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Comment by QwertyPi | Hacker News Reader

Ok, there are two issues here:

1. Amazon refuses to hold themselves accountable for the products they sell—they advertise one thing but sell you another, clearly indicating they have no idea what they're actually selling.

2. Apple relies on legal protections to artificially inflate the pricing of their products. AirPods aren't much better than bluetooth headphones sold for a tenth the price, and they are straight-up inferior to the products of competitors with a third their price. If the superiority of their own products were so obvious the branding wouldn't be an issue at all. And don't even get me started on how they force consumers to buy their hardware to get access to their software, which should be forced to be sold on the open market along side their competitors.

Now of course we need to fix the first issue to fix the second one, but the second issue has far more destructive consequences.

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I don't know of any third party options to Airpods that:

1. pair instantly without problems to my apple devices

2. intelligently know when to switch between my phone to my laptop

3. intelligently know when to switch from car bluetooth to headphones

4. is compatible with "Find My"

5. has magsafe charging

6. has same sound quality and sound cancellation with above features

these are all very important to me and my experience with literally any other non-apple device has been awful

Transparency mode alone is a technological marvel.

It is extraordinarily difficult to do correctly, and once your brain has adapted to the Apple acoustic transformations, they’ve achieved near-indistinguishability.

Agreed, it’s one of the most well refined Apple features in recent years. The teams behind sound at Apple have been doing amazing work.

Sure, but by that metric apple could charge literally any price through the inherent deficiencies of bluetooth. You're not exactly a rational consumer.

My point is that the extra price is worth these features. If they charged $1k I wouldn’t buy them

Those "features" are arbitrary stuff Apple told you to care about through their marketing. Many people really don't care about them, because outside the Apple ecosystem, there are other, often better solutions. The auto switching never worked properly for me so I'm always curious how come all Apple fanboys have it working so well. In my opinion it's like the Siri "demo" I got back in the day where the thing supposedly working so well, completely, and utterly failed, yet my Apple fan friend acted like everything worked fine.

I have non-Apple Bluetooth earbuds and they pair simply fine to my Apple devices (and others). Apple oversell the shit of their iCloud "auto switching" (that often do not work) but what you actually want is Bluetooth multipoint, a feature that many headphones in the price range of Airpods have.

Find my and MagSafe charging are very odd, Apple marketing induced request, and Apple definitely doesn't have a lead in sound quality at the price they sell their stuff. If anything, their sound quality is extremely disappointing considering the price. Funny thing is that for the price of a set of Airpods, you can get 2-3 equivalent competitors' products. So much of the stuff you say matters is largely irrelevant.

Before calling me a hater: I'm an Apple customer since the PPC days and bought both first iPod and first iPhone. But I am currently leaving the Apple ecosystem precisely because their pricing is not grounded in any technological reality, and mostly about fashion/social statuts.

Person 1: I like <list of things>

Person 2: Those "features" are arbitrary stuff Apple told you to care about through their marketing.

How wildly condescending lol. “You don’t actually like those things. You just do as you’re told, puppet.”

I hate capitalism and I think advertising is unethical in all forms. I have a high level of self awareness around corporate influence in my life and generally have massive disdain for any business. I believe my opinions are a result of how I actually use my device on a daily basis and not just a nice to have.

That's what you want to believe. Yet every "feature" you listed as a reason for buying AirPods exists in competing products, very often with superior experience. I don't know why anyone care about MagSafe if they have reliable wireless charging anyway and everything else listed just require a competent Bluetooth multi-point implementation and from experience it is preferable to the annoyance that is iCloud switching. When it comes to "Find My"; it is where we really enter the arbitrary territory because it is not a feature related to the use of earbuds, but some random stuff Apple is advertising because they have the money and scale to do custom chip for "features" of the like that are of dubious value.

AirPods have no way to stream lossless music, so you didn't mention that feature (yet they sell it with Apple music). It does exist in competing implementation of wireless earbuds. I guess when Apple do finally implement the feature you will care about that.

You went on and listed an arbitrary set of features and use that as a rationalization of your choice. Just like a hiring agent crafting a job proposal that could possibly only be met by one specific individual.

It's your right, you can make whatever choice you want and be happy with them. However, you can't argue they are inherently better than some other choice that would offer a different set of features, especially not without putting everything into the pricing context.

Apple Airpods are ok. For the price they are sold at they are very mediocre and the "features" they market as something customers should care about really do not pass the sniff test. Its ok if that's what you prefer, but you can't claim there are no other options that can provide a similar if not better experience. Of course, requiring a perfect 1 to 1 equivalency will get you nowhere...

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