Sidebar: Why has the AirPod design become so ubiquitous? I always thought they were the ugliest earbuds since earbuds became small. Is there some technical reason they have this design? Or do people actually like it? Or is it simply the Apple effect?
https://www.instructables.com/id/Increase-and-extend-the-ran...: “As Bluetooth devices work at frequencies of around 2450MHz, the formula will give you an antenna length of +/- 12cm.
This figure then has to be divided by 4 to give us a quarter wave antenna, which will be 30mm in length”
Chances are hanging the antenna (a tiny bit) away from the bag of water called “skull” also helps reception quality. It also provides an easy handle to take them out of your ears.
Funny story about antenna lengt , I got a new job and was excited that I could at last upgrade my airpods to airpods pro. After a very frustrating couple days, I learned that my head is too big/dense/whatever for the airpods pro to reliably sync across my head. They would only work if used one at a time, or if I really cranked them at an angle such that the tails were far off my head which was unwearable.
I have long earlobes, I think the extra little bit of length of the non-pros gets it past my lobes and allows a connection that the pro's can't make.
- They fit my ear and don't hurt. Nothing else ever has expect apple buds, wired or not.
- I find the design much more appealing than all the other products on the market.
- They actually work properly.
I have had bluetooth headphones etc before that either sound like crap or are just to buggy to use. Hell, even my 'premium' Bose BT speaker randomly gives up for weeks on-end and then decides it will work again.
The latter two points hold for most apple products in my experience. Over the last year I've tried replacing my laptop and phone with non-apple products, and not the cheap crap either. It was fucking torture to me :P
>They fit my ear and don't hurt. Nothing else ever has expect apple buds, wired or not.
Same for me. I'm lucky, for my partner they hurt minutes after wearing them. The only other in-ear besides Apple's "dagger tip" design that works for me without pain is a custom mold.
What in particular makes them ugly for you? I have a pair of second generation AirPods and find them neither ugly nor particularly beautiful. I like them because they work really well. They sound good, they’re compact, and the integration with my phone/laptop is close to seamless. My wife has some other wireless earphones and they’re much worse: bulky, heavy, and always causing some kind of pairing hassle.
For me, the fake cable makes them look dumb. But as Someone said, they seem to require a certain sized antenna. I couldn’t think of a better solution to hide one either.
Note that I never said they suck, I was pretty certain that the $200 something is not all just the Apple tax ;)
The antenna stick is conspicuous. For a luxury brand, that's important. Think about how quickly people went from black headphone cords to white. Or how the coloured iMacs were introduced. Or how three visible cameras on the back of your iPhone came to signify something that two cameras didn't (you bought a newer, more expensive model).
Pointing into the head or away from the head are not ergonomically viable options. Realistically, if you are going to have a quarter wave antenna the product shape is going to look a lot like an Airpod, but not necessarily shaped as a white amorphous blob. Like a large touchscreen on phones means a rectangular slab of glass shape, but the industrial design around the slab can look different.
They are expensive - for a pair of wireless ear buds.
Putting aside all subjective qualities. People know they are expensive and regardless of whether you agree w/ the decision, you know they cost $195, $249 or whatever.
That's a signal of wealth like certain clothing, a super car, or a bloomberg terminal.
It may be confirmation bias, but it seems people care more about someone else’s phone choice (Android and iOS fanboys) than some more wealthy person wearing a $50,000 watch.
For example, Lifehacker posts some articles about how to do something on iOS every so often, and the comments always have those people saying, “iPhones suck; just throw it away and get an Android” with no mention of why.
Alternative designs come with their own problems or ugliness.
The ones that look like buttons give me the impression that it's a medical device and are simply too pronounced. I assume they are that beefy because they need to house the battery in the "head" but the "head and stick" design can have more elegant head since the battery is in the stick part. Since Apple was the first to have that design, they now pretty much own it.
I also suspect that the microphones work better with the head&stick design since the orientation of the mic and the proximity to the mouth is better.
I thought they look funny (although not ugly) when they first came out. But other designs (e.g. round blob sticking out of earholes) are even worse, and convinience outweighs visibility.
I agree so much with this. I bet that 2 decades down the line, kids will look at pics of people roaming around with alien-probe like dangling earrings and thinking they look "cool" and judge them the same way my generation judged people in the 80s for their fashion sense (or the wall street types in the 90s/early 2000s for their douchey bluetooth headsets: https://www.blueshoon.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Bluetoo... )
The fully in ear design works very, very, very well once you figure out the proper tips for you. Otherwise, the around-the-ear IEM design works well too.
I don't get it as well. Especially the "let's make it look like it has a wire but it hasn't" aspect (there might be some ergonomic aspect to it, but it definitely looks weird)
But to be fair I don't think that I'm in their market as I think it goes too far into the ear to be comfortable to me
> I always thought they were the ugliest earbuds since earbuds became small.
Ditto. Whenever I see someone wearing them I make a point of locking eyes, then smirking. AirPods and similar headphones are an upscale version of a face tattoo. They are like a South Park parody come to life.
I firmly believe that in twenty years we will look back at them in chagrin, like bell bottoms and bowl haircuts.
> Whenever I see someone wearing them I make a point of locking eyes, then smirking.
Some people on hacker news are so cringy... I promise you they don't even know why you're smirking, just think you're either autistic or an asshole. The answer is likely both so I guess they aren't wrong.
1. Apple removed the headphone jack.
2. Apple stopped giving out dongles in the box.
3. Apple limited others' ability to compete by including proprietary chips in iphone and airpods.
4. Apple marketed airpods as a status symbol.
5. People bought into the hype.
Objectively, airpods are the worst wireless earbuds in the market on every single metric, but still command a premium price.
Isn’t the burden of proof on the person making the claim? In this case, you’re claiming they’re worse, so the burden is on you to find a better one. Any would work. But to put the burden on the person claiming, in their own opinion, that they’re simply “the best on the market” doesn’t make sense.
They never asked me. Instead they resorted to name calling, personal attack. So understand why I don't feel inclined to continue this conversation and put more effort into it.
The audio quality is not good compared to other similarly priced buds. And the latency with Apple is exactly what I mentioned, it is an anti-competitive move by Apple.
I don't feel like arguing about audio quality, but the reason they're being anti-competitive about it is because they're leveraging the objectively better latency.
There are standard ways of achieving low latency. Everybody else does it. Why did they choose to implement a proprietary solution that works only with their phone and their earmuffs?
1. AirPods are convenient to carry. 2. AirPods are convenient to charge. 3. AirPods are convenient to wear. 4. AirPods are convenient to share between people. 5. AirPods are convenient to switch between devices. 6. AirPods sound good. 7. AirPods Pro have good noise cancellation, transparency and spatial audio. 8. People buy them because they want them and know others who are happy with them.
Objectively, this is the worst list formatting on the internet in every way.
I am not a native speaker, but I do feel my comment was accurate. For the price of an airpod, you can get other brand earbuds that are better in every metric relevant to an earphone.
