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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?

#621

Post by C1sc0cat »

ctdonath wrote: post #498
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…

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…

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

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

#622

Post by C1sc0cat »

toasterlovin wrote: post #550
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.

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

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

#623

Post by mettamage »

addicted wrote: post #186
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…

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…

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.

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

#624

Post by mprev »

ikeboy wrote: post #466
filoleg wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.

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.

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

#626

Post by jen20 »

Fnoord wrote: post #343
dkonofalski wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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.

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

#627

Post by kalleboo »

Fnoord wrote: post #354
jrockway wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

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

#628

Post by jen20 »

seppin wrote: post #532
asdff wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 earpod…

> 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.

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

#629

Post by ojosilva »

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.

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

#630

Post by brlewis »

fenwick67 wrote: post #598
ramses0 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

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.

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