There's no need to be obtuse.
The advanced noise cancelling, pairing, and synchronization tech are solutions to problems that don't exist (or are less pronounced, in the foremost case) with wired headphones.
The advanced noise cancelling, pairing, and synchronization tech are solutions to problems that don't exist (or are less pronounced, in the foremost case) with wired headphones.
“It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.” — Steve Jobs
The others are certainly wireless problems, but some people prefer wireless for a variety of reasons. Lots of manufacturers sell wireless headphones. To say that Apple created those problems makes no sense.
a) Placing the microphone further from a person's mouth, or at least, removing the option for people to hold a wired microphone close to their mouth;
b) Significantly reducing the distance between microphone and speaker.
I don't think the distance between the speaker and microphone matters. Canceling out the noise you're emitting isn't hard with modern signal processing.