> Another thing to note is that they are still a substandard user experience compared to 3.5mm jack and decent headphones ($50+ with non tangle wires)
No, this is your assessment of user experience. It’s opinion, not fact. Perhaps some $50 wired headphones sound better but different people value different things.
For a long time I thought “pft what’s the big deal with AirPods, I’m fine snaking the headphone cable down my shirt when I go for a run”. Then I bought some on the recommendation of a friend. For me the user experience is far from substandard — it’s great. The charging case means they rarely run out of juice, the tap to stop/start and Siri is great for running, they sound good, I can walk around the kitchen while cooking with them paired to my laptop, I find them comfortable, etc.
Fashion: I don’t care. What I’ll look like didn’t factor into the decision to buy them at all. As it happens I can easily afford them but didn’t buy for a long time because I don’t like to spend frivolously.
In short: just because you think AirPods (or Apple?) sucks doesn’t mean others don’t find them valuable.
> No, this is your assessment of user experience. It’s opinion, not fact. Perhaps some $50 wired headphones sound better but different people value different things.
Ok, 3.5" headphones are objectively: cheaper, simpler mechanically, more reliable, easier to use, easier to connect to different devices, never run out of battery or require charging, you can't lose 1/3 of them, and oh, yeah, they tend to sound better at the same price point. They tend to sound much better at the same price point since all you need to focus on are coils and membranes, not bluetooth stacks and batteries and inductive charging coils. A set of Shure SE315s will blow AirPods Pro out of the water on sound quality and noise isolation.
Yes, wireless headphones are wireless. That's all though. You can achieve all the rest with the jack, but you could achieve all of that wireless while the phone still had the jack.
None of this makes AirPods Pro a platform. They're neat wireless headphones. Among the best wireless headphones probably. But that's still all they are.
I've used AirPods Pro, and I've used me SE535s with an inline mic. It's gonna be SE535s by a country mile for me, even to the extent I have to go through the additional hoops of stupid dongles to hook them up. [1]
> Hi! I’m Johnny Average Consumer.
> This phone was a thousand dollars!
It's not accurate to describe the average consumer as being in the thousand dollar phone market. They are premium products, and not one that the average consumer can afford. That's one reason why Apple's phone global market share wavers around 10-15%.
Anyone buying AirPods has already bought an iPhone (a thousand dollar phone), so I think you can replace ‘Johnny Average Consumer’ with ‘Billy iPhone Consumer’ and the rest of their points still hold
And seeing that the Apple Watch is already generating more revenue than the iPods at peak, there are lot of people with a $350 Watch, a $600+ iPhone and AirPods.
> Anyone buying AirPods has already bought an iPhone (a thousand dollar phone)
Not everyone buying an iPhone today is buying a current, model (carriers are selling back to the iPhone 8), even if they are the base iPhone 11 is about $700 not $1000, and even flagship models are often bought on promotion with steep discounts (AT&T has one with, in the right circumstances, a $700 discount on the 11 Max Pro, bringing it to around $400 on the promo.)
Wow, it's almost like there are millions of different people with a wide range of preferences and wealth! Maybe there is room in the market for this product after all. Maybe that explains how it has already sold in the tens of millions.
It's funny because I own both AirPods and 315s. I always have thought "Why did I pay so much for the 315s when I can get a crappy ol pair of wired headphones for $20 that work well enough." There wasn't a fantastic bluetooth connected option, I have owned 6-10 bluetooth wireless solutions, but nothing matched airpods.
> Wow, it's almost like there are millions of different people with a wide range of preferences and wealth!
Isn't it also almost like discussing the average consumers is a way to consciously limit the scope of the discussion so that it isn't about some <1% of the world's population?
> I don’t care. I’ll pay for convenience. This phone was a thousand dollars!
Did you mean for "Average Consumer" just to be your name? Because an average consumer certainly did not pay $1000 for their phone. Already here you represent an outlier.
> What about that horrible wire? It gets tangled in my pocket and I rip my headphones out when I run.
About 20% of Americans engage in activities like running or jogging. Again, you're an outlier.
I can't say for sure that you're an outlier hear because these figures represent a mean and not a median. I'm taking "the average consumer" to mean "the median consumer" because "the mean consumer" doesn't exist.
> I charge my AirPods Pro every few days. This is a non-issue.
Again, I'm not sure that you are an outlier here because of averages vs medians.
If you spend 18 hours per week just listening to music, If even half of that is spent listening to music from your only device, you'll be charging your airpods at least twice a week.
If airpods are additionally used for calls, some two hours a day, you'll have to charge them even more often.
If AirPods are an ubiquitous platform for augmented hearing, "adding context" to what you hear, you'll be charging them at least twice a day.
That's closer to what my peers are spending. They are outliers, though, living in a developed country, working well-paying jobs, almost all tech nerds. I have a hard time imagining that the world wide average or even a national average for Australia is anywhere near that. That said, I haven't found any non-paywalled comprehensive survey data on the subject so I'll leave it at that.
> I don’t care. I’ll pay for convenience. This phone was a thousand dollars!
The average US smartphone consumer is paying like $500 (substantially less anywhere outside of North America) and saying their limit is substantially less than even that, if you look at both actual average price data and surveys of what consumers say they are willing to pay, so (1) not buying a $1000 phone, (2) not aware of how much they are actually paying for a phone, and (3) not as willing to pay extra for convenience as you suggest.
> A set of Shure SE315s will blow AirPods Pro out of the water on sound quality
The internet really needs to get off it’s high horse about this. The fact is 99% of people can’t tell the difference.
Just like 99% of people don’t care about the headphone jack being removed. This is evident by the market mocking Apple and then following Apple when they realised that it’s true.
Rather than not being able to tell the difference, most consumers don't care about the difference. Everyone has their own acceptable level of sound quality, even enthusiasts. That being said the airpod pros' fidelity are known to be quite good in audiophile circles.
I agree they aren't a platform (yet?). I just don't understand why you're conflating this with an assertion that AirPods can't possibly offer any additional utility over a basic set of wireless headphones. I for one don't want to know what Shure offers or deal with adding microphones or whatever. I don't care about that. I just want to pay someone a sum of money I am okay with paying for a product that will do what I want. I don't even care if it doesn't sound quite as good as the best possible offering; for me part of the utility is not needing to think about all this stuff. (That doesn't mean I would blindly buy anything Apple makes or whatever my friends tell me, but in this case I felt pretty confident I'd be happy with my choice and I was.)
I'm glad you're happy with your setup and choices. It wouldn't work for me but it does for you. That's all that should matter to you.
On this point, wireless headphones are massively superior. You only need to plug in wireless headphones when you’re not using them. You need to plug in wired headphones all the time when using them. This enables things like “using two hands to carry an object across a room, without wearing a pocket, while listening to headphones”. This is a huge practical upgrade that most people find impossible to give up once habituated.
>Yes, wireless headphones are wireless. That's all though.
And that's exactly what makes them easier to use and better sounding if you don't sit still.
Wires get caught in clothes and tend to pull on the earbuds. They scrape and bang against clothes, chin, neck and chest, making a lot of noise in the process.
Does that mean I'm going to pay hundereds for headphones or believe in Excalibur - sorry AirPods - as a platform any time soon? Unlikely. I guess I'll just continue to put up with the occasional bluetooth pairing issues.
Not sure about that part - especially for bigger (over-ear) headphones. My last 2 pairs of wired sets all died because the cable or connector inside the headphones got loose due to mechanical stress. Resoldering was not an option since it was not possible to open the case in a non destructive fashion.
At least that failure-mode does not exist in bluetooth headphones. And so far I had not an issue with my pair (but it's only a year old). But long term the battery might certainly become a potential issue.
I used to review consumer electronics as a side gig, and one year Shure was nice enough to send me one of every in-ear headset they made. This was around 2005 or so. The gear was excellent, fantastic sound quality, but they all broke. Even the $700 pair. The cable got pinched or something. Shure replaced them (even though at this point they were out of warranty), and the replacement pair broke a year later. Wires suck.
Headphones, no matter how high cost they were in the first place, always end up with a wire failure on the connecting part after a few years. I have come to hate them with passion for this single reason.
Being wireless counts for so much for me. For myself and many other people, the experience of wireless headphones is hands-down superior to wired headphones. I would never go back to wired ones.
Wires are a pain. They get tangled, they mean your phone and headphones need to always be close (which adds a certain amount of friction, once you get used to the alternative), but most importantly (for me) they get caught on things all the time.
Another disadvantage of AirPods (and most other wireless headphones): they're terrible for the environment. Builtin batteries which will wear out, glued shut so no way to replace the batteries, tied to a stack of radio/protocol/codecs which will be obsolete sooner or later.
They are throw-away products. Just look at all the original 1st gen AirPods which now see their batteries failing - each one by itself is small, but given the sales numbers it's huge mountains of electronics trash.
For the price of AirPods you can get a good pair of wired headphones which can last 20+ years. Replace tips or ear cushions as needed, on good headphones they are easily replaceable. No batteries or protocols or codecs to ever worry about.
Wired headphones wouldn’t work too well when I just have my cellular watch at the gym....
But even back in the iPod days, I hated wired headphones when I was running or doing anything at the gym.
And how are they “easier to use”? I open the case, they pair to either my iPad or iPhone without a manual pairing process. I put one in my ear, it changes the sound to be monaural from stereo. I also don’t have to go through an unpairing process for it to connect seamlessly to
my watch, iPad, iPhone, or AppleTV.
But that’s the thing. A lot of people are willing to compromise just for the wirelessness.
People apart from tech-people or audiophiles don’t really care about the points you listed or if they do, the convenience that comes from the wirelessness is more important.
For another point of reference, that’s larger than the iPod revenue when it peaked in 2007.
So the entire narrative that Apple hasn’t released a successful product since Cook took over is provably false. Both the Watch and AirPods lines are larger than the iPods ever were.
> Ok, 3.5" headphones are objectively: cheaper, simpler mechanically, more reliable, easier to use, easier to connect to different devices, never run out of battery or require charging, you can't lose 1/3 of them, and oh, yeah, they tend to sound better at the same price point.
The utility value of AirPods or similar products is way higher. They are easier to use because they don’t need plugged in. They provide a superior user experience because you’re not tethered. They are easier to every-day-carry and thus always available.
There will always be exceptions: audiophiles, etc. For most of us, it’s no contest.
I only picked the 315s since they're give or take the same price point as AirPods Pro and have infinitely better sound quality because they only do one thing.
I thought that the AirPods were ridiculously overpriced when they came out and wondered why anyone would get them. I’m still kind of on the fence about the usefulness of them, the control, and the fit.
Then I heard rumors about Apple coming out with noise cancelling AirPods about the same time I was getting fed up with my “open office”. As soon as I read the first reviews of the AirPods Pro, I ordered them. I have no regrets. The integration with iOS, noise cancelling, transparency mode, control with the stem, etc is great.
While controlling the volume without having to use Siri would be nice, for me it’s not a big deal, I just use the crown on my Apple Watch.
> What on earth do you value in a $160 pair of earphones then?
Well, all the things I just listed.
It may be true that I could get 90% of the functionality of AirPods for half the price, but that would mean researching what to buy, dealing with incompatibilities, and losing 10% of the features AirPods offer. But I loathe researching what to buy and dealing with wonky hardware. I'm fine with paying a bit of money to avoid these hassles.
So while $160 is not "cheap" I felt confident that a) I'd get something I liked, b) that they'd work well, c) that I was okay with spending $160 on them. Would I spend $320? No. But I'm happy with what I got and what I paid. You or anyone else might not be, and that's totally fine as well.
I never said they suck. What I failed to get across is that they are compromise.
Technically they are amazing. I mean look at how small they are.
But they are not a platform. They are not superior headphones, they excel because they are small. not because they do anything better than any other headphone. I've not mentioned sound quality because that's full of mysticism. Airpods to me sound fine, in a low noise environment.
I have bluetooth headphones, they work, they are sound isolating. They look like shite, and so do I when I wear them. I use them commuting, in the office (sometimes) and when I'm cleaning or doing DIY (30db is attenuation means I can listen without going deaf.) I bought them because they are noise isolating.
However I curse when they run out of battery. I curse when I go through congested 2.4gig areas.
As for value, fashion is a value. People buying them because they look sleek is a value judgement. Loads of people think they are valuable, otherwise this article wouldn't have been written.
No, this is your assessment of user experience. It’s opinion, not fact. Perhaps some $50 wired headphones sound better but different people value different things.
For a long time I thought “pft what’s the big deal with AirPods, I’m fine snaking the headphone cable down my shirt when I go for a run”. Then I bought some on the recommendation of a friend. For me the user experience is far from substandard — it’s great. The charging case means they rarely run out of juice, the tap to stop/start and Siri is great for running, they sound good, I can walk around the kitchen while cooking with them paired to my laptop, I find them comfortable, etc.
Fashion: I don’t care. What I’ll look like didn’t factor into the decision to buy them at all. As it happens I can easily afford them but didn’t buy for a long time because I don’t like to spend frivolously.
In short: just because you think AirPods (or Apple?) sucks doesn’t mean others don’t find them valuable.