Everything about the pixel buds is a blatant airpods ripoff, it appears. That’s fine by me, though. I’d love to see a third company/platform try to get in on the act, too.
A third company making wireless earbuds? There's an absurd number of companies doing that :)
Like any Google product, however, we have to enter it in the deadlock at launch time since it is only a matter of time before they see some shiny...
Eh, as near as I can tell like 10 brands came out at once in 2015, so it was always like that. More options aren't a bad thing.
Samsung has a lot of first with true-wireless headphones.
Wireless charging, IEM style buds and first android to have Apple style seamless pairing. They pair to multiple devices too. They also have much better battery life than both the pixel buds and air pods. Lastly, the android app itself is pretty great with decent customization and information, without looking half bad.
Idk why they get left out of the conversation.
Bragi crowdfunded "The Dash" in early 2014 (to much publicity) and released them in late 2015. To my knowledge this was the first high-profile pair of "disconnected wireless earbuds".
AirPods were released late 2016, so a full year later, so they were not the first with this kind of a product by a long stretch. By that time, Bragi already released a second stripped-down version of their product. The Pixel buds also much more closely resemble "The Dash" than AirPods.
As for product pages, I sadly don't have paper trail, but I'm sure people more into the topic can find examples dating back ~10 years for pages where the product twirls around the page while scrolling (and there is nothing more connecting the product page for the Pixel Buds and the AirPods).
Good, I would hate for you to waste effort on something few but yourself care about. Because I doubt you'd find many that would agree that Google is really ripping off "The Dash" because they were "first!!11".
As much as it will pain some to admit, Google is ripping off Apple, not some Kickstarter project no one has heard about.
Why not agree that both Apple and Google we’re inspired by the Dash?
If this were academia, they would probably be required to site them as a source.
And they had so-so reviews.
There were smartphones before the iPhone, there were tablets before the iPad, there were smartwatches before the Apple Watch. However, in general when Apple enters a category they set the bar for the rest of the industry (with some exceptions, e.g. HomePod and to some extend the Apple TV), because they nail the experience and the category becomes much more popular. Moreover, Apple generally dominates the categories they enter when it comes to profit margins. (And no, it is not only because people pay to carry an Apple logo.)
So, it is not strange that people compare Google Pixel Buds to AirPods. The now-iconic AirPod is what Google wants to emulate or compete with, not "The Dash" or many of the other less-visible competitors.
At some point it switched from people buying Apple as a premium brand to, as you said them just being "more popular" and leveraging that. A lot of people simply don't look much farther than they brands they already own, and this applies to Apple as well.
I wouldn't say that the AirPods were a "setting the bar" product. I'd argue that for the Apple ecosystem it was more of a "keeping the bar", with AirPods being the path of least resistance after they removed the headphone jack.