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There's no need to be obtuse.

The advanced noise cancelling, pairing, and synchronization tech are solutions to problems that don't exist (or are less pronounced, in the foremost case) with wired headphones.




Creating to solutions to nonexistent problems is a cornerstone of the electronics industry. Nobody ever needed an iPod. Apple didn't become the most valuable brand in history by selling people things they needed.

“It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.” — Steve Jobs


How is noise related to wireless? I was not aware that wired headphones enjoyed any advantage there, and I can't see how they would.

The others are certainly wireless problems, but some people prefer wireless for a variety of reasons. Lots of manufacturers sell wireless headphones. To say that Apple created those problems makes no sense.


I'm no sound engineer, but intuitively the design of the AirPods slightly exacerbates noise cancellation issues by:

a) Placing the microphone further from a person's mouth, or at least, removing the option for people to hold a wired microphone close to their mouth;

b) Significantly reducing the distance between microphone and speaker.


I never see people wearing headsets that place the microphone near the mouth outside of specialized settings, nor do I see people holding the microphone to their mouth. I suspect they generally want to keep their hands free.

I don't think the distance between the speaker and microphone matters. Canceling out the noise you're emitting isn't hard with modern signal processing.




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