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Comment by arsenico | Hacker News Reader

That is exactly why AirPods are an absolutely superior product.

For one very niche use-case.

No wireless technology is a replacement for the headphone jack. It will probably be decades before we have anything decent (though I'm not hopeful).

It's not really niche. The GP's problem is solved because pairing effectively becomes "put these two things close together and open the box".

If it only works on one device it is pretty niche and hardly a replacement for the headphone jack...

Not to mention that for that price I can buy a pair of extremely nice-sounding headphones, wireless or not.

I mean it's certainly a replacement for the headphone jack on that device which is pretty much the stated goal.

What? It will only work with that device. It won't work in any car or any other circumstance. Also the pods themselves will not work with any non-apple device.

That's an extremely narrow use-case. If that was the only thing people used the headphone jack it wouldn't have been the big travesty that it currently is (and will be for the foreseeable time).

They have a pairing button like any other bluetooth device. They work in my car and on my windows laptop.

My bad, when they were new I was told it wouldn't work on regular devices. Still, it's just another bluetooth headset then.

I use them with my laptop too. I have had only one ‘pairing seems a bit broken’ issue since buying them as soon as they came out - and an iPhone restart was the fix. That’s about 2.5 minutes of hassle in several thousand hours of use.

If they were a pain, I would stop using them, but they are much less hassle than the many pairs of corded headphones I have. This said, other Bluetooth headphones are much more hassle.

There's still a dance you have to do when you want to change between devices. For example, I want to switch between listening to a podcast on my iPhone to watching a show on my iPad. You'd think that would be quick and easy but it still takes 10-20 seconds.

And it takes longer if the device or OS you want to switch to is not made by Apple.

I switch between iPhone and MacBook sometimes. My flow is usually turning off Bluetooth on the iPhone then selecting the AirPods from the MacBook, or similar. It doesn’t feel like much of a pain but it does seem like there could be an easier way. If the Bluetooth icon/menu on each device could have a ‘move AirPods to iPhone/MacBook/iPad’ option, and maybe a ‘move from’ on other devices.

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