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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

I'm honestly shocked how good of a job Apple did on their AirPods. When they first came out I thought it was an expensive gimmick, but when they released the Pro's I bought in and they became my favorite Apple product of all time.

At least for me, the reliability of the connection as well as being able to do a quick "handoff" from my iPhone to my Mac to take a call is a gamechanger. Also the spacial audio feature is probably one of the best overlooked features of the AirPods, the depth of sound you get with it enabled is truly incredible given what you are listening on. When I discovered that feature I pretty much re-listened to my entire Spotify library, listening to songs I've heard hundreds of times before, I picked up sounds I never heard previously.

For $200, what a freaking package.

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I've heard consistent excellent things about AirPods in terms of connectivity and listening experience for the owner :)

Let me be the annoying one to say that they can negatively contribute to a team meeting experience (which fair enough, isn't what they're designed for - but what many people use them for, not just in a pinch but as primary day-long mechanism).

There's only so much software can do to mitigate the fact it's an omnidirectional microphone far away from one's mouth, as opposed to focused microphone 2cm from mouth. E.g. literally yesterday, we thought our colleague was in a hurricane in Nova Scotia. Turns out, after we eventually asked and we were all nerdy enough to pause and troubleshoot :P, he was at home during a heat wave; his line was quiet when he didn't speak, but when he spoke, the A/C noise came overwhelmingly from his line; making it appear he's experiencing massive intermittent gusts. With airpods (or any other non-boom microphone - Airpods indeed are best of the breed, this is not their issue), we always know if person is walking/moving (wind noise going over microphone while they're speaking), or in a car, or eating, or around kids, etc. With the Plantronics boom headset (which is our team's go-to set, there's another good Jabra one I think a few of us use), nobody has any idea if we are in the car, or walking, or quietly in the office. That boom microphone makes a massive, massive hardware physical difference that software struggles to overcome without penalty somewhere in the chain.

The worst technology I've encountered in recent years is: Other People's AirPod.

When paired with a windows PC or older Mac, Airpods use an older or lower quality audio codec that sounds pretty poor for those hearing you speak.

Caveat: I don't know what I'm talking about, technically.

This is basically all bluetooth headsets though. Try using any of them to play games on Windows while using in-game chat. The audio drops down to tape recorder quality because there isn't enough bandwidth.

I agree with the mic issue and it's not ideal, though it eventually just gets down to what you can and can't do with the hardware. I will say for me at least this is non-issue since all calls are taken in my quiet apartment.

Agreed; this is the tradeoff inherent in that hardware design; by all accounts, Airpods are the superior offering in that space.

I keep a cheap set of wired headphones to use when I call people. I've used them when calling tech support on site somewhere. I probably looked dumb in the airpods age, but they work so much better than anything else. I'd use headphones from the $5 store before real airpods.

Friend has airpods, they have problems during phone calls pretty frequently. Maybe better than vanilla bluetooth, but still there are issues.

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