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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?

#441

Post by Fnoord »

lmm wrote: post #437
macintux wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 muc…

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.

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

#442

Post by derefr »

ikeboy wrote: post #315
addicted wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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-t…

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.)

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

#443

Post by distantaidenn »

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.

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.

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

#444

Post by [deleted] »

derefr wrote: post #442
ikeboy wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-t…

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…

[deleted]

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

#445

Post by WiseWeasel »

hrktb wrote: post #313
mattkevan wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 intercomp…

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.

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

#446

Post by filoleg »

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.

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).

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

#447

Post by iudqnolq »

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.

The difficulty is when headsets are paired with two devices at the same place, eg phone & laptop. In the I believe there are higher end non Apple devices that have solved this.

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

#448

Post by damnyou »

wrboyce wrote: post #433
ikeboy wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#450

Post by microtherion »

gumby wrote: post #125
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…

> 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 S…

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).
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