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Comment by righthand | Hacker News Reader

Most people don’t wear hearing aids because they don’t like how it looks and think their hearing isn’t bad enough to warrant social stigma from it. I don’t see how Airpods solve that problem as they are very unsightly, no matter how much pundits say they love them.

In fact you mentioning how they are like hearing aids has made me justify never wanting a pair.

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The advantage of AirPods for social stigma is they aren't solely hearing aids, so you have a type of (casual) plausible deniability about why you're wearing them. They won't draw people's attention in the way that hearing aids (because they're different/unique) do.

But a lot of people don’t wear Airpods because they look dorky and look like something is growing out of your ears. This is what I’m saying, coolness doesn’t trump looks even if pundits say “I love my Airpods”. A lot of people do not like wearing headphones for a similar reason.

If i see someone wearing AirPods or headphones my initial reaction is they don’t want to be talked to or interacted with. Even if that’s not true and they have passive throughput.

Having earpods in while talking is an entirely new and worse social stigma than wearing hearing aids.

> you have a type of (casual) plausible deniability about why you're wearing them

"He doesnt even give enough of a shit about talking to me to remove his earbuds" isn't a good thing.

> They won't draw people's attention in the way that hearing aids (because they're different/unique) do.

They won't draw peoples attention in the same way because normal humans only begrudgingly interact with people wearing earbuds in conversations and only for a bare minimum.

I really can't stand this website sometimes. But at least you all got the AirPods™ branding right instead of just calling them earbuds.

I think that's more of a negative though. I always remove Airpods/earbuds if I'm in a situation when I may be interacting with others because otherwise I come across as rude, uninterested or unsocial, like having a "do not disturb" sign on.

Whereas I can see myself wearing a hearing aid (and probably need one) because people will recognize that I'm not trying to shut them out but I may have difficulty hearing.

If anything, if someone's wearing Airpods, I'm going to assume they can't hear anything I'm saying. "oh no he's wearing airpods" is a meme for a reason.

> In fact you mentioning how they are like hearing aids has made me justify never wanting a pair.

Why? Because hearing aids are unsightly? Are wheelchairs unsightly? Canes? Prosthetic legs? It looks to me like this idea of what’s “unsightly” is being fed by a cultural bias against the disabled. Interestingly, glasses were “unsightly” a few decades ago, and now they’re in fashion. It would be nice to see the same thing happen for other assistive tech.

One reason I already use them as hearing aids is because I use Airpods for phone calls, and it's a lot easier to leave them in than change to my hearing aids. So the question of what they look like doesn't arise.

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