and it was only added because the content owners wouldn't license the music to Apple without it. Once the iTunes Store exploded and became a primary sales channel, Apple renegotiated their licenses and required all media to be DRM-free because, at that point, they had the upper hand.

That’s not at all what happened.

Around the end of 2006, the music industry was complaining that no other music store could compete with iTunes because the DRM wasn’t compatible. They wanted Apple to license FairPlay to competitors.

Apple refused and Jobs posted his famous “Thoughts on Music” letter on the front page of Apple’s website where he said that if the music industry wanted interoperability, they could license music to everyone DRM free and there would be interoperability. Especially since all physical music was already DRM free.

https://fortune.com/2014/12/14/re-thinking-steve-jobs-though...

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.”

There was some haggling back and forth about terms. The music industry wanted variable pricing, to be able to sell more music as a whole album and a cut of each iPhone sold. Apple refused all of their demands.

The other stores acquiesced and were able to sell DRM music before Apple. However EMI and some independent labels did agree from day one.

Two years later all of the music labels came to terms with Apple and allowed it to sell music directly on the phone over the cellular network.

Sony players were good but all those restrictions,need for special software and etc. was absolutely infuriating. That's why even today I'm staying with Android: drag&drop,no questions asked.

Yup Sony's investment into technology and media is a very tough balance and pretty much the reason why their endevours can't excell even with some of the best ideas and talent behind them.

Sony failed to compete against Apple because they weren't as good at software.

Not sure if I’m typical in this or not but I’m a heavy apple user but have been mostly “forced” into it but ended up loving them.

Got my first MacBook because of work. Was previously a windows / Linux user and didn’t get macs but ended up loving the MacBook Pro. Got an iPhone from work too, ended up loving that too. Got a pair of AirPods as present, use it pretty frequently now.

Seems like both a good thing (like it after using it) and a bad thing (wouldn’t have gotten into it if not for the unplanned opportunity) for Apple.

I think one of the strokes of genius for Apple here was the fact that they made AirPods work just as well with Android phones as they do with iPhones (minus a few secondary features).

Back when i bought airpods 2 years ago, I still had an Android, and they blew me away in terms of UX. Up to that moment, i have tried and failed to find a pair of fully wireless earbuds that worked as well and sounded as good (for earbuds, obviously). And even today, out of all people i know with android phones, about a third of them use airpods. Each one of them had a similar story of quiet dismissal of airpods for quite a while since the release, then they tried them, and bought them shortly after.

P.S. as of now, there are a few good non-airpods truly wireless earbuds that are solid alternatives. Back when i got them, however, every single model out there I tried had some critical flaw. Things like dropped connection or sound getting choppy and stuttery in certain areas. It mostly happened on busy street intersections, so i guess it had something to do with interference from a lot of other bluetooth devices, because the exact same thing used to happen to bluetooth connection in my old car at one specific heavy traffic intersection.

You know what doesn’t have that problem ever? Wired headphones. God I hate that they’ve removed the headphone jack.

One problem that airpods dont have is the dependence on cables and having to fiddle with them every time you get them out of your pocket or getting the cable caught on clothing. As well as other cable issues, like earbuds wiggling in your ears due to cable tension or weight. Not even mentioning the cables wearing out from regular use, rendering the whole set unusable (though there are some headphones that have detachable cables that can be replaced, but those are usually featured only on pretty expensive models).

Being able to just put them in your ears and instantly listen to music is something that i never thought i would care for, but after using airpods for a bit, there is no way i am going back.

I still use wired over the ear headphones, but only on my desktop. The desktop scenario is perfect for wired, since it is stationary (i.e., i never have to worry about unwringling the cable or worrying about it getting caught on clothing, and they are always plugged in).

P.S. i still dont get the point of your comment. You reply on the comment chain talking about Apple and their impressive entry in the field of wireless earbuds decrying the whole industry of wireless earbuds. It’s like going into a thread talking about how Tesla dominates in the EV market with their supercharger infrastructure and vehicle range, and exclaiming “you know what doesn’t have this problem? Gas cars.”

I’ve broken a phone due to a wire getting caught on a doorknob and ripping out of my hand. Guess what doesn’t have that problem? wireless headphones.

It wasn't until I started using AirPods that I realized how much headphone wires annoy me. I was also annoyed when Apple removed the headphone jack, but looking back now I am glad they did, since I don't think I would have started using AirPods if they hadn't.

It’s not just the marketing - it’s that if you buy all of your tech from Apple you have 1) top-quartile product quality and 2) remarkable little upkeep to do compared to compiling a collection of multiple brands.

What upkeep do you do with a $15 bluetooth headphone?

it's also the ecosystem.

I have an Apple Watch, it unlocks my laptop automatically. My AirPods connect seamlessly to my phone for listening to music, my watch when I'm working out and my laptop when I'm doing video calls at work. Continuity, AirDrop, AirPlay ... you can't deny that Apple has built an impressive ecosystem.

Damn Watch really unlocks macbook? I already sold mine (didn’t have a MacBook at the time) but I’ll consider purchasing one again, haha. Edit: shit, just realized how easy it is to fall into Apple’s trap.

They do! It's great how slick it is, you sit down at your laptop, hit any key and it wakes up and automatically unlocks.

i mean, i know airpds are the new platform on top of which things will be built.

"what the tech can do"? you mean the airpods?

what else is there?

You missed the first cool smart watch.

Pebble?

Mass market cool not nerd cool.

If Apple can make the same leap from iPod to iPhone with these earbuds we are going to see a sweat new product range.

Jim Collins talked about his conversations with Steve Jobs at the end of the Knowledge project podcasts. He started talking to Steve after Steve got fired from Apple.

I strongly disagree about the fashion bit.

The iPod was better than any competitor it faced ever. The UI with the click wheel was completely unmatched. Maybe the Zune, years later, came close, but Apple absolutely crushed it with the iPhone and iPod touch.

The iPhone was leaps and bounds ahead of its time, to the point that the then King of the hill, BlackBerry, didn’t even think it was possible. And the smoothness of the UI was completely unmatched. The pocketPCs of the time were clunky messes. The iPhone’s UI was so far ahead that it’s now the default UI for every phone.

And finally, the AirPods are a far superior experience than the alternatives. In addition though, the AirPods are extremely competitively priced.

My iRiver H340 was ahead of its time. It supported MP3 and Ogg Vorbis and had 40 GB, while the iPods of around that time were running around with 4 GB. Oh, and iTunes DRM.

I bought an iPod Classic later on (with 160 GB) to experience the genius usability of the iPod. Except, I didn't experience it.

The major innovation of the iPhone was that it had a capacitive touch UI (which allows finger use, gestures, etc). The iPhone did not have an App Store during release. It was missing a lot of features. It was Nokia who was the market leader around that point. I wish they fully bet on Maemo and capacitive touch instead of Windows Phone (they went the right way with the N9, but the predecessors were still too much on pen and resistive touch, or hybrid).

Right now, it is oddly enough Jolla who have a partly proprietary, partly FOSS, Linux-based OS (SFOS) for which you need a paid license for. After that, they won't track you though. The iPhone would've never sustained a big pie of the smartphone market though; it is Android which killed Nokia. Official SFOS has Android emulation.

I had a Nokia N95 when I first used an iPhone. It was clear within 5 minutes of using the iPhone that regardless of specs the iPhone was a vastly better experience. That’s how Apple defines “best” and the market has demonstrated that a huge chunk of the market agrees with them and will pay the price for it.

Why was this downvoted? The first thing I thought of was the iRiver. It was incredible at the time.

Because on HN it is allowed to downvote based on disagreement, and it is a thread about how well Apple is currently doing.

Replies like this miss the point completely. The iPod wasn't aimed at people like you who know what Ogg Vorbis is/was. It was aimed at the average, non-techy person and it absolutely crushed it.

Same with the iPhone. The major innovation of the iPhone was that it was simple to use and anyone could pick it up and use it without knowing anything about it.

Except the first iPhone was not simple to use. It didn't even have 3G. You couldn't use MMS. It lacked a ton of other basic features, such as custom software. Then there was the need for jailbreaking to get some basic features back.

Ever since Web 2.0 it was clear to me that a touch-based UI would win if you used a web browser; it was Apple's capacitive touch UI which was the killer feature. Nobody had such even though Mozilla was experimenting already with a mobile browser (Fennec). (For some use-cases, a keyboard is still desirable though. E.g. a Pebble during sports is better usable than a touch-based smartwatch.)

You don't need to know what Ogg Vorbis is; I knew because I ripped my CDs to Ogg Vorbis. I already paid for these. It allowed me to save even more space compared to MP3 and AAC.

>It didn't even have 3G. You couldn't use MMS. It lacked a ton of other basic features, such as custom software.

None of these things, in any way, take away from how simple the first iPhone was to use. Once again, you missed the point completely.

It was limited in its usage (terrible speed while 3G was widely available, limited applications while Symbian had these, could not update via repositories which my Nokia N-series could, could not even use a comm feature like MMS). Apple got away with it because of their iPod fame, and that the UI was a decent capacitive touch-based one which nobody else managed to do.

Again, nothing you've mentioned made the original iPhone complex. They were missing features. But them being missing didn't make using the phone complicated to comprehend.

Did you ever actually _use_ a Symbian device of the era you are referring to? I returned two different ones as they would freeze just sat in standby.

The only thing that came close to the usability and reliability of an iPhone in 2007 was the Blackberry.

Oh yes, Nokia E71. Brilliant device (obviously, with quirks). Keyboard did break eventually; got it repaired though. Before that a friend's Nokia Communicator.

I love that you continue to double down on your responses that keep, repeatedly, missing the point.

I love that you keep saying I miss the point, without providing substance why I do. We clearly disagree, repeatedly, as you'd put it. What you do is, repeatedly, waving away my arguments as irrelevant, by ignoring them and saying I "miss the point". Like that is going to convince me?

FWIW, I never used the original iPhone for a long period of time, but I did use the iPod Touch, and I did have usability issues with it (not in hindsight). Something simple as blocking ads, for example, it could not do without jailbreaking. I call that a design issue. That Google does such, is to be expected as it is their main source of income. Apple? Not so much. Multitasking was also something to forget about.

Because nothing that you've offered as a counter-argument has anything to do with how simple it was to use the device. The vast majority of users, at the time the iPhone came out, didn't care about "App Stores" or ad-blocking or anything else and none of those things detracted from the simplicity of the device.

Unless you have some kind of argument that actually addresses the premise that the iPhone was successful because it was the easiest smartphone on the market to use and had high discoverability, you're going to keep missing the point by responding with features that you wish it had when it launched.

The vast majority of users of Apple products don't care about feature X, until the Apple product gets such feature. Then, suddenly, due to some magic miracle, these features do matter. We're talking about basic functionality the current devices had such as capability-based security, App Store, ad blocking, cut and paste.

The only major innovation the iPhone was using, was a capacitive touch UI. iOS wasn't polished, as it lacked many basic features. Yet the UI was good enough and simple to use. Nothing I wrote here above is in contradiction with each other. The only thing you appear to disagree on is the importance of these missing features. If they had these features from the beginning, perhaps Apple would've released too late, and the market would be saturated already (as touchscreen devices were coming to the masses regardless).

What really cemented the iPhone for me was that, compared to early Android touchscreens, the iPhone's touchscreen was actually pleasant to use.

HTC had touch UI few years before Apple, Apple just happened to be very good with marketing.

Apple spent around 40-50m on the initial rollout, a sum completely unheard of in the industry. And they bested themselves every iphone release since.

Even today, closest contenders are far from that mark.

Someday I need to turn this into a blog post.

HTC may have had a touch UI, but they didn’t have a capacitive touch screen (did the XDA use a stylus? I’d wager it did).

More importantly, Apple was the only company willing to:

* commit all their resources to a single UI and single phone

* write their own operating system for said phone to have control over its fate and optimize for that UI

* offer a sales experience where people could discover the phone, see how it worked, and get expert help, with sales people who actually knew about the phone and weren’t offering users the choice of three dozen competitors at the same time

This "Apple is only good at marketing" idea is vastly off the mark.

Apple could put a capacitive touch screen in because they were willing to sell a phone for $600, carrier-locked on a 2-year, $40/month contract, at a time when phones sold for about 1/3 of that, and they could run a single well-optimized UI because they were somehow able to get Verizon (I think?) to agree to let a phone run a third party's UI untouched. It may not be "marketing" per se, but their success was very much business rather than technical.

In the USA it was AT&T. Other than that, agreed; it was an expensive smartphone. They've always been expensive smartphones, with ridiculous prices for storage (compare with Iriver H340 series). The cheapest iPhone was an iPod Touch.

It wasn't just "an expensive smartphone". It redefined how much the category cost. These days we shrug off a $1000 price tag so it's difficult to remember how extreme it was by the standards of the time, but "expensive smartphone"s in those days were $300 unlocked.

Are you sure? Wikipedia says CNET’s pick for 2007 was $300 with a contract.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Voyager

HTC had capacitive touch screens, with Touch being the flagship model

Not 5 years before the iPhone.

People don't spend $700 on a phone because they were hoodwinked by good marketing. And they certainly don't continue to spend $700 every several years because they were hoodwinked by good marketing.

People don't "need" to spend $700 on a phone a moto g is good enough

People also don’t need automatic transmissions, or heated car seats, or rib eye steaks, or remodeled kitchens. But most people happily spend extra money for nice things and experiences. The world will make a lot more sense once you internalize this.

But a 1000$ iPhone is not that much better than a < $200 Motorola G , this is from some one who is considering a single port USB hub just to isolate a USB DAC from the.

The processor is way faster. And the camera is probably way better (and still not anywhere near good enough, FWIW). Maybe you just don’t care about those features?

What does a faster processor give me ? and I have an entry level cannon DSLR if I want a better camera

Your preferences != other people's preferences. Most people prefer things to be faster. And most people do not own or (if they do) carry a DSLR. Phone cameras are important.

> Your preferences != other people's preferences.

OK.

> [...] Phone cameras are important.

Your preferences != other people's preferences.

> And the camera is probably way better (and still not anywhere near good enough, FWIW)

The camera on a $1000 iPhone is not good enough? For what? For whom? The cameras on mid range smartphones are amazing, these days. A $150 China phone or $250 West phone is great these days. It is basically adequate for a whole lot of use cases, including normal day to day usage.

The camera on the new phones are amazing, but nowhere near good enough. I think the bar for good enough is that every photo a regular person takes is an objectively great photo. People use these cameras to capture important moments in their lives. Important moments deserve great photos. Computational photography has gotten us much closer to that, but there is still a long way to go.

To capture important moments in their life, people have used worse quality in the past. The quality is going only up and up. When is good good enough? It has been good enough for me for quite a few years already (although always JPEG being compressed, so loss of details from get go).

Also, smartphones with multiple cameras are, in a way, unrealistic. There's quite some lack of realism in today's cameras, akin to autotune.

It is also not possible to take an objectively great photo. Everyone has different biases, interests, quality thresholds, etc. See e.g. [1] for a (result of a) blind test.

[1] https://tweakers.net/reviews/7566/blinde-test-smartphonecame...

> Except the first iPhone was not simple to use. It didn't even have 3G. You couldn't use MMS. It lacked a ton of other basic features, such as custom software.

You are describing missing functionality, but you are not refuting the claim of iPhone's simplicity of use.

There were plenty of things the iPhone couldn't do. Among these that it could, the experience was years ahead of the competition.

> [...] but you are not refuting the claim of iPhone's simplicity of use.

I already addressed that in my first post in this subthread:

"[...]

[...]"

> and anyone could pick it up and use it without knowing anything about it.

I wouldn't say that's accurate. Like the iPod before it, the iPhone relied on experimentation and peer demonstration for UI comprehension. It wasn't discoverable.

My single instance of using an iPhone resulted in total failure in determining how to switch between two running apps. I kept ending up on the home screen and having to click the app's icon again.

Apples clever hack around that was to let customers get hands-on with the devices before purchase in controlled Apple Store environments where they could be nudged into thinking that they had mastered the UI themselves.

>My single instance of using an iPhone resulted in total failure in determining how to switch between two running apps. I kept ending up on the home screen and having to click the app's icon again.

Except this was exactly how the original iPhone handled app-switching. It was only by getting people used to that paradigm that modern smartphones were even able to introduce mobile multi-tasking. At the time of the iPhone's release, Blackberry was king and switching apps was a matter of hitting the "Back" button over and over again until you got back to the main menu of the Blackberry OS. On some models, you could click on a scroll wheel/ball and click "Go back to App Launcher" (or something similar). Precisely what the iPhone did was give people a home button.

The iRiver H340 came out in 2004, the iPod came out in 2001. Apple basically had the world's entire supply of tiny hard drives on lock for a year or two, after that other players could finally compete in that form factor (contemporary MP3 players either had little storage or were almost walkman sized).

Remember itunes? UI was horrible from day one and got worse over the years until they killed it. I don't think it was ever a dealbreaker. UI is not the whole story here.

iTunes is very much alive for the majority of IPhone/iPad users.

I really don’t think so. I’d say only minority is using it after streaming services became popular and you can easily do OTA updates. Not much of a reason to use it anymore, that’s why Apple even discontinued it.

Uhh... what? Apple didn't "discontinue" iTunes. It just got renamed to Apple Music. They separated out the syncing features but it's still the same product.

It’s not discontinued for Windows. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/itunes/9pb2mz1zmb1s

iTunes Store? That’s not the same as the music app.

I haven’t needed to connect an iOS device to iTunes since iOS 5 in 2011.

It’s pretty much the main way to get any movies from a Windows personal drive on an iPad, etc., unless you’re using something like Plex.

Edit: added Windows clarification

Not any longer, drop a file into iCloud, go to VLC, enjoy movie. The files app upgrade is pretty neat.

I do in fact use Plex. The last time I downloaded a video, I used VLC. There are plenty of ways to get movies into VLC - any cloud storage provider and its own website. The VLC app on iOS exposes a website you can use to upload movies.

Also; Now you can copy media directly from a USB attached hard drive or a network share using the Files App.

The iTunes UI was, by far, the best for legally acquiring digital music when it launched.

It was also the best for maintaining a library of illegally acquired music until they diluted the feature set into what the music app is today.

And completely fucked it by the looks of it. I'd take iTunes back over that mess any day.

My understanding is that the Airpods are not better than the high-end competition. There's plenty of $100-150 Bluetooth earbuds that have better sound quality, and a handful of sub-$100 ones that are just as good. You're paying for the name.

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-airpods-review-wireles...

>The biggest downside? Their sound is just OK. AirPods produce a perfectly average sound that's clear in the mid-tones and is good for podcasts but doesn't pack much in the low end. And because of their open design, sound isolation is terrible. There's also no noise cancellation, so you'll be stuck hearing traffic or crowds around you. The Jabra Elite 65Ts produce much better sound at about the same price. Even budget alternatives like the $80 Anker Soundcore earbuds offer just-as-good sound for half the price.

I've read pretty much the same take from most reviewers I've looked at. It matches quality on cheaper models, and is outpaced by competitors in the same price range.

Audio quality is only one of the metrics for comparison, including:

- form factor (my powerbeats pro case is huge compared to airpods) - handoff between different Apple devices - BT reliability/connection strength (mostly down to BT 4 vs 5) - fit and finish - noise cancellation

People weigh all of these things differently to arrive at what is "best". If a broad range of wireless buds all meet someone's threshold for acceptable audio quality, the other factors will be deciding.

Audio quality may be only one metric, but it is by far the most important. When shopping for headphones/iems you first listen to them and find the ones that sound how you like, then you compare on all other factors. I think most people who buy them do so because the marketing, not due to the experience. They know the brand and know they won't suck. Not that they are the best.

I doubt anyone I know cares about audio quality better than what airpods provide. What they care about is a device that works (I.e. pairs and has long battery life). Plus it has some neat features integrated with other Apple hardware, such as being able to listen to the audio from an Apple TV.

It isn’t by far the most important. I have numerous audiophile headphones which provide a better listening experience than AirPods, but I use AirPods almost all the time because they are with me when I need them.

"The best camera is the one you have with you" is a saying among photographers, and the same goes for headphones. Apple realised this a long time ago, and they sell both.

I, and I expect many others, mostly use them walking down the road, or around the house. And mostly for voice, not music, in my case. Audio quality certainly isn’t my main priority; comfort, battery life, and reliability are all far more important.

Form factor is largely a fashion parameter which is what OP is saying , it is not purely technical superiority driving buying decisions

Usability is by far the biggest factor for me when it comes to AirPods.

3 years ago, they were the first seamlessly and reliably working product to free me of the cabled ear buds mess.

Were there other bluetooth ear buds before? Yes. Were they complete and utter shit to use? Also yes.

Now, 3 years later, a few competitors arise and some are better in some ways than AirPods - but again none are better than AirPods Pro. Active noise cancellation always has a markup of around $100 no matter the brand or product. So still, these AirPods Pro are fairly priced in my opinion (AirPods + $100).

You have to actively hate on Apple for even claiming any bluetooth in-ear buds are better than AirPods Pro as of today.

Samsung etc. caught on to AirPods after 3 years - but certainly not to AirPods Pro.

I think you missed parent's point, which was 'experience.

With Airpods for the most part you're paying for the convenience and features. With the W1 chip they pair super fast and are really convenient to use. Sound quality is decent but something like the Sony WF1000xm3's will obviously blow them away.

Try saying WF-1000XM3 five times in a row. I have them and they sound awesome, but I can't deny that both the case and earbuds are much bulkier than AirPods, making one look "odd" when wearing them. Also the app is pretty horrible, it only sort of works 50% of the time.

Battery life, overall size, and warranty policy on airpods is very competitive.

When you can buy three units for the price of one, warranty doesn't really cut it. And it's easy to find competitors with a one year warranty. The latest one I'm using is earfun, with 30 hour battery life (longer than Airpods), wireless charging for the case, and 18 month warranty.

Apple charges an extra $40 for the wireless charging case - airpods are $159, Airpods with wireless charging case are $199. Earfun earbuds are right now less than $40 total on Amazon, sold by the brand, and are better than Apple's offer at 199 as far as I'm concerned.

AirPods are the only Bluetooth earbuds that don't give me instant pressure headaches. For some reason, nobody other than Apple wants to make wireless earbuds, or even semi-wired Bluetooth "sport" earbuds, that don't have some kind of conformant in-ear seal to them. In at least this sense, Apple's product is decidedly "better."

Or, one might say, Apple's product is the only satisfactory product on the market. It could certainly be better; along some axes, it's strictly worse than its competitors. But along a crucial axis, it meets a minimum standard of quality—not hurting my ears—that nothing else does. Sort of like modern VR products were "better" in that they finally met the minimum standard of quality of "not making me throw up."

(You can tell that Apple is thinking specifically about this problem when nobody else is, because when they decided to add a conformant seal to the AirPods Pro, they then spent who-knows-how-much figuring out a way to actively pump air out of the ear canal to relieve the pressure imbalance you create when you shove the 'bud in there. I haven't tried those, but I'm pretty sure, from the description of the pressure-equalization tech they employ, that they wouldn't hurt my ears either.)

> they then spent who-knows-how-much figuring out a way to actively pump air out

It's a simple vent, no pump, active or otherwise. My B&O's have not quite the same, but a flange in the silicon to achieve the same effect.

OTOH, AirPods don't meet a minimum standard of quality for me, namely that of actually staying in my ears. They just kind of sit there, dangling, and fall out as soon as I turn my head. Only earbuds with an in-ear seal stay in — it just seems to be how my ears are. (I haven't tried out the Pros, however.)

Airpods dominate because when you put them in your ears, they work immediately. They also have a great case, which means you usually have them with you when you need them.

And finally, the AirPods are a far superior experience than the alternatives. In addition though, the AirPods are extremely competitively priced.

The former is subjective, as for the latter - what's the competition to which they are favourably priced?

And the Zune was crippled by PlaysForSure DRM, even coming later.

Apple added on their own crippling DRM after that.

All made possible by multitouch coming out of MIT! This is the video if i am not mistaken: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89sz8ExZndc

AirPods are objectively great and it has taken 3 years for anything better to come out (and I would rather have seamless pairing than negligible audio quality improvements), but fashion is absolutely part of this.

The same is true of the iPod and of the iPhone. To me, that doesn’t diminish from the fact that those are/were best-in-class products, but the ubiquity is absolutely based on fashion.

The same is true of the Apple Watch. Of course the irony here is the Apple Watch was very much marketed as a fashion accessory first. That didn’t work. When the messaging pivoted to health and those capabilities got better then the completion (and there is no Android Apple Watch competition. Fitbit is the closest.), adoption spiked. But again, there is a still a very strong fashion component, even tho that isn’t a large part of the marketing anymore (the attempts to target luxury fashionistas have shifted and that has IMHO made for a better product all around). You don’t get a smart watch. You get an Apple Watch.

What exactly is this seamless pairing that Airpods do so much better than everyone else? I've not noticed much in the way of seams on the other wireless earbuds I've tried. Connect on device, it works, and autoconnects next time.

You can think of the AirPods being paired to your iCloud account, and connecting to any authenticated devices is generally seamless and very quick.

So, not seamless if you use Android, Windows, Linux, a Mac laptop and an iPad like I do.

It would be seamless between the Mac and iPad… I'm unsure how you would expect Apple to achieve it on devices they do not control though?

Create a standard. Release it as royalty free. Contribute implementations to open source.

The way it's been done for decades.

I've used quite a few wireless headphones/buds, and have yet to see anything as smooth as connecting a new pair of Airpods to an iPhone. The process takes about 2 seconds, and 1 second of that is you opening the lid to the charging case.

Have you tried using any of them with multiple devices? Not at the same time, obviously, but in scenarios like "listening to them connected to phone while on the bus, getting into your office, switching to listening to them on your laptop".

If not, I recommend you testing out this specific scenario. For a lot of the ones I tested, it becomes an exercise in patience and frustration. There were even some that refused to pair with more than one device at a time at all, meaning that every time you switch a device, you have to do the whole pairing process again. And that wasn't 10 years ago, i tested this less than 2 years ago.

And even the whole pairing process is annoying. Best case scenario, you can just pair them using the standard bluetooth settings on your phone. Worst case, you have to deal with some custom app (that you have to install on your phone) and do the steps from there (looking at you, Sony; I love your WH-1000XM over the head line of headphones, but ffs this is just bad UX). Contrast it with AirPods, where you just need to open the case and put them close to your iPhone. You do it once and then completely forget about having to do this ever again.

P.S. if your other device is an Apple one as well, it gets even more seamless. You don't need to pair it in that case, you just switch the audio output device on your macbook from speakers to airpods, which are already present on the list of audio devices (as long as you paired it with another apple device of yours first).

I've been switching between my Ubuntu laptop and Android phone. Pretty simple, I do need to disconnect it manually on one device before switching to the other but that takes a second.

I don't believe Airpods would be any better in that scenario.

I do need to disconnect it manually on one device before switching to the other but that takes a second.

Only a second if your kids don’t have it, or you didn’t leave it at home, or...

With AirPods, one does not need track down the other device.

I've used a $50 pair that had that feature, if I cared about it I'd use that over Airpods.

So I can go find the ones ikeboy used some time ago, if I can find them, and the user isn’t misremembering... or I can go buy AirPods. Going AirPods on this one.

> ...but that takes a second.

A huge percentage of our species gladly trade money for, objectively speaking, very minor improvements in convenience or experience. Apple has been taking this fact to the bank for 30 years. You may not have the same preferences, but you're probably in the minority. FWIW.

I think our perception of improvement is not linear when it comes to a lot of things, one of them being the “convenience of time” and we attribute an strong preference for something objectively better even if the improvement is marginal. The “slightly sharper camera lens” or “slightly lighter bike”. In terms of time, waiting 30 or 20 seconds for a computer to boot up won’t make much difference to most people but waiting 10 or 1 second makes a huge difference in perception.

If you're using Ubuntu and Android then you're already trading less convenience for either financial or philosophical reasons. So, you're probably not the market for AirPods.

Not the GP but I use Linux and Android primarily because they're more convenient (to me at least).

I'm philosophically aligned with Linux but not with Android.

My killer Android feature is having a microsd card. Not supporting that is very inconvenient of Apple.

I've tried both Windows and Mac, I just like Ubuntu better.

microSD is a big, big reason I'm still using Android. Before that the key factor was replaceable batteries, but all the OEMs shifted to non-replaceable sometime around 2015-16.

>(looking at you, Sony; I love your WH-1000XM over the head line of headphones, but ffs this is just bad UX)

Could not agree more. I love the WH-1000XM3s (and loved the XM2s before that), but the UX on this stuff is just so frustrating.

Bose sport has seamless nfc Bluetooth pairing and supports multiple Bluetooth connection switching with ease. Worth checking out, I enjoy my pair in the gym.

I came here looking for excuses folks spending 200 odd bucks on apple headphones tell themselves... aaaand found it! Seams!

Talking about seamless, the 3.5mm jack is far more seamless and robust to me. I wonder how long before they seal that hole on the only apple product (of the ones I use) that has it yet ... the macbook.

The difficulty is when headsets are paired with two devices at the same place, eg phone & laptop. In the <$80 Android wireless headset market, at least, everyone requires that you disconnect from one device and then manually connect to the other. That means power cycling the headsets or disabling Bluetooth on the device they were connected to.

I believe there are higher end non Apple devices that have solved this.

I can't concur on this at all; I have a 59 dollar LG in ear Bluetooth stereo headset that easily and seamlessly auto connects to at least 3 different devices, two Android and one Apple. Multiple Bluetooth earpieces (of the single ear kind) from jawbone and Plantronics, though not nearly as cheap, have been similarly painless and this has been the case for at least 5 years, since Galaxy Note 2 days. I would never have guessed this was even a pain point that needed solving.

Much like how my Apple cables outlive everyone else’s (I still have working 30-pins), someone is going to have a good experience with BT audio and switching from one device to another. But I know other people have longevity problems with their cables, and if you didn’t know before, you know now that people have these problems with Bluetooth. I, for example, have used BT audio almost since it was a thing. I generally don’t buy cheap shit, but I’ve had the same problems others complain about across multiple devices and audio gear.

I’m glad it’s worked well for you, though. I figured someone must being a good experience with it.

My $50 funcl AI would disconnect if you touch the right earbud for a few seconds, and you could then connect on the other device. But that died a few months in.

There are. Bose hardware (both the QC35II and SoundSport headset I've tried) handle this beautifully. They've also had audio sharing between multiple headsets working for years, which my partner and I have used numerous times while traveling.

> In the <$80 Android wireless headset market, at least, everyone requires that you disconnect from one device and then manually connect to the other.

I'm wearing a pair I bought over a year ago, and using multiple devices at the same time is as easy as just turning them on.

What model?

Jaybird Tarah

Actually my bose have the best pairing experience I’ve had so far. I flip a switch, it tells me I can connect a new device, then I select my bose with my device. I can even have my bose connected to several devices at the same time.

Apple Watch was very much marketed as a fashion accessory first. That didn’t work.

Au contraire, that was _vital_ to shifting the public discussion. Right at the beginning, public sentiment was "what? >$400 for a watch? are you crazy?" To stifle that thinking, Apple brilliantly went for the fashion accessory approach and announced the absurdly high-end Watch Edition at >$10,000 ... suddenly discussion went from "$400 is too much" to "$10,000 is absurd, but I can do $400."

Once the Overton Window for watches was shifted away from "vs $5 cheap watch" to ">$400 is reasonable", then Apple could shift the discussion to "...and look at all these other things you get besides time!"

They couldn't get to "...and health" until they got to "...reasonable price." Having achieved both, people buy an Apple Watch for all occasions, because ... well ... it's what sensible tech-connected people do.

You're giving Apple way too much credit on Apple Watch. They had no clue what they were doing with it. One of their original tentpole features was that it was the most accurate timepiece ever. They also thought that people were going to send each other heartbeats. They were clueless, in other words, other than that they knew there was something there.

I think you’re right. Especially since they just started to focus more on the health aspects of the Watch with series 4. They figured that this is apparently important to many Watch buyers, but it took them three series to truly understand this.

At ten grand for a watch your competing with Rolex which doesn't become obsolete in a few years

No, Apple wasn't "competing with Rolex" on price. Ten grand was to defuse the "OMG, $400 for a watch?" response to "well, you COULD get a stupid $10,000 version, but at $400 it's great." It also made the Rolex look lame ("it only tells time"), legitimizing getting an Apple Watch (far cheaper at that) instead.

Offering a handful of $10,000 Watch Edition probably segued into $1B in profits from associating the product line with high fashion. Nobody is ashamed to wear an Apple Watch with a 5-digit suit.

People were dissing the airpods when they came out, same with the ipad. Fashion was definitely not part of it there.

> but fashion is absolutely part of this.

I dont think it's fashion so much as not looking stupid. Airpods aren't cool, they just don't look bad.

"The iPod was better than any competitor it faced ever. The UI with the click wheel was completely unmatched."

I preferred the Creative Zen Touch to the iPod from the same year (2004), because:

- it had a great UI (similar to the iPod's, but the scroll area was vertical instead of circular)

- I could load music onto it easily (no need to use a special app)

IIRC Apple and Creative had some litigation about the IP for the UI, although I don't recall the details.

EDIT: I agree with your point about the iPhone.

iPod was a shitty player few tiers below the competition. Tiny battery life, tons of bugs, IO limitations, iTunes nonsence, original, but unergonomic ui, mechanically unsound engineering.

iRivers, Cowons, and Samsungs were a head above it without any doubt. They were just never marketed in US.

Same with Smartphones. Japanese phones had all features of a smartphone a decade before the rest of the world, but they never bothered to market them outside thinking of outside world being "not advanced enough" to culturally absorb a phone as an integral lifestyle element, and not as a work tool.

If this was true the iPhone would have made negligible inroads in the markets where those products were available. Instead it was a massive success immediately in every market where it was offered. I’m sure it had many flaws but it was enough better where it mattered to dominate the competition.

No, Apple got literally the only one thing right, and that's their marketing

It's not a controversial opinion, it really was all marketing and polishing existing tech like the airpods. When the ipod was first revealed, even apple fanboys at the time thought it was going to be a flop given the competition used common io, didn't require proprietary software, and didn't require a proprietary OS, and also was nearly half the price.

https://www.cnet.com/news/apples-ipod-spurs-mixed-reactions/

This forum thread from the 2001 release is pretty funny:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...

You say polishing, I say crushing superiority in user interface and design.

> This forum thread from the 2001 release is pretty funny:

Absolutely: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...

The Reality Distiortion Field turned out to be in this guy's head :) Seriously, many technical people underestimate the power of "bringing X to the masses" by making a beautiful, easy polished, effortless UX. UX (usually) trumps functionality.

> Oct 23, 2001

> #13

> iCan't believe it!

> It's now at the online Apple Store!

> $400 for an Mp3 Player!

>I'd call it the Cube 2.0 as it wont sell, and be killed off in a short time...and it's not really functional.

> Uuhh Steve, can I have a PDA now?"

A quote for the ages... :D

> The iPhone’s UI was so far ahead that it’s now the default UI for every phone.

When it comes to multitasking, the WebOS card metaphor won out and even came to iOS.

> WebOS card metaphor

WebOS is now a smart TV OS

The fashion was everything. The ipod mini with it's colors. The iconic dancing silloutte ad campaign, where the only defining characteristic is the status symbol of the all white ipod and all white headphone.

Growing up during the rise of the ipod, it absolutely was a status symbol first and foremost. Owning a zune gave you more ridicule in middle school than not owning an mp3 player at all. People were buying earpods without even buying an ipod, just to have that white cord dangling out of their ear.

Maybe older generations saw it as good tech only, but for late millenials, the ipod's popularity was due to an obsession for vanity. These were the years where everything had to be either lacoste, abercrombie, hollister, american eagle, or a 6 inch tall polo man, after all.

Part of the airpods success is that they tap into this obsession toward vanity harbored deep within millenials, who have also moved on from mall brands to gucci/balenciaga/supreme/insert bougie brand of the decade.

> The fashion was everything. The ipod mini with it's colors. The iconic dancing silloutte ad campaign,

I actually bought different headphones because of that ad b/c I thought it was so stupid, but do go on.

I continued to use the (black) earphones from another device _with an iPod_ to reduce the mugging risk.

> Growing up during the rise of the ipod, it absolutely was a status symbol

It was a status symbol for you and your teenage friends. Life expectancy is currently around 80 in the developed world and teenagers don't really have disposable income, so teenagers weren't really driving sales. Apple made cool commercials and cool colors because they could.

I agree with your opinion on the early iPod and iPhone, but personally I bought a pair of Bang and Olufsen wireless earpods around when the earpods gen 1 were released. I was not a big fan of the Apple design. My dad got the Apple earpods and to be honest, sound quality compared to mine was very lacking. It felt like Apple was a ripoff here.

As well any Apple main product this day in my opinion. Good and decent products, but severely overpriced. Nothing close to as revolutionary as they were in the early days. Look at functions in new models of iPhones or hardware upgrades in Macs, they are not new or exciting. These days they are so much alternatives, it's a wonder to me why Apple is still so popular. It has to be a fashion or prestige feeling in my opinion. And it's only a matter of time before that dies out in my opinion.

oof, this sort of writing is why I avoid any apple threads on hackernews. "X was better than Y" without any sort of support.

How come we have such high expectations for argument quality for every other topic other than how "apple is better" - it has reached the point where I read it and I almost jump to astroturfing conclusions. Fortunately for Apple their fans are dedicated enough to astroturf for free!

You are being unreasonable. People don’t have time to analyze every point they make, and they especially don’t need to if it’s pretty much agreed to by now by everyone in tech except couple of Apple haters like yourself. If you disagree with something call it out and let the parent comments defend it, instead of complaining how hacker news is full of fanboys. It’s what forums are for after all.

Okay here's ways in which I found the AirPods to be vastly superior to any other bluetooth headset or earbuds I've tried, including more expensive over-ear noise cancelling ones: -The H1 chip ensures a quick connection that's more stable than any other bluetooth device I've experienced. Much less pairing hassle and dropped connections and fiddling in menus. At a competitive price that already makes them superior to anything I'm aware was out for sale at the time. Add to that the tiny charging box that always keeps them topped up, and it's a winner for me. (This comment was indeed written at no cost)

I agree with this. I once thought I lost my airpods, and had some gripes with them, so I bought a similar priced bluetooth headset from another brand. I wore those for 2 weeks and had many more gripes with it.

Then I found that my airpods were under the couch and I immediately switched back.

AirPods don't have a single competitor. There's no clear alternative on the market.

It's Air Pod or...

TOZO T10? Sony XB950B1? LETSCOM IPX7? KOVEBBLE IPX7?

Fuck I have no idea what all these numbers and letters mean, I'll buy some Air Pods.

There's plenty of AirPods competitors on the market now with easily recognizable names. I'm a proud Samsung Galaxy Buds user myself.

Great name actually.

Sony WF-1000MX3s, Jabra Elite 65ts (which I own and don't like using at all, should've returned), Samsung Galaxy Buds (my commute dailies and much more akin to airpods in use, not amazing but I love them). There are now a lot of BT5 mobile earbuds w/ good ANC in the $100-300 range. Not sure what the top of the line in the last 3 months has become as I'm now swimming in headphones. My work dailies are the Sony WH1000XM3s (which actually replaced my XB950B1s, XBs don't have ANC like 1000s do).

To someone who uses Sony, AudioTechnica (loved my ATH-M50s for.. 5+ years) , Jabra. etc you tend to learn the numbering not that it's great. It's like buying a 3 series or 5 series BMW. There's usually some way to determine which class they're in from that brand, like the Sonys were 1000MX2s before they became 1000MX3s, next will be the MX4, the preceding WF or WH is earbuds vs over-ear (no idea what WF or WH actually means, though).

What does air pods mean? I guess they are bluetooth headphones, but what are the specs, do they work with non-apple hardware/software? I would have to search for that info, so its just the same if they were called AIR IPX7 T10.

> I guess they are bluetooth headphones, but what are the specs, do they work with non-apple hardware/software?

To most buyers, they don't need to search for anything. It's an Apple product that works with their other Apple products because of course it does.

Huawei Freebuds and Xiaomi Airdots are clear alternatives in Asia at least. Airpods are very popular too, even in places where the cost seems prohibitive, partly because the Huawei and Xiaomi ones are also premium products.

> AirPods don't have a single competitor. There's no clear alternative on the market.

Why do you need only one competitor? I picked a random non-apple bluetooth 5 earpod and it's a superior product for over $100 less as far as I can tell.

If you have enough money not to care then fair enough, different target markets.

The sony WF-1000XM3 get mentioned immediately if you google/reddit/etc for "Air Pod Alternative"

I don't have enough money so I just sit it out completely and keep buying the same wired buds I've always bought.

You act like the fashion is not tech. Their stuff looks good because of engineering all the way down. Looking good is a feature.

I disagree with the idea that it's marketing. Apple does very little marketing these days. Apple products are a memetic virus.

> Apple does very little marketing these days.

Apple does a significant amount of marketing, and I'd argue that they've been steadily ramping it up recently. It's just that they're usually a lot better at staying out of your face about it.

First of all marketing != advertising.

But they certainly do advertising specifically. A lot has been oriented around photography for a while but that's hardly surprising as people certainly don't upgrade phones for texting or phone calls.

Remember when the airpods first came out? SNL, Conan O'Brian, all of twitter were basically dragging it through the mud and making a mockery of them. 3 years later you can't walk around a major city or airport without seeing a significant amount of people using them.

People made fun of pagers, cell phones and bluetooth headsets pretty relentlessly too.

Don’t forget about that one big fad called “internet”.

And the Tesla Cybertruck. I would bet on it falling in the exact same category: Being a Meme first, and a huge success later.

Apple is marketing company.

I hate Apple marketing, their ads always annoy me. Great products tho

> first cool MP3 player

The iPod was far from the first, far from the best, and maybe even technically not an mp3 player.

Replace "cool" with "actually working great" and I'm with you.

Hahaha, one of the actual coolest, most fashionable people I’ve known had nothing nice to say about AirPods. She said, “Steve Jobs would have never allowed that to happen.” And to be frank, they don’t look any better than the Bluetooth headsets that were around for years before, so I have to agree with her assessment. Personal taste, of course, but I’ve also never heard anyone say that AirPods look “cool” ever.

The only upside is they’re branded, so you can make yourself look like you’re the type of person who owns Apple products. Wow.

Straight from the basket of pretentious people who think they know what Steve Jobs would have wanted. They don't. Even Steve from year Y would not know what Steve from year Y+1 would want.

Like I said, personal taste, but I definitely took her opinion of it more seriously given her job is to sell fashionable clothes to fashionable people, and throw in some confirmation bias because I don't like AirPods.

I'm not even sure what standard anyone here could use to claim that AirPods (or anything) are cool. Apple products are a status symbol, and sure they have potential to be cool, but glorifying bluetooth earbuds as such looks more, to me, like we're just conflating whatever cool means with the idea of status.

I'm not saying they're mutually exclusive, but I am saying I require some actual definition of terms and proof beyond sales or people wearing them to take the claim seriously on HN. Otherwise, it just looks like a fanboy being a fanboy.

But yeah, anything sticking out of your ears that has a lower profile than wired headphones falls into this goofy uncanny valley of man-melding-with-machine, at least in my view. And this is why I believe that Steve Jobs had the design-sense to see that and not allow it. But hey, maybe not, maybe the way I have articulated it is completely wrong, and this goofy uncanny valley is actually really cool.

I wouldn’t say they are cool either. But I remember the time when landlines without wires were “cool”. Nobody thought putting the cord back was a good idea.

And the first cool smartwatch (although I would never buy one myself)

Not so sure about _the first_ but might agree to _the coolest_ ;-) Motorola Razr was very cool when it came out.

Impressive figures no doubt, but in my opinion flawed to consider Airpods as a standalone business and compare to other businesses. It's so successful specifically because Apple built bespoke chips, software, and integration across their ecosystem for the Airpods. This is something a brand new company building just the Airpods product would never be able to accomplish.

And even if they accomplished it, they wouldn't come even remotely close to being as financially successful with the same product.

Yup, good point. It's not possible to extract AirPods from Apple and still have them be as successful. But it's illuminating to isolate the business against a backdrop of other top tech companies. It's kind of like Apple spawned Silicon Valley's hottest new tech company in 2016.

I am on my third "generation" (Airpods, AP wireless, Airpods Pro) of Airpods and have never been otherwise in the Apple ecosystem. I use Android. I think there are probably some advantages like quick pairing and being able to see battery level quickly, but so far haven't specifically needed this information. Really love the Airpods, previous had several pairs of in ear earbuds like the Google Pixel Buds, Beats, and over ear stuff like the Bose QC35. The Airpods were nearly perfect, even without an iPhone, and the Airpods Pro have made me totally replace even my Bose over the ears.

I think it's an amazing product even without the integration and software and integration.

Even for Android you can simply download an app that gives very similar features.

The submitted title ('Airpods make more money than Spotify, Twitter, Snapchat, and Shopify combined') broke the site guidelines, which say: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

Cherry-picking the detail you think is most important from an article is a form of editorializing. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, do not do so by changing the title. Instead, post it as a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I have a pair of Airpods. What bugs me most is that le lithium battery is not replaceable, and will degrade after a couple years. which makes these a high-end throwaway device...

As opposed to the phone itself?

Once upon a day, phones had replaceable batteries. I'm still holding on to my ancient phone specifically because of that.

Quite a few of the replaceable battery devices I’ve had over the years got old, and then I had to be careful to not flex them badly, or the battery would momentarily disconnect and drop the power. Or you loose the battery cover, or the little plastic tab breaks and now it’s held on with tape or a rubber band.

The phone battery is hard to replace, not impossible.

Most phones are 10 minutes to replace the battery, or 30 mins if you've never done it before.

I think that's about the right tradeoff for something that will be done once every 2 years.

That doesn't differ from their other offerings...

Their laptops and phones do not have replaceable batteries, why would their headphones?

The batteries in the other items are replaceable, it’s just not easy. In my understanding, the AirPods batteries simply aren’t replaceable at all.

Then it’s just a matter of what you think is easy enough to be called replaceable. I would wager for most consumers a MacBook battery is not in that category.

There are repair shops for 'most consumers'. They do great work, but even they can't fix an Airpod.

That most consumers will come to Apple with their laptop for a service and Genius will replace the battery. Will genius replace the battery for their AirPods?

Yes (though in practice, they're probably just swapping the unit and sending the original back to be refurbished). https://support.apple.com/airpods/repair/service

When they “replaced the battery” on my dads iPad Pro they just sent him a new one. I don’t know if that holds for MacBooks as well, it might depend on the model: the 12” MacBook’s layered battery might be pretty hard to replace.

No, not really.

Practically, an iPhone battery is replaceable in you average mall tech shop in a mid sized town. In the 5/6 era, it was a 30 minute job if you’re being slow and careful. (I’ve got 3 screen replacements and 2 battery swaps under my belt from that era).

My understanding of the AirPods is that the complexity level is more akin to component level fixes for a main phone board. I’d expect that there are people who can do it, but they’re rare, and they’ve got specialized equipment, and it’s probably not worth it for an earphone battery.

Those batteries are replaceable, just not by you (officially anyway).

And for $49 each, Apple will replace the batteries in your airpods. (they probably just replace them)

If they aren't replaceable by you, they aren't replaceable.

You can buy a third-party battery an install it in other products with a bit of work. You cannot do this for AirPods.

If that's true, it actually sounds like a good deal.

https://support.apple.com/airpods/repair/service

It is true, and it is indeed a pretty decent deal. $49 over the course of a few years is imo a reasonable price I am willing to pay for this. They also have a similar reasonably-priced battery replacement program for iPhones as well.

The batteries are not replaceable, at all.

> An update to Monday’s report: Apple has confirmed that the new AirPods Pro are no more repairable than previous versions of the wireless earbuds. The pods are made partly with recyclable materials but due to size and build process (i.e glue) it doesn’t repair. Just replace.

https://twitter.com/LaurenGoode/status/1189663651214450688

I believe they were referring to the batteries in their other products, not the airpods.

Except their laptops and phones totally do...

What are you talking about?

Every iPhone since the 8 has had a strip of glue holding the battery down. They aren't intended to be serviced, especially not by users.

They're basically 3M Command Strips. They even have a pull tab. Calling it glue is being totally disingenuous.

That’s false. I’ve had the battery in my Apple laptops and phones replaced many times. They even monitor its health and tell you when to replace it.

> Their laptops and phones do not have replaceable batteries, why would their headphones?

That's like comparing a car to wheels. Laptops/phones have infinitely more use cases to them. Headphones are accessories.

Or, you can pay to replace the battery. I've done it with an old iPhone6 and got back a pretty usable device.

battery replacements aren't a thing for AirPods. You can send them to Apple to be recycled, though.

https://support.apple.com/airpods/repair/service

To replace the batteries: $50 each airpod, $50 for the charging case

I'd bet they just give you a new one.

Done this myself. They don't replace the battery but send you a new AirPod or charging case.

My understanding is that opening an AirPod without damaging the plastic casing is close to impossible to do.

My guess would be they replace them then strip the components out of your returned AirPod or charging case and recycle/reuse what they can.

BOM looks like <$10 (there's barely anything inside). Maybe $15 with those small batteries. I doubt it's economical to recycle. What's fascinating is that people are willing to pay so much over the BOM. But I guess that's Apple speciality making people do it.

I think you're significantly underestimating the BOM on those.

Hmm, I guess I've seen taerdown of something else than airpods on youtube, maybe a cheap clone and a mislabeled video. Heh.

Now I'm looking at iFixit teardown and it looks very different.

I guess you're right.

> Wedbush analyst Dan Ives estimates that the cost of production of AirPods is $59–$69

https://articles2.marketrealist.com/2019/09/airpods-face-sti...

almost everything apple makes has that feature ... degrades in a few years, throw away, buy another.

ipads, iphones, even some modern mac laptops that have the disks soldered and batteries glued, etc.

Apple products have really long life span compared to the alternatives, actually. That's why their products have very good re-sell value. Nothing degrades, you pass your iProduct down the line in the family to the less tech-savvy members. My father is using my iPhone 5 now and works great after the battery replacement. People still user their iPods, iPad 2's and so on.

Airpods are an exception to the rule here.

I wonder where this narrative comes from, can you please explain why do you think that Apple products degrade rapidly and are thrown away?

The modern macbook pros (not the recent 16's) have the worst keyboards ever. That won't last a few years without being returned to apple for the Free Apple Keyboard quality program.

That's an entire generation of Apple laptops of all kinds - Apple MacBook Air 13, Macbook Pro 13, Macbook Pro 15 - all of them having their keyboards eventually malfunctioning, and ultimately needing their keyboards refurbished or replaced outright.

If you think this doesn't indicate Apple has a quality problem I don't know what you're thinking about. (They admitted it themselves and have a repair program that basically has their entire slate of MacBook products on permanent free repair for the foreseeable future)

And by the way, when you take your laptop to Apple, and they offer to replace the "Top Case" for your laptop for free, where do you think it's going? the battery probably goes to refurb, but a large portion of it is just getting junked because it has a genuine design issue to begin with.

Here's some of the Apple gear from my family.

Macbook Pro from 2008: Still boots iPhone 4 (2010): Still functioning (although obviously does not run latest OS) iPhone 5s (2013): Still functioning (running iOS 12 just fine) iPhone 7: (2016): Still flawless

Same. After 2 years I had to buy a second pair.

Apple apparently DOES offer battery service for these, but it's $49 PER AirPod. If it was $49 for both I might be up for it.

Apple's battery service across the board is just too damn expensive. I get that it's the labor costs involved, but I wish they would put more thought into this.

I have three older iPads, a few older iPhones and a MacBook Air that are perfectly usable minus the batteries. but it would costs hundreds of dollars to replace them all so they just end up sitting in a bin because I don't have the heart to toss them.

Do they actually change the batteries in them, or do they just give you new airpods?

I can't imagine the genius bar has tweezers and microscopes for battery replacements in-store...

I'm not sure since I've never done it. My guess would be that they just give you new ones, then send the old ones away somewhere to be refurbished and sold as such. This was my experience with iPhones in the early days, actually. Now they actually try to fix them on site if they can.

They send you a completely new one. I know of exactly just one person who did it. He noticed that the mesh on the earbud itself was straight up new (his one was dented a little bit in certain spots due to his attempts to clean out some earwax using a sim-card ejection tool), and the plastic was spotless clean with no scratches.

And what apple is betting on is that people will prefer their totally sealed, light as possible, "throwaway" $200 product over the competitions user service, replaceable battery option.

It is the same bet they have made repeatedly with their phones. Smaller sim card (obsoleting old approaches) - removing headphone jack, switching to lighting, doing totally sealed (but durable) devices etc.

It's generally paid off - oddly people seem to prefer used apple products (ie, beleive in their durability) over used logitech headphones or android phones - so the actual life of apple products ends up being pretty long.

Apple's battery service fee is $49 for airpods and useful life is perhaps around 3 years, if you keep wanting to replace the batteries every three years. My quick sense is that most folks may retire their airpods after the second battery (6 years in) at the longer end.

So far their approach has paid of tremendously for them.

I am curious what other headphone providers are doing here. Ie, how easy is it to get a fresh set of batteries after 3 years that are of high quality and replace them. I've gotten burned replacing batteries in products with amazon replacements and the mfg sometimes doesn't even stock or sell new batteries for their devices so I've gone with Apple for now - if you go into their store for a new battery I've never had a problem with quality.

Calling it battery service is interesting - they are most definitely simply replacing the AirPod. The $49 battery fee is for a single AirPod - replacement for the pair is $99.

The question I have is if they are able to meaningfully recycle the used AirPods or if they just end up in the landfill?

I'd bet the average person contributes 10 times more plastic waste every single day than a single pair of airpods (by weight).

Yes it's still wasteful, but one of the absolute least impactful places to start optimizing your life given how useful the things can be over their 2-3 year lifespan.

I do not think the plastic is what is concerning. It is the energy put into manufacturing and shipping the item. This is a high end electronic device, with a bluetooth modem and a lithium ion battery. Plastic waste is one of the least significant problems here.

> The question I have is if they are able to meaningfully recycle the used AirPods or if they just end up in the landfill?

First they get sold as refurbished products in their primary market, or sold in 3rd world markets at a discount, and then they end up in landfills.

> Smaller sim card (obsoleting old approaches)

I've always just cut the old ones to fit and it's worked fine.

My AirPods, specifically the left one, cuts out after 5-10 minutes every time. Having purchased my AirPods mid-2017, I was pretty disappointed when I went to the Apple store and they said there was nothing they could do about it and I would have to buy a new pair.

Needless to say, I said no thanks. I'm about ready to throw these away and I'll probably buy a pair of Sony headphones this time.

There is an interesting comparison to be made between most of the crap we use today that isn't serviceable and is proprietary. My favourite devices growing up were Gameboys, and an iPod nano which wasn't serviceable realistically. I have all of my Gameboys up to SP in a box, I can pop standardized batteries into them and play them with at least as good performance as 20 years ago. The Nano malfunctioned after about 4 or 5 years and despite it being the first thing I spent more than $100 of my own money on, stopped being useful. By contrast, here's the ifixit guide for replacing the lithium ion battery in a DS Lite.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Nintendo+DS+Lite+Battery+Replac...

and here's the battery that you can order for $15 on Nintendo's official store. https://store.nintendo.com/battery-pack-nintendo-ds-lite.htm...

I was at Costco a while ago and overheard a conversation between some kind of store manager and several visitors in suits.

The manager was explaining that on weeks when AirPods are in stock their sales in the electronics department more than double. The exact numbers he mentioned escape me but were staggering. The whole time people were loading thousand dollar TVs onto carts - and the AirPods alone were doing that much over again in sales.

Airpods are an integral part of Apple's future medical ambition. Always in ear Airpods constantly taking your Temp, HR, Glucose, GSR, etc. With the kicker that it is only stored locally and securely on your device, all processing done locally via HealthKit. That customized data will change how we think about patient care.

>With the kicker that it is only stored locally

Do you think most people would want to lose all their data if they lose their device?

It's certainly possible for the Apple Health data to be backed up to iCloud. I haven't changed devices recently, so I don't know if it is.

Correct... it's backed up to iCloud or on your computer with itunes if you encrypt it.

It has the option to backup to iCloud with end-to-end encryption.

> Always in ear

What percentage of Airpods owners do you reckon _always_ have them inside their ears?

probably pretty high - apparently 17% of people in one survey said they have left them in during sex, so there's that

I'm going to need sauce on that.

Wtf aha, citation needed!

Primary source for the 17% number (although dubious considering it was 1,010 people online via Amazon's Mechanical Turk, and to qualify participants were required to be sexually active and enjoy listening to music):

https://www.tickpick.com/musics-influence-on-sexual-behavior...

You need to take them out every 2-4 hours for charging.

I've noticed a lot of people wearing just one, my kids included. They explained to me that by alternating earbuds they can wear them almost continually.

This sounds like the plot to a Dystopian tech movie. Something always in your ear... whispering.

We're only getting warmed up. Wait until they're invisible, or implanted in your skull.

Someone call Charlie Brooker!

The Seashells from Fahrenheit 451 fit into users ears like thimbles and they'd be worn into the night, lulling users to sleep.

I don’t know about always, but my APP are so comfortable I forget I have them on.

Same with my old bose SoundSports

Higher than I'd like. I find it incredibly rude and a bit disconcerting when I'm talking to someone and they've got Airpods stuck in their ears.

> Airpods are an integral part of Apple's future medical ambition. Always in ear Airpods constantly taking your Temp, HR, Glucose, GSR, etc

I don't think there's nearly enough evidence for this to be an _actual_ thing.

I effectively exclusively use my AirPods when working out. That alone would skew any medical data dramatically (avg. heart rate, blood pressure, etc.)

Wouldn't it be simple to detect that dramatic change and isolate it/ keep it out of averages? I think the fact that people work out in AirPods is a non-issue for this example. If anything, just a way to segment the data and get even more insight.

That's your problem no?

If they were being fancy I'm guessing you could use some buzzwords (AI etc. etc.) to combine the data along with the moisture content around the ear to determine whether someone is exercising automatically. (Assuming they don't already, my phone seems to be able to but not very accurately)

That's going to be annoying.

>That customized data will change how we think about patient care.

People keep repeating this almost like a PR slogan but is there any actual solid evidence that constantly measuring health data has a meaningful impact on average, healthy adults and is a reasonable thing to do?

A non-diabetic person does not need to constantly measure their glucose level, and if anything slight anomalies in otherwise asymptomatic people may very well create health scares or overburden the medical system with people getting things checked out that isn't a problem.

This is a very real trade-off already present for example when it comes to mammographies, with many studies suggesting the routine screening might be a net negative.

The economic incentive for the healthcare industry is very obvious when it comes to putting everyone on 24/7 surveillance, but is there any indication it meaningfully improves the life of individuals in general?

> People keep repeating this almost like a PR slogan but is there any actual solid evidence that constantly measuring health data has a meaningful impact on average, healthy adults and is a reasonable thing to do?

ISTR some studies that for certain measures, frequent measurement without specific indication of monitoring need tends to drive overtreatment and worse outcomes, not even considering things like mammograms where the measuring actually can contribute to the thing it detects.

No. And there can't be. There were 0 generations that were able to track their parameters on a constant basis. If over time it is proven that it is useless we can stop doing it, but for now let's at least try to collect such data and make use of it...

There is still a problem with this PR, since everyone is talking about that, but technology is nowhere near to deliver on those promises. Hope the hype won't kill off real work in developing good sensors.

Currently they're just causing a ton of ear infections and hearing problems.

https://www.reddit.com/r/airpods/comments/e2gmyw/ear_infecti...

A couple years ago, I got a bit of saltwater in my iPhone and the headphone jack failed. Since the next generation of iPhone (the iPhone X) was about to come out, I held onto it for a couple months and bought AirPods.

I then realized this was Apple's real reason for eliminating the headphone jack. It had nothing to do with courage. It was about eliminating a deeply ingrained user habit so they could solve the problem they themselves created. I wouldn't have bothered with the AirPods if my headphone jack had continued to function.

That said, I don't know if Apple's strategy bothers me. There are a lot of user behaviors rooted in history and old constraints rather than good usability. There are a lot of downsides, but as someone who views technology as ephemeral I don't know if it matters to me.

I then realized this was Apple's real reason for eliminating the headphone jack.

To do away with the point of failure that you so aptly illustrated by getting salt water in your phone?

I wouldn't have bothered with the AirPods if my headphone jack had continued to function.

That's you, though. There are clearly millions and millions of people who don't want wires.

The millions of people want reliability. They want something that just works.

Wires don't just work when they get tangled or broken.

Wireless doesn't just work when it runs out of batteries, gets glitches/interference, or is hassle to pair.

Apple was able to tip the 'just works' balance through good engineering.

I don't think the person you replied to is saying they wanted wires, just that they were entrenched in using what they had until they were forced to switch. It sounds like they like the new world better, just it took a push to get them to switch.

> To do away with the point of failure that you so aptly illustrated by getting salt water in your phone?

That's Apple's point of failure. The rest of the industry (mostly) has worked out how to make a headphone jack water-resistant.

> To do away with the point of failure that you so aptly illustrated by getting salt water in your phone?

That's Apple's point of failure. The rest of the industry (mostly) has worked out how to make a headphone jack water-resistant, years before Apple made any phone water-resistant at that.

The rest of the industry (mostly) has worked out how to make a headphone jack water-resistant

Yes, by removing the headphone jack on high-end phones, just like Apple did.

Let's not pretend this is an Apple vs. The Rest Of The Industry sort of thing. The whole sector is going that way; Apple just took the lead.

See also: Floppy drives.

> Yes, by removing the headphone jack on high-end phones, just like Apple did.

No, this is clearly incorrect. As I said in my original comment, there were water-resistant phones with headphones jacks years before Apple released one without a headphone jack, and there are ones being released now as well. While Samsung removed a headphone jack for a generation of their flagship phones, the generations before and after were both water-resistant as well. Samsung's newest releases (S10 Lite and Note10 Lite) both have headphone jacks and are water-resistant.

From years ago: https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/27/apple-if-samsung-and-sony-...

I mean yeah they have an interest in selling more ear buds.

But after having used Bluetooth headphones for a while, going back to wired headphones was pure hell.

> But after having used Bluetooth headphones for a while, going back to wired headphones was pure hell.

For me going back to wired was amazing. I no longer had to charge my headphone to listen to my music. Want to output to the speaker? Just unplug them physically.

I'm sure the airpod support this much better than the Bluetooth headphone I had on Android, but my biggest pet peeve was shutting them down each time I put them in my pocket, or else any call would go to them.

As you said yourself ... the airpods are better bluetooth headphones than the ones you had.

Charging is mostly a nonissue due to the case having a battery. shutting down is as simple as putting them in the case.

There are downsides (Airpods are expensive and though they can last a few years in the end are a throwaway product), but not having a cable being in the way and pulling out the headphones is also something I'd consider a downside so there's that I guess.

> As you said yourself ... the airpods are better bluetooth headphones than the ones you had.

Sure but we were talking about switching from bluetooth headphone to wired one, thus why I added that part even though we were on an Airpod thread.

> Charging is mostly a nonissue due to the case having a battery.

Which you still need to charge, the issue persist. Their battery life wasn't the issue, they could works multiple days without being charged, which just add to the issue because then it means I could go multiple days without charging then and then forgetting to do it.

> shutting down is as simple as putting them in the case

That's certainly a nice feature that would alleviate my biggest issue, that's for sure. I knew they would have fixed that or else they wouldn't be as popular, or at least, much more people would complains about that.

> not having a cable being in the way and pulling out the headphones is also something I'd consider a downside so there's that I guess.

Sure but that's a minor downside for me versus the issues I mentioned about wireless headphone. The only times I accidentally pulled down my cable was when I was training on a treadmill, which is also what made me buy bluetooth headphone in the first place. I stopped using them before stopping training...

You could see this a different way. Apple has a way of being the forcing function on tech: serial ports, CD drives, low-res displays, Flash, USB-A, headphone jacks.

They push us into a new shift in technology each time. It's like accelerating us by being a single large agent. No one else has the market presence. Suddenly I was able to buy Jabra earbuds that are pretty damned good but the equivalent of which cost twice or thrice as much.

I've always wanted ones like this, not the weird "around the back of the head like I can't keep my glasses on" ones that make me look like a dork and not the "sound quality is worthless and you look like a stock trader" jawbone ones. This is the best world.

I used to have wired headphones die all the time due to stress on the wires connecting to the earbuds or to the phone, and get ripped out while walking nonchalantly down the road. There are a lot of problems with wires that are solved by not having them.

This is quite alien to me, I've had the same pair of pink Sony (£10) Earbuds* for the last 3 years on pretty much continuous use (Running, Working, Walking etc.) and they're faultless despite having been through the wash twice (and various other beatings).

* My hearing is a bit weird so with the right EQ they're better than pretty much anything other than actual speakers for me.

>so they could solve the problem they themselves created

I don't know if I agree with this assessment. Apple is, to a fault, driven by the user experience of their products and what the "ideal" of a situation should be. It's very likely that AirPods, or some early variant, was discussed while Steve Jobs was at Apple and the conversation probably went something like:

"What would be the perfect user experience for listening to music on an iPhone?"

"I pick up my phone and hit play and the music plays directly into my ears."

AirPods are about as close as someone can get to buying the product, putting them in their ears, and immediately listening as you can get. They set themselves up as soon as you open their case and they automatically connect to the active audio device when you put them in your ears. No one would ever add a wired cable to that process unless they absolutely had to for technical reasons. The only way to make this even more ideal is that the listening device is already in your ear or they can beam the audio directly into your ear canal without some kind of device you insert.

Am I out of touch or are audio-first interfaces use in public spaces/work very unpopular? I rarely witness people actioning Siri/Google assistant, most of the time I guess for obvious reasons. I wonder what's the future of audio-first UIs.

Obviously that's not the case in private, at home, the car and at specialized aplications (ie medical), where audio tech is thriving.

No you're correct. I personally feel silly asking Siri to do anything, but yeah. I've never successfully written a speech-to-text text-message, my brain just struggles to make it happen. Here is to hoping that brain-link stuff actually happens (not holding my breath though).

It’s because they’re amazing. They’re seamless. And the work well enough and I didn’t know I hated wired earbuds until I got them.

At a time when Apple in many ways feels like it's stagnating, the AirPods are a breath of fresh air. With an "old Apple" focus on the details, they present a fantastic user experience and give me faith that Apple still has the ability to innovate when freed from the constraints of a long-lived, entrenched product.

I can't wear any earphones for more than 5 minutes without them falling off, this is due to the morphology of my ears. I wonder: how large is the percentage of people with the same problem? Anecdotal, but I know personally at least a couple other people that can't wear earphones for the same reason.

Note: I'm talking about earphones/earbuds exclusively, headphones are fine for obvious reasons. Also some types of earphones (designed for sports) that have "ear-hooks" behind the ear are fine since the hooks will keep them in place.

Note 2: my ears don't have the "bump" (not sure what the scientific term is) that is circled in red in this picture https://imgur.com/a/CJv20Zu

Edit: that bump that I don't have is called "Antitragus" https://elementsofmorphology.nih.gov/anatomy-ear.shtml

If it's an ongoing problem that you really want to solve, check out companies like Etymotic who will take custom molds and make you exactly the earbud you need. I don't have headphones like this but I did get my musician-quality earplugs for live music done this way and it is a 1000% game changer for me.

The pros you sort of shove into the ear canal and they're more or less wedged in place, right? Same with other earbuds like jaybirds. They're very different design than the normal airpods in that sense which I could totally see falling out if you were missing this "bump" on your ear.

So as I said in another comment in this thread, in my experience, many in-ear earphones don't have enough "grip" inside the ear canal and while they will stay in place in the short term (5-10 minutes) they still rely on that "bump" in order to stay in place in the long term. The ones I've tried had rubber tips, another user told me that there are some with memory foam, maybe those ones would work

True for me as well, but more importantly, the horrible audio quality literally causes me pain. Something to do with the poor frequency eq curve and limited range, I'm guessing.

(Plus, phones that leak audio seem rude in public places.)

Interesting! Do foam earplugs work for you (expanding in the ear)? If so, Comply makes foam tips to fit various models of earbuds.

Yes the foam earplugs that you wear for noise protection work for me, before reading this thread I didn't know that there were foam tips for earphones, thanks for the tip (pun intended)

Does this mean you can't wear in-ear monitor type things, e.g. memory foam tipped earbuds that stay in (I thought) through pressure in the ear canal?

In my experience, many in-ear earphones don't have enough "grip" inside the ear canal and they still rely on that "bump" in order to stay in place. I'm talking about the ones that have a soft rubbery tip, I've never tried earphones with memory foam though.

You’re not alone, I have trouble keeping earbuds in also. If I keep my head still, they will slowly slip out after about a half hour. Doing any sort of exercise will make them fall out. I have tried many different tip types and sizes for these and other earbuds/IEMs. Outside of expensive custom-fit IEMs, I’m not sure what to do besides resort back to over-ear headphones.

You are definitely not alone! I have a very small antitragus, earbuds are not an option for me. They hold so poorly that I can't even walk around without them falling out, much less do any real activity. And if that weren't bad enough, for some reason they cause a significant amount of pain after 10 minutes or so.

I have the same problem with the old airpods, but I have had no problem with other type of in ear ear bud like the pro models.

Unfortunately those don't work for me either. Yes the in-ear ones will stay in place for a longer time, but never more than about 10 minutes, which is not enough to make them viable for me.

I lack that same bump! Historically I have only ever bought the kind of earbuds with the behind the ear hooks as well. That being said, the airpod pros stay put for me pretty well out of the box, but even better after I modded them with some memory foam.

We're slowly turning into cyborgs. So far, the pieces are removable so the transformation has not truly started except for some people with disabilities. I wonder for how long that will remain true.

I expect to be the odd guy still using over-ear headphones at some point. When everybody just gets implants. Or maybe I'll just join the crowd when my hearing gets worse. Wouldn't want to miss out on music would I?

I have to wonder what percentage of people are like me and Apple earbuds/AirPods have never fit their ears? Are my ears that strangely shaped? Most people seem to have no problem when I've never found a pair of Apple earbuds that can stay in my ear if I do anything other than sit completely still and upright. They just don't fit, at all in any way.

I have to use earbuds with a stiff silicone shroud that I can shove deep enough on my ear canal that they can't fall out. I couldn't even get the hard plastic Apple earbuds to balance in my ear, they just fell right out.

I have the same issue, and the only reason why i wont pickup earpods, they just fall off, have you found anyway, to keep them in?

For Apple's products, no, they're completely unusable to me. For earbuds I found some $15 Panasonic ones that sound alright and fit me perfectly, so I bought 6 sets of them and just go through them over the years. I think I'm on set #2 right now. I also have Sennheiser HD1 In-Ear Bluetooth earbuds that fit pretty well, too. Both products I mentioned come with different size silicone shrouds so I just found the ones that fit best and shove them into my ear canal until they're stuck. Even then it's not perfect. My right ear doesn't hold them as well as my left.

How does this compare to Apple Watch? Sounds to me like this is a fairly big upside surprise. If you were given the choice beforehand, which of the two would you want to have managed?

I would have guessed Watch but it looks like I'm wrong. Pretty astonishing that people will throw an extra quarter on top of the price of their phone for this, especially given that I've used noise cancelling headphones before. My guess would have been that removing the wire would only make a small difference.

I guess the market is there to discover this kind of thing. Kudos to Apple for finding this.

A couple of key things make the experience fundamentally different from traditional headphones, for me:

- I can carry the little dental-floss-case around with me everywhere in my pocket. Even if I don't plan on using them, I have them there just in case. Especially when it comes to noise-cancelling, this has a major effect on day-to-day life for me as unexpected use cases pop up.

- It's not just the lack of a wire: one entire step is eliminated from starting and stopping using your headphones. You just put them in your ears, or take them out. There's no messing with a cord or even a menu on your phone. Something easy is made effortless, which matters.

- Once in, they stay out of the way so well that you can leave them in even if you're not using them. Then when you do unexpectedly decide to watch a video, or take a call, your phone is already plugged directly into your headspace, no extra step necessary.

- All the little details. The fact that taking one out of your ear pauses your media and placing it back in resumes it is essential for wearing them passively while out and about; ordering a coffee, etc. No fumbling with your phone for a pause button; the social signal for "I'm listening" is paired with what you want your media to be doing at that moment.

All of this combines into an experience so frictionless it's mindblowing.

For what it’s worth I’ve heard Apple has made more money off the Apple Watch than they did from all iPods combined. That business is HUGE too.

But compared to the iPhone it looks small so people dismiss it.

>how does this compare to apple watch

One more thing to consider, Apple Watch works with iPhones only. It might have changed now, but given how integrated with apple ecosystem the watch is, i doubt it is anything but a weak neutered version of the iphone+apple watch experience.

Airpods, on the other hand, work great with Android. The only neutered “features” are those that i dont consider vital at all (like being able to rename the display name of your airpods that gets sent to devices attempting to pair with them).

It's incredible these tiny earbuds generate more than half the revenue of Tesla.

Has anyone found any info/study on "average likelihood of losing or damaging an airpod in a given year"?

That's all that's stopping me from buying this and other premium products. I love premium products but not if I have to replace them every year.

Live a little! Nobody would buy anything nice if they were constantly worried about it.

Buying $100+ pair of headphones that are the size of a kidney bean with no strings attached doesn't really seem ridiculous. It's pretty hard to lose old apple wired headphones or real cans like my Bose QuietComforts. I don't have to worry@!

It's definitely anecdotal, but I know probably 30+ people who own Airpods and have never heard of anyone losing or having to have them replaced for any reason.

Except all the people that have to replace them when the battery lifetime expires. You can take as much care as you want with airpods, they will need replacing and you'll need to fork out again.

One of the first reviewers of the Macbook Air lost it in a stack of newspapers.

I used to be scared to lose mine while running. They never came close to falling out. Also the new generation of the AirPods is more secure in the ear.

All you have to do is put them in the case whenever you aren't wearing them. The case isn't so small that you're going to lose it. Plus, that way they're always charging.

I don't wear airpods because I came across a few articles saying they are they are really bad for the environment: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/neae8z/why-airpods-are-a-...

Honestly a little surprised that Airpods would be so successful.

In the same way that every electronic product is really bad for the environment and humanity.

At least these are tiny compared to the other electronic (and just general plastic) junk I generate. I feel like every grocery trip I end up with 20x the volume of plastic that AirPods have that I would get rid of after a few years.

not sure what your point is... should I stop caring because it makes no difference? You care because you care.

They are virtually impossible to repair and the battery becomes shit after a couple of years because they are constantly doing full cycles so yeah, not the best for the environment. Super good for business though.

> That means almost all iPhone users are still either using wired earphones or none at all.

Lol, or they're using other Bluetooth headphones?

The sentence before that is "First, unit sales of AirPods have significant room to grow from here.".

LOL indeed, is this what counts as market research/insight?

Anyone have experience using AirPods with Android? I have a Google Pixel(first gen) and have tried various Bluetooth earbuds, but they all suck and have frequent interference. Would be cool if I can bite the bullet and get AirPods without suffering those same issues.

works fine on my pixel 2. You can't 100% control the pods from your phone (only thing I know is you need to sync w/ a mac to change stuff like wifi name).

Used them for a year on my old Galaxy S8+, no issues whatsoever. In fact, they worked so well, they made me consider a forage into other apple once again, after not using any for over 5 years. A lot of my friends with Androids use airpods as well, and they vastly seem to prefer them, considering that a good number of them went through a few other truly wireless in-ear headphones before settling on airpods.

What features are missing when using Android? I'm going to switch from Android to iPhone when the next generation comes out but was thinking about getting airpods before I get an iPhone. I was curious on what features require the iPhone. I think I am mostly interested in the auto pause when taking them out of your ear and the environment-aware noise cancelation

Imo, none of the missing features were crucial or dealbreakers. The ones off the top of my head:

1. Initial pairing by simply opening the case instead of doing it through bluetooth settings (only done once anyways). 2. To check the battery, you need to install a separate app. 3. Activating Siri through a button press on airpods. 4. Single airpod listening mode. 5. Automatic ear detection (according to the article I read, cannot remember whether that was the case back when I actually used it).

As for noise canceling controls and such, you might have to do some googling, because I only tested Android with original airpods, before pro version was available. But I have a few friends who bought pros for their Android phones specifically for noise canceling, so I assume it works fine.

Creating a successful hardware product, especially one that becomes a fashion symbol, is sooo much harder than creating software. Orders of magnitude harder. They are now taking the profits from their success.

This will get buried, but whatever, here are my $0.02 as an Airpods user. I have the gen 1 airpods, have had them about 1.5 years and overall, I have been pleased. Many people complain about battery life in the gen 1, I've never experienced this, but I typically only use 1 pod at a time and cycle them out when the battery gets low on one.

Pros: I think that the overall design/form-factor is the true winner. The conveniently pocketable charging case, and the ability to wear them during physical activities without falling out, without the need for annoying straps etc is a huge win. Seriously. My hobby is skateboarding, and I have taken countless falls, tons of high-impact activity, and have never once had them fall out. Being free of wires also helps this. The pairing capabilities are fine (Mac and Iphone user), but I agree with what others are saying in that other options also handle this (almost) as well. I switching from IOS to Mac to be mostly seamless, but sometimes have issues switching from Mac to IOS. The sound quality is, meh, but this is Bluetooth, if you want audiophile quality, you must look for wired.

Cons: One major gripe I have with the Airpods is that, while using 'Find-My' works great if you lost an Airpod outside the case (while paired), it does not work at all when the pods are in the case. I understand the charging case has no speaker, therefore no good way to alert, but if Apple had this feature on a new version, it might be enough to make me buy them before my current Airpods reach EOL. My second complaint, is that I feel like Apple is under-utilizing them as an input device for IOS/Mac. You have the capability of summoning siri, and skipping tracks, but you can't do both on a single pod. This design is bad UX for people like me, who typically only use 1 pod at a given time. I also think it would be nice to adjust volume with a gesture. I also get that Apple probably doesn't want to have feature overlap between Airpods and Apple watch, but I digress.

Overall, despite some gripes, I don't really see any better options at this time for what I need them to do. When my Gen 1s die, I will shell out for new ones. I hope that Apple doesn't just rest on their laurels and actually adds some new features/capabilities on subsequent releases, but I'm not holding my breath.

Several brands' true wireless earbuds have been rated as just as good or better than Airpods, such as the Jabra Elite 65t and Anker Soundcore Liberty Air 2, for significantly less ($100 and under). Newer models (that are also cheaper) beat the AirPods Pro on every metric. I can't see how Airpods will continue to be a market leader if their competitors continue this trend; it'll end up like Android, where some people will pay a premium for a brand, and everyone else will pay less for a competitor.

Personal opinion time; Airpods are a powerful coupling with the real next big thing: The watch.

I think most of HN think of the watch as either a thing that will never happen or they think it peaked. But not only do I think that I could likely go a day without having my actual phone with me, I think this is only the beginning for that form factor.

I mean, consider that: handoff is here, and works.

Airpods mean external peripherals can be attached seamlessly.

It supports LTE and Streaming music.

The future I see, phones as they currently exist become tablets, and watches are the new phone.

If only apple watch faces were like apps on iPhone. Can't buy one until they do.

I'm still surprised that it took so long to get wireless earbuds that didn't suck. I guess battery/power technology was just never in a place to make them feasible, but it still feels like it took a really long time. I remember when the Jawbones first hit the market thinking like, really? Is this the best we can do? Those things were huge.

Then we get airpods and I'm sort of stunned how small they actually are. I just wish the battery was more easily replaceable.

Airpods are popular not purely on their own merits: new phones don't have a phone jack. So in the sense it's an exploitation of the existing iPhone pricing power.

I usually don't bitch about Apple pricing, since I personally consider ROI for most Apple products pretty OK. But headphones that costs 2.5 times the price of my Apple TV? Nah, thanks. 250 for headphones is just a joke. Divide that price by 3 and I might be interested. But I am not going to pay 250 for something I use once every month or so.

I don’t think anyone expects you to.

One thing that I think is missed: AirPods are an almost have to have addition to the Apple Watch. Without an iPhone, an Apple Watch with a data plan is pretty good for text messaging (I am traveling and tonight during dinner with my Dad and brother, the woman back home who takes care of my parrot texted me and included four pictures - the pictures were easy to view on my Apple Watch), phone calls, and reading emails. You can also use Apple Wallet on the watch for airline check in images, store discount cards, etc.

With AirPods, an Apple Watch Is good for Audible books, podcasts, and music.

I used to think that it was cool to just take an iPhone on a trip and be connected. Now, an Apple Watch with AirPods can suffice. For travel the only thing missing from the Apple Watch is not being able to read eBooks which is why AirPods and Audible fill an important use case.

Voice control gets better all the time and our always carry digital device can get very small.

I have an airpod since November 2018. I've never had an iPhone.

A market research is due by Apple. This is the first Apple product that is compatible outside its own ecosystem, and my guess is that this is having a very positive impact on sales. Steve old "closed ecosystem" adage might be doing more bad than good.

You probably forgot that the iPod was Windows compatible.

Many alternatives with the same solution on Asian online marketplaces for the fraction of the price of AirPods.

Conceptually, it's already the next big thing. Will it be Apple's next big thing? Probably yes, but in a heavily competitive marketplace.

Just bought one and it is good. I got the previous version and an over the head Bose cancellation one. Both have their use. (Airplane, plug in etc ) but it is portable noise cancellation. That is great.

Not everyone will drop $1k for a new iPhone, but plenty will "upgrade" their old device with Airpods. That's what we're seeing here. The question is: how long can it continue?

Threads about wireless headphones used to be filled with comments dismissing the whole concept. Now all of a sudden it's the best thing ever. HN really is a bad predictor for trends.

Are airpods really worth it or is it just marketing

They are worth it for me, but it depends on what you want in a headphone, and your mileage may vary.

I have really enjoyed using my pairs (had a 1st gen, bought the 2nd gen later on for the much quicker connections). They work absolutely amazingly with my iPhone, iPad, Macbook Pro. The switchover is mostly glitch free, and I can pair them to "standard bluetooth devices" pretty easily (like my complex's gym equipment). I think the investment has been pretty great, but you have to own products that make sense with them (at least an iPhone, iPad, or Macbook).

Adjusting the volume is very convenient if you're wearing an Apple Watch.

(so I agree, they're great IF you're already using at least the iPhone).

I hated them until I tried them. Their integration within Apple's ecosystem is killer.

Are they worth it if your setup is a MBP plus an Android smartphone?

They can pair with an Android phone, but I don’t know if you get the great connection/pausing related features or not.

Same. I think it's interesting because out of all the Apple products that I own, Airpods are the first that I saw and didn't want. I hated how they looked.

I had a coworker who used them for calls and he talked me into buying them. Once I started using them I realized how much I enjoyed using them over wired headphones and how well they worked compared to other Bluetooth devices, especially older headsets.

The only negative for me is that the Pro model didn't exist when I bought my Airpods, and the regular model has poor sound isolation--fine if you are at home, in a office, etc., but terrible on the street or on a plane.

The killer feature is the connection awareness. You put them in your ears and it immediately connects. You take them out and it pauses the audio. I’ve had several wireless earbuds and they all suffer from connection frustrations and letting audio continue playing when not used.

> You take them out and it pauses the audio.

Even better, if you put that earbud back in it then continues playing in both ears - which makes it a perfect intuitive enhancement of the physical actions you'd already take to talk to somebody while you have earbuds in.

This. Even the latest high-end sony offerings can't quickly switch between devices - you have to manually re-pair them each time you want to switch devices.

I hear people say this everywhere, but I still find myself needing to manually pair my iPhone with my AirPods around 50% of the time whenever someone calls me.

The battery life is also rubbish, they regularly fall out of my ears and they don't work with my (non-Apple) MP3 player.

Giving credit where it's due, though, the microphone quality for phone calls is exceptional given the orientation and how far away they sit from your mouth.

Otherwise, I really don't get understand why these things are so popular (which just shows how little I know about consumer goods and marketing). Mine were gifted to me, but mostly go unused for the reasons above. I probably wouldn't complain if they were $50 a set, but I'd never dip into my own pocket for whatever obscene amount they cost now ($200?).

A few weeks ago my company got us the Pros as a Christmas gift. It's my first experience with Bluetooth.

These hurt my right ear slightly. The audio sometimes stutters. Sometimes the battery drains in one very quickly but not the other, or there's some other bug causing the audio to go out in one ear. Putting them in and taking them out of the case is awkward. Keeping them charged is a responsibility.

The $8 wired earbuds I had before never had any of these problems. And I was never worried about losing them. I saw them being wired as a pro, not a con. I'm going back to those. I can't believe anyone pays $250 for these. I couldn't believe paying $50.

I've idly thought that Spotify should get into hardware. Headphones and/or speaker, purchase it connected to your account, and one touch button to a stream of music you like.

Obviously a million times easier said than done, but has to be a better margin business than where they currently are and would be good lock in.

A “single purpose music box” would be neat to me. Maybe it controls all the speakers in my house, informs me of concerts coming up, let’s me set a mood, and most importantly doesn’t care about anything else.

I feel like every gadget being in one is gonna start breaking down now that software interop is more of a thing.

Chromecast is $35 and will play spotify and other apps pretty darn well.

They did a recent promo with Google where you get a free Google Home Mini if you're a subscriber. So I don't think they are getting in to hardware.

Google does these promotions all over, to get more Home’s into... homes.

We got a free one with our YouTube Premium subscription, another free one with our Spotify Family Plan, and another free one from our ISP (though I’m not sure if that was paid for by google or the ISP).

They have such economies of scale now, and such vertical integration that they can sell you things like speakers for free as long as it has voice integration and sucks up all of your data.

The only reason they don't sell a TV for $200 is they already get all that data from the current TV providers. Chromebooks at $99? Sure, why not.

And eventually nobody can compete. Users must be in google, or amazons ecosystem or be super rich to avoid it. Companies must hope that google or amazon never move into their space because they can be obliterated. This is a "kinder" version of what microsoft got anti-trusted for in the 90s.

Three or four years ago I loved my Chromecasts, but it's crazy how much worse they have gotten in that time. They used to have a really simple setup and then "just worked" from there. Now though, they regularly disappear from every device we use them with in my household and have to be setup again. The setup flow has changed several times over the past few years, always for the worse. Once everything is (re-)setup, they still fail to connect or lose a connection often enough to be a big annoyance.

I'm not a fan of smart tv apps for all of the reasons discussed on HN, but they work so much better for me than Chromecast I've started using those instead whenever possible.

That's strange. My Chromecast seemingly hasn't changed at all in the 4 years I've owned it.

> I feel like every gadget being in one is gonna start breaking down now

The smartphone has a huge advantage: you only need to have 1 device in your pocket to do everything. Not having to go get something from another room may not seem like a big deal but I think it really is. (Or I am just lazy.)

A headphone that only works with Spotify? My Bose QC that I can use for anything (including Spotify - with a single on button to connect to bluetooth controlled via my phone or laptop) isn't really inconvenient or anything.

Yup, that is the idea. Obviously it would be less useful than standard headphones for a HN reader, but the mass market may disagree.

For example, to use the parent cliche, my sister got my father AirPods this Christmas despite me saying it is probably a bad idea. And it has gone unused because he doesn't grok Bluetooth even in the simplified AirPod way (also, his iPhone is too old to support it natively). But if I gave him a pair of headphones and said "press this button, it will play Van Morrison and Sly Stone", he would use it in a heartbeat.

The only way I could see that working is if they had a built-in cellular modem and the data usage was covered under your existing subscription. Just a direct-to-internet Spotify hose. Even then it would be a tough sell; single-purpose hardware rarely does well in a multi-purpose world.

Sonos seems to get away with charging about a million pounds a pop so there's definitely money in it (They're good speakers but £349 - the price of a quality musical instrument or a whole computer - for a device that connects a Hi-Fi to the internet is daylight robbery).

Do Airpods have a built-in microphone, and audio/ambient mixing (with ratio controllable through the phone)?

I can't believe this feature is not standard on today's headphone products, especially digital ones.

edit: Thanks for the responses. Looks like Airpods pro do have this feature. Thumbs up!

AirPods Pro do—“transparency” mode—but you can’t control the amount of mixing.

Airpods Pro do. Along with noise cancelling that's the main improvement.

All AirPods have dual microphones (one in each ear). AirPods Pro let you toggle between noise cancelling and active ambient mixing.

You got answers about AirPods Pro. On the normal AirPods there is no need because they’re not isolating earphones, you can still hear ambient sound just fine.

And now we discover why Apple removed the traditional headphone jack - and why it's never coming back.

> Keep an eye on AirPods feature improvements, and the possibility of an Apple audio operating system in 2020.

The out-of-the-box experience for Sonos is Apple like. Yes, there are forums where users have issues, and so does Apple.

If Apple were to acquire Sonos, it would speed things up a bit.

Wish there was a way for public investors to invest in certain parts of a publicly traded company. If I believe in a certain project at Apple or Google, I want to fund it and get returns on my investment.

Isn't that cart before the horse? The concept of investing is taking a risk. If you want to invest in only successful products after they're developed, there's no wealth delta to be a part of.

I think they're getting at a model either like Kickstarter, or directly funding a department ( say Google's AR department, if you liked their Glass idea ). The problem with a normal investment and no seats on the board is that you don't really have a say on direction provided that a company does more than one thing. there's also the fact that money is fungible and would probably just subsidise loss making departments as is common today

I would want to invest in projects that I think will take off. For example, if I had to invest in Tesla, I would not invest in the Cybertruck. In fact, that project turns me off investing in Tesla entirely. But say, the Model Y, on the other hand is something I think will be successful so I would bet on it

If you believe that Tesla as a company is a reasonable capital allocator, and that the Cybertruck will end up being a flop, then you should expect that investing in Tesla will mean investing in the successful segments (Model Y per your prediction) and quickly divesting from the unsuccessful ones (Cybertruck per your prediction).

The same goes for Apple and Airpods.

Tesla Cybertruck as it currently stands will flop in Europe, as the design is unsafe.

The government should work like that with taxes. Instead of just giving 100% to whatever the government decides it wants to fund, 20% could be reserved to go to what people want it to go to. Have some participation in the tax paying.

More interesting and better for the world if we apply that to governments rather than companies :)

Instead of just giving 100% to whatever the government decides it wants to fund, 20% could be reserved to go to what people want it to go to.

Under that plan, the best funded parts of the government would be the ones that benefit rich people only.

Then again, considering the intelligence and temperament of the average person, I think in short order we'd have amazing playgrounds and free hot dog stands everywhere, all under the flag of the hammer and sickle.

Seems to have worked for Porto Alegre, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porto_Alegre#Participatory_bud...

> A World Bank paper suggests that participatory budgeting has led to direct improvements in facilities in Porto Alegre. For example, sewer and water connections increased from 75% of households in 1988 to 98% in 1997. The number of schools quadrupled since 1986. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTEMPOWERMENT/Resources/... (English)

Seems to also have been implemented in quite some places

> By 2001, more than 100 cities in Brazil had implemented PB, while in 2015, thousands of variations have been implemented in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe http://www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol8/iss2/art8/

Would be interesting to see how it impacted those places

That's called participatory budgeting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_budgeting

Thanks for connecting it to a name. I've thought about that thing for some time but never found anything related, so many thanks!

The problem is you now have investors voting on what the company should do. You buy Apple shares because you trust them to envision the future. I bet most punters would have put money on the next iPhone and nothing else. And also there is the issue of most money coming from index funds just chucking money at everything regardless.

By using the airpods for a while, I can see it being used as communication device in tandem with siri/apple watch. It's super convenient how it integrates in Apple ecosystem even right now.

Now I can’t wait for Apple glass - fashion forward enhance eye glasses

I'm with you, Apple contact lenses would be amazing.

I have them and absolutely hate them. Syncing issues a third of the time that are not easily remedied. I usually just use the wired version, which also gives me volume control.

Why people prefer wireless earphones to wired I'll never know; they cost more, require charging, and are easy to lose.

But they don't have wires that are annoying and tethers your head to your phone.

I would love them to be an Apple Watch accessory. My dream is to leave my iPhone at home and do Siri on watch only.

As far as I understand, the Apple Watch has Siri, and the AirPods can pair directly with the Apple Watch...no need for a phone.

as far as headphones go i have never seen one brand on so many heads and the initial sales are impressive. would it not be better to compare like apple music with spotify though. this is also hardware they would last a while and without subscriptions. the sales will continue im sure but start to drop off.

Airpod sales benefit from one key feature: a big replacement market. They break and get lost...a lot.

How do I profit from this information?

Buy AirPods.

What about an AirPod derivative. AirPod futures?

I've personally bought 9 of these in the past year and need to buy the Pro's one this month!

Why?

>First, unit sales of AirPods have significant room to grow from here. 110 million AirPods have been sold since they launched, while Apple’s installed base of iPhones is 900 million. That means almost all iPhone users are still either using wired earphones or none at all.

I use $15 bluetooth earbuds cause I don't want to worry about losing them.

Imagine if they managed to corner the illegal knockoff market how much they’d make

Can you run with Airpods in?

Get some of these[0] and it should be no problem.

[0] EarBuddyz 2.0 Ear Hooks and Covers Accessories Compatible with Apple AirPods 1 & AirPods 2 or EarPods Headphones/ Earphones/ Earbuds (3 Pairs) (Clear) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B019BREFE4/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_EJ...

Yes, although it may depend on the shape of your ears. I trained for the NYC marathon and often (but not always) wore AirPods. I never had them fall out.

I really don't understand. Why would someone pay $120 for a product they can buy online from a off brand retailer for half the price? I must be missing something. How are airpods better than say Cambridge Audio Melomania's which are almost half the cost?

Have you used them?

They’re ridiculously low friction. Stick them in your ears and they’re on and paired and ready. Take them out and they’re off. Store them and they’re charging. Trivial to swap them between Apple devices, easy to pair the first time.

And they sound great considering their size.

They’re little magic gizmos that make me (and millions of others) happy because they work so well.

Come on, they sound terrible compared to other true-wireless earbuds in the same price range. And to be turned on/off automatically is absolutely standard even for cheaper earbuds. The only thing that is true specifically for AirPods is swapping between Apple devices.

What products do you think compete with it?

I once was looking for my airpods for 15 minutes until I realized that I was wearing them. Never had that with any earbuds before. Admittedly I was wearing a beanie (cold outside), ready to leave home and it was in the morning (so still sleepy)

Edit: that's a good thing

Check out [1] - also the Melomanias are the closest I've found to wired quality headphones (and absurdly good battery life) that also are close enough to 'just working' but they were $99 last I looked.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21985320

From the article:

> Apple may launch an operating system for AirPods in 2020, and apps like TTYL and Yac are already creating buzz as audio-first applications.

Apple being Apple, this integration will likely only work with airpods. But I'm with you. I'd rather have great sounding music. I have an android phone and $60 earbuds, both of which support the LDAC 990kbps standard. This sounds much better than when I pair the same earbuds with my Macbook using AAC.

For me, apple audio earphones in general are really uncomfortable. They're just hard plastic at the end of the day but that's just my experience. My main problem with them is with other people. The audio leaks so much they may aswell be speakers.

If apple is a public company, why are exact sales figures unknown?

Public companies have to report their figures as a whole, but aren't required to divulge sales data on specific products if they don't want to.

As accessories, sales are limited to iphone numbers...

...until Airpods get an eSIM (like apple watches) and become standalone products, they'll be earphones. Ear-phones, geddit? Telephones for your ears, they'll be like... oh never mind.

FWIW the 'phone' suffix just means relating to sound. A "tele-" phone transmits sound over distance. "ear" phones put sound in your ears. (Megaphone makes sounds loud, xylophone is a (traditionally) wood thing that makes sound, homophones sound the same, ...)

I know; it's a joke, conflating two common usages of "phone".

Apple Ecosystem, Apple's way - create a problem and a solution at the same.

I wonder what's the ratio among the owners, who bought vs. who received them as a gift.

> create a problem and a solution at the same

"Wires are annoying" and "other Bluetooth headphones suck" were not problems created by Apple.

They removed the wired option which created a problem for some and offered a solution. Yes, I know about the dongle, already lost 2 of them.

Why though? I don't know anything about AirPods Pro, but previous models were quite mediocre product compared to competition.

Dear god. That's impressive.

AirPods are an absolute joke. Total ripoff price, poor performance and design. Everyone at Apple should be ashamed.

This is why Bay Area houses cost $2 million and why Enterprise SaaS is the only viable startup sector.

I enjoyed reading this.

They're easy to loose! You have to keep buying more

They're really not.

Apple starts making wireless headphones (who would think it's a novelty, when they exist for years already), but calls them "airpods" instead of wireless headphones. Hype jumps to the sky, because Apple.

Link doesn't work for me. Interested in any correlation between airpod use and making more money than Spotify, Twitter, Snapchat, and Shopify combined.... why does that even matter in this case? Do airpods read twitter feeds to you :D ?

The height (another one I suppose) of blind consumerism. Buying wireless versions of the things that come in the box just because. And then also not even attempting to look further than Apple highlights it's not a matter of quality audio experience either.

Most profitable company in the tech world creates new product and uses prior manufacturing skill, brand awareness/loyalty, device lock-in, advertising experience and retail channels to sell it and makes more profit that arbitrary list of companies in different business areas. What's the point?

The point is that one little product is HUGE. Just MASSIVE. People may not think it’s very big because it’s such a small share of Apple’s revenue but it would be a success everyone talked about if a third party had got those numbers.

Based on the lively discussion generated in this thread - because it's interesting.

Sure. But it's hardly suprising nor is it a useful comparison to say airpods make more revenue than Twitter.

What intrigues me more than the features of the AirPods -- especially the new AirPods Pro -- is that these little things have the potential to be a platform to themselves: https://www.aboveavalon.com/notes/2019/11/19/airpods-are-bec...

> This dynamic could be extended so that a simple tap of an AirPod or a quick voice command can take us to a different location via sound. Utilizing HomePods as sound receivers, an AirPods wearer would be able to “move” from the kitchen to family room.

That idea of transporting yourself to another location through the use of sound is absolutely fascinating. I think developers should and will start to consider how sound enhances existing experiences, and how new experiences can come from looking at audio output and input as tools to be used to reach the user.

Sound has kind of been neglected in more recent times in technology, with apps and operating systems making fewer sounds then they did in the past, since sounds are often intrusive to whatever other thing the user is listening to. But sound has the potential to communicate completely different ideas and experiences to users and that idea in the article to me is one prime example of that sort of interaction that only works through sound.

I seem to remember that Microsoft released an app for the iPhone that is a map service, but it works on sound only because it's designed for blind people.

And uber and wework and well...take your pick...zoom, that other one and that other one. You know the one with the logo. slack. Is it called podhop? hoppod? Airbnb, put them in too.

Thinking about it... I probably make more money than Spotify, Twitter, Snapchat and shopify.

That's because they're overpriced heavily marketed Bluetooth earbuds pushed by the biggest brand.

I bet almost any of apples products could be similarly compared.

Are they over priced? They're cheaper than Sennheiser or Bose at $159. They have a value-prop of having their own, better, wireless protocol that works flawlessly with iOS. And people seem to like the form factor.

They also seem to have better performance specs and software quality than anything else on the market. In addition to a design that people actually like.

Well its pretty simple. Just remove the most essential feature needed by almost all iPhone users and create a new alternative, forcing everyone to buy AirPods or the second-best alternative. If they won't upgrade soon, then planned obsolescence takes it course. Due to the AirPods being a platform and ecosystem in its self, there is less of a reason for iPhone users to settle on an alternative apart from price, which completes the lock-in.

I would expect Apple to make more out the AirPods after they force those stuck on iPhone 6S's or SE's to upgrade. Revenue-wise, it almost unfair to begin comparing with the revenues with any of those mentioned companies. It just puts things into perspective of how 'successful' the AirPods have become for Apple.

For a majority of people wireless earbuds are far superior than tangled corded headphones. Its pretty clear based on how popular in ear Bluetooth earbuds are. Not just on the iOS side either.

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