We should start a club!
My son just bought a 3.5 mm adapter for the phone. Turns out the younger generation prefers wired too.
My son just bought a 3.5 mm adapter for the phone. Turns out the younger generation prefers wired too.
Airpods are just about the worst headphones money can buy and people fight over them, despite there being headphones sold for <$100 that blow them out of the water. I have in-ear-monitors that cost a fraction of what an airpod does, has detachable cords AND bluetooth to each ear, and they sound much better and balanced.
Whoever took away the audio port on modern phones should be dragged outside and beaten like an unruly fax machine.
I went through a few other pairs of bluetooth "true wireless" ear buds and every single one of them would exhibit the normal bluetooth problems. Sometimes one wouldn't connect. Sometimes both wouldn't connect. Sometimes trying to resolve this I'd "forget" them and then not be able to pair them again necessitating pulling out the manual and figuring out how to do a hard reset on some ear buds. And then ending up with only one paired. Etc, etc.
I pretty much exclusively use in-ear headphones to listen to something to fall asleep to, so this is generally happening as I've already wound down and gotten into bed and... now it's tech support time!
I paired the airpods to my phone the first time and have never had them fail to connect immediately since.
That hasn't been my experience at all. The differences, even to a lay person, or not subtle.
Now, I can believe that many don't care, I can't believe that they can't tell.
And my wife experienced their noise cancelling once on a flight and bought a set the next day.
And we can share the audio between two airpod things when watching a movie, but not with non-Apple products.
I keep coming back to my Airpods, something that was gifted to me a year ago, when the other ones break. Most recently, one of my Jabra Elite buds plays audio at 50% volume from one ear 50% of the time.
Not a fan of the tap interface nor the shape of the things nor the need to use a rubber condom (that doesn't fit in the case so I have to remove/add every time), but my Airpods are the ones that I can count on, so I have to give them that.
[1] <https://crt.the-mori.com/2020-09-25-solve-jabra-elite-active...>
Airpods are still just Bluetooth with an extra chip for NFC pairing. All of the "magic" your Airpods provide are software-based, not part of the actual hardware you're buying. I think Tech Press is totally justified to ignore software that isn't part of the headphones itself.
This is actually not true. AirPods contain custom silicon from Apple for the controller that speaks bluetooth, whereas most true wireless headphones use a Qualcomm chip, and therefore suffer the exact same ergonomic issues almost regardless of price. The most obvious way this is shown is that you can be on a call with the right airpod in, then seamlessly add the left to the call and put the right back in the case all without dropping the call, developing sync issues, or making the switch obvious to the other party. It's especially useful if your airpods are low on power. Airpods also better than average (in my experience) at switching devices when clicking the connect button from a device they are not currently connected to. This is most obviously good with apple devices (where there is auto pairing based on apple id), but in my experience it works better than the average even on non-apple devices. I am comparing the experience to Sony WF-100XM3 as well as cheaper devices like soundcore liberty neo.
Of course you are correct that there are additional software derived things that make airpods nice on apple products. When they work well, they can be pretty great, but I still find those hit or miss. For me, the way the controller can switch easily between the right and left as well as easy pairing are what makes airpods great.
Nowadays, I think any phone running Android 10+ or Linux device using Pipewire has the best wireless audio experience I can think of. You can have high-bitrate audio codecs with excellent latency and a connection that's as good as the antennae you have plugged in. AAC and the funnel of buying U1 chip devices doesn't really put up enough of a fight, especially for a company that's long prided itself on delivering quality audio experiences.
The larger factor (in my eyes) is implementation. Bluetooth quality is all over the place: mobile Bluetooth stacks used to be abysmal until ~5 years ago, and desktop OSes still don't have it ironed out yet. It makes perfect sense that reviewers would focus on the hardware, as opposed to enumerating how each device works on each operating system, and so on.
I assumed I was just a grouchy old man (because I am:) but I recently found out what level of social stratification happens for teenagers without iPhone. Immediate judgement, plus the continued dreaded green text box. It is brutal
I thought I was exaggerating the iPhone as a status symbol as opposed to actually convenient / technical solution, turns out I was naive.
(there ARE things that Apple does very well, when it comes to integrating within ecosystem, though some of them are CREEPY - like being prompted to share my wifi password with another person who happens to be looking for wifi around me; just because they happen to have an iPhone doesn't make them my best friend... or does it :P )
But between Winnipeg winter storms and kids and experience of civil war and strife in a previous lifetime, mobile phones as a safety lifeline were a strong priority for me early in my life in late 90's; and then I was one of those nerdy guys with Palm Pilot (I used to read entire books... many many books... on a 320x320px screen - which is why I find it hilarious when people so righteously proclaim "Retina or bust" :), then Palm Treo then HTC G1 then Galaxy S2 and so on. I am too self-absorbed or something to worry about social media (I genuinely don't care what anybody else had for lunch or the cute picture of their cat or the latest copy pasted platitude that's 5 words but 3MB overcompressed JPEG grr!), so scrolling Facebook or twitter notification etc are not a real threat vector in a portable phone for me. Which is to say, I don't care one iota if anybody else has a portable phone or not, but I personally find it much too convenient; and I can see it impacting me if somebody else doesn't have a phone, not from status perspective but from practical perspective - there's a change of plans, but oh, Bob is still going to the CoolCafe and we can't tell him to meet us at the NiceRestaurant; or my tire is blown, how am I going to call anybody; etc. How do you handle stuff like that?
For a while, it was the same with Facebook.
Texting, like messaging and email, are async whereas phone is sync. For 99% of my communication, I don't need to talk to somebody right now (and they don't need to talk to me right now :). I don't care if other party has a cell phone or not, but written comms is preferred to voice comm for large number of my requirements.
Similarly, email/messaging/text can trivially be a group conversation, and plans can be narrowed down or many people can be informed quickly; again, don't care if other party has cell phone or not, but in many circumstances I'd prefer to send one quick message/email/text, than to call 7 people.
(lest you think I lack empathy, I am of course on the other side of the equation too! My family is all on Whatsapp, which for me is the worst messaging system that an evil mind could possibly invent, so I feel the pressure :)
Personally I hate text because most people will reply with one or 2 word answers and it takes much longer to get a decision vs a minute phone call.
In collage my reasoning was purely financial and this was the beginning of the mass adoption wave. I can only guess that the pressure to conform is so much greater and the scorn/ridicule for not is as well.
I also wonder if we will see a counter wave similar to the "I don't watch TV" that happened. Phones are great but they are also insediously great time wasters.
I think some counter movements are already seen; and more mainstream, people are trying to learn how to limit / constrain their phone interactions. Part of the problem is that our labeling is horrible outdated - it's not actually the "Phone" part of the rectangular device that's usually the problem, it's the "massively powerful computer and media consumption device" part :D
- A food truck sends a text when your food is ready
- The menu at the restaurant is only available via a QR code which sends you to a website
- You have to take a picture of your license plate for some parking requirement
But I would be frustrated if it was somebody close to me, if (if!) there was no other way to contact them.
Orrrrr we tolerate repeated mistakes on Apple's part because every time we poke our heads up and look around at the rest of the market (or even try switching for a while!) it's clear we'd just be trading every one problem for three others.
I sincerely wish any other tech companies would at least credibly pretend to actually be competing with Apple head-on, rather than just avoiding them and trying to fill other niches.
This was in the late 1900's....
True wireless have so many drawbacks: - lower battery life yet people got convinced that they last long thanks to powerbank, I meant ,,case" which you need to carry.
- bulkier so they stick out of ear one way or another. They fall down easily when changing t-shirts, huddies .. - easy to lose
pre-covid we had an open floorplan office, typical valley startup layout, no noise dampening etc
Everyone had the bose 35 quiet comfort i or ii noise canceling headphones. I was one of the new guys so started off with a $60 panasonic noise canceling headphone, and later when released got the sony ...mx4000? noise canceling headphones because they had USB-C in ~2016 and I brought them with me on my most recent trip here in 2022
I don't know anyone who has ever complained about their bose or sony bluetooth noise canceling headphones. They just work, all the time, every time. Except that one time I forgot to charge them and let them run down to 0% (and it even warned me about an hour before)
My Sony XM4 cans often give me trouble with bluetooth. Once in a while, there is no sound from the device. The device says "connected", the phone app says it's connected, the computer says it's connected. The way to fix it is to plugin the 3.5mm jack, and take it off. The device powers off. The next time it is powered on, it works properly. Lots of other people have had this trouble too. I did not discover this "fix" myself, but was written online somewhere.
You mean "....you have iPhone". Gotta get the weird marketing right if you want to be in the club.
They heave this “feature” where they turn off after 10 min of silence. And they’re Bluetooth, so once they turn off, u have to walk to the damn speaker (no remote), push the power button that’s hidden on the back for several seconds (less used buttons are visible on top), then go to your playback device and reconnect the Bluetooth.
People on the forums have been complaining about this for years, and the support still says this feature can’t be turned off.
For a company that supposedly makes very carefully designed, great Audio equipment made in Germany, this user interface is infuriating, pointless and feels never actually tested. (Also, Nowadays nobody reviews products anymore so bad user interfaces are not caught). Btw, I have some Bluetooth speakers with a tiny battery that will stay on for a day and not turn off, idling takes nearly no battery power.
So yeah, this is like the laziest product I have owned, that just dares u to stop a movie for a bathroom or snack break lest it goes back to sleep, and it wasn’t designed by some big monolithic FANG but a supposedly user centric design focused hiish end shop.
There's plenty of phones and devices waterproofed to any given standard with 3.5mm. To my ignorant mind, a USB C or Lightning port is not fundamentally different exposure / difficulty than 3.5mm when it comes to this - this is far from my area of expertise, but a cursory google search, and plentiful of counter-examples, indicates this is just a post-hoc justification for Apple's removal, not a real critical path.
Understanding that "if you need something, get an adapter / live the dongle life" is the core Apple philosophy, and agreeing that most standards should eventually die (parallel port, Firewire, etc), 3.5mm still seems a uniquely standardized, useful, and time proof feature that's is sorely missed with no adequate replacement (dongle, of course, is not it, for many reasons - expense, inconvenience, losing them, and if you want to charge your phone while being on a call things get very wonky very quickly - does Apple even offer a 1st-party solution for this common office-worker use-case?)
I've been using Sony phones in the shower and at the beach for years now and only briefly switched to a different company when they tried to pull that headphone jack removal of crap briefly when I needed a new phone.
Now, has Apple gotten too obsessive about thin phones? Maybe - but that’s a different discussion.
Some searching suggests that 5mm is about the point where it won't fit, and iPhones are comfortably 7+. One of these phones is 5.6mm thick with a headphone jack and has near-zero bezels.
USB-C just felt terrible to me when I had a Nexus 5x. Port wasn’t as secure, cable was huge. Not a fan.
Some people wreck the 1st-party cables abnormally quickly; they should buy one of those armored cables from Amazon.
So when you WhatsApp from your mobile someone else has to see you type slowly, full of autocorrect errors and typos. You don't switch to the web Whatsapp from a computer, or a model M attached to the phone despite knowing they are faster because you get their messages fast and correct so it's all great.
By placing the microphone close to the mouth noises you make, you are increasing, by many orders of magnitude, the signal-to-noise ratio.
Cars and other large BT devices (like an Amazon Echo) can use multiple microphones and some fancy processing to really isolate the voice signal coming from a specific direction (relative to the device) and also cancel out surrounding noise sources.
With ear-bud systems, you can't fit in many microphones, nor can you spatially separate them enough for the software to do the job.
But they also pick up peoples' gross mouth noises. You hear them chewing food, wheezing when they have a cold, or even eating food in waaaaay too much detail.
Obviously mute buttons exist but... I've had multiple remote coworkers with boom mics and even if they rememeber to mute 90% of the time over the course of a year that other 10% really adds up lol
It's also not surprising when you realize no one buying these things is testing the mic before the purchase. They probably aren't even testing how it sounds. It's hard to sell better things when most customers will never know how bad they sound, and even the ones who do probably won't care. And worst of all they'll blame zoom, or the telephone network, or their internet, anything but the cheap piece of crap mic and half bandwidth connection they're using.
Sorry for the rant. The economics of consumer audio are why I personally quit the industry. Some of these things are easy fixes but no one cares enough to make them.