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Comment by fumar | Hacker News Reader

Right, wearing an Apple Watch + AirPods is the modern iPod experience to me. I can leave my house without a smartphone and take a stroll or bike ride or skateboard etc with music. The Apple Watch crown provides that tactile feel missing from smartphones. I like how easy it is to turn up the volume by quickly rotating the crown up or down.

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I have this setup and it’s a great vision. Unfortunately I personally find it needless hamstringed:

1) the Watch works great for every single one of my smartphone needs, but you are required to pair it with an iPhone that has a phone plan…even if you keep the iPhone turned off 95% of the time.

2) the AirPods fall out of my head when I smile. I’ve tried the different sizings. For such an expensive gadget, I expect to be able to make them stay in my head without fear of losing them simply because I’m having a nice time.

3) people sometimes report that they can’t hear me very well through the AirPods even if I’m sitting still in a quiet room with no obstructions. This happens regardless of whether the pods are tethered to the Watch, computer, or iPhone.

#3 it sounds like something is wrong in your device chain. 80%+ of my family and friends use AirPods for personal, workout, and or business purposes and their experience is rather seamless. Reach out to Apple support.

For 2), something I didn’t realize till recently is that you can “twist” them towards your face to tighten the grip. Perhaps try that?

I found cheap yet decent earbuds from Aliexpress and a cheap 3.5mm bluetooth receiver that solves the earbuds falling out of your ears problem. Every time I hear about issues people have with AirPods I'm so glad I went with this solution, and spent a fraction of the money too. If I pop the bluetooth receiver off the 3.5mm jack, I can use it with my (growing) iPod classic collection. The only reason I even use bluetooth at all is because my iPhone demands it.

Can you reccomend decent earbuds from aliexpress? I bought some but they still had a strong chemical smell after I let them offgas for a week.

Anything from KZ. I’m personally using their ZSTs at the moment but the ZSN is probably the go-to

I got the KBEAR Lark Hybrid earbuds. Incredible price to performance ratio. They wrap up around your ears so nothing is getting them off your head except deliberately removing them. The Chinese have massively upped their quality game in recent years, it’s no longer cheap shite that takes a month to arrive.

That's too bad. I love my AirPods so much. I run with them, bike with them, work out with them, and I've never had one fall out (classic, not pro). Obviously one-size-fits-all doesn't always work out though.

Do you have to have the watch with LTE, or does it actually cache music locally?

LTE but you can download music when on Wifi and keep it stored on the watch.

It can cache music locally – it does some guessing as to what you want by default, but you can also sync specific playlists. Current models have 32gB of storage.

you can but the issue is they limit the media storage to 8gb. :eyeroll. I can see why they'd want to leave some to the OS, but it really defeats half the purpose of 32 on a watch as is if limited to 8GB for media.

As far as I know, only apple music saves it locally but spotify and others can stream if you have LTE. I believe this is just a hold up from spotify and the apis are available though.

As of about a month ago, Spotify can download content to watch too.

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