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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?

#431

Post by mastazi »

velosol wrote: post #192
mastazi wrote: post #141

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 earp…

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.

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

#432

Post by mastazi »

skizm wrote: post #179
mastazi wrote: post #141

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 earp…

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

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

#433

Post by wrboyce »

ikeboy wrote: post #423
filmgirlcw wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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.

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

#434

Post by mastazi »

usertrjx wrote: post #311
mastazi wrote: post #141

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 earp…

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.

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

#435

Post by mastazi »

eddiecalzone wrote: post #191
mastazi wrote: post #141

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 earp…

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)

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

#436

Post by kccqzy »

Fnoord wrote: post #304
dkonofalski wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thou…

> 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.

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

#437

Post by lmm »

macintux wrote: post #419
baybal2 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

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.

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

#438

Post by thekyle »

capableweb wrote: post #16
typon wrote: post #8

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.

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 :)

That's called participatory budgeting.

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

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

#439

Post by iliketoworkhard »

matwood wrote: post #319
qsymmachus wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Always in ear What percentage of Airpods owners do you reckon _always_ have them inside their ears?

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

Same with my old bose SoundSports

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

#440

Post by Fnoord »

kccqzy wrote: post #436
Fnoord wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thou…

> 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:

"[...]

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).

[...]"

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