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Comment by jmacd | Hacker News Reader

There is something weird about the AirPods Pro product line. I think a lot of us who are very technology focused can appreciate the marvel of engineering that they are. Long battery life, excellent noise cancellation, the right weight, water resistant, etc.

By many of my friends and my wife, all of who work in non tech fields but otherwise are 100% apple device people, all seem pretty much not impressed by them.

For Christmas I got my wife a pair of Nothing headphones. They are 1/3 the price and I figured it was worth a try since she basically just stopped using her AirPod Pros.

Now she raves about these cheap Nothing headphones. Tells her friends they are better. Less obtrusive, clear so they stand out less, good audio quality, and they don't try to magically switch devices, they just wait for you to decide what you want them connected to.

They support AAC on Apple, but have not great Bluetooth Audio support for Android.

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The price of the AirPods Pro ($329 USD, though they go on sale for a significant discount quite a bit) might be a reason.

I purchased no-name Bluetooth wireless earphones for ~$55 USD before the AirPods Pro, and they were shockingly good for the price (super small, lightweight, long battery; similar observations that your wife reported about the Nothing headphones). I got the AirPods Pro after that, expecting a massive upgrade, but really the only significant difference was the noise cancellation (which is why I still use them primarily). The easier switching between Apple devices is nice too, but for my use case, I mostly use the AirPods on my phone anyways.

So for the price differential between generic headphones, I would expect a massive upgrade, but now it feels like a nice upgrade but pretty expensive for what it does (especially since I'll have to consider replacing them once the battery degrades).

Very similar story with cheaper no-name bluetooth wireless earbuds. Honestly..despite the other complaints in the thread here about regular bluetooth earbuds…I’ve had a MUCH better experience with them than the airpods at doing one thing: being wireless earbuds.

I've had the polar opposite experience with the Nothing Ear 1:

- I can't seem to use them for extended periods of time without running into this issue where one earbud stops playing audio entirely and I have to fully reset them to fix it.

- The audio completely cuts out every 5-10 minutes for a brief (like under a second) moment, leading to these annoying gaps in whatever I'm listening to.

- After pairing, the audio will sometimes be extremely low quality, output in mono or not output sound at all; usually unpairing and pairing fixes this.

- Firmware updates have done nothing to resolve these issues.

I tried reaching out to Nothing support to try to return them but have been unable to get a response. These headphones are unusable and probably the worst tech product I've ever purchased.

Thank you, I've had my eye on those and was searching this thread for just such a review!

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