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Apple AirPods: iPhone accessory or the next big thing?

kevinrooke.com

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Re: Apple AirPods: iPhone accessory or the next big thing?

#301

Post by rvz »

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.

Re: Apple AirPods: iPhone accessory or the next big thing?

#302

Post by jzwinck »

rkuykendall-com wrote: post #197
gz5 wrote: post #40

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 itsel…

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.

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.

Re: Apple AirPods: iPhone accessory or the next big thing?

#303

Post by Whatarethese »

rvz wrote: post #301

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…

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.

Re: Apple AirPods: iPhone accessory or the next big thing?

#304

Post by Fnoord »

dkonofalski wrote: post #284
Fnoord wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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.

Re: Apple AirPods: iPhone accessory or the next big thing?

#305

Post by filoleg »

mattkevan wrote: post #200
jVinc wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. Ev…

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.

Re: Apple AirPods: iPhone accessory or the next big thing?

#306

Post by dingaling »

dkonofalski wrote: post #284
Fnoord wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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.

> 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.

Re: Apple AirPods: iPhone accessory or the next big thing?

#307

Post by Shank »

madrox wrote: post #76

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…

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.

Re: Apple AirPods: iPhone accessory or the next big thing?

#308

Post by dkonofalski »

ryanmcbride wrote: post #91
rolltiide wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 fr…

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?

Re: Apple AirPods: iPhone accessory or the next big thing?

#309

Post by redisman »

gowld wrote: post #237
yjhoney wrote: post #212

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.

Re: Apple AirPods: iPhone accessory or the next big thing?

#310

Post by [deleted] »

nomel wrote: post #282
Fnoord wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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

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