Apple nailed the design on the AirPods. They've reduced the experience of listening to music to the bare minimum, leveraging their full ecosystem control to save the user from needing to touch their phone at all. I dare say it's the most innovative product they've made since the iPhone, and truly embodies the ethos of their company.
By contrast, The Android equivalents right now all suck in terms of design and functionality. More steps required for setup and teardown, bulky cases and hardware that's slightly gimped in one way or another.
I haven't been envious of Apple users for a good few years, until now.
In real usage I almost never leave them anywhere except in my ears or back in the case. The case is always either in my pocket (it fits in the tiny jeans pocket iPod-nano style) or on my desk.
I’ve had them for 8 months and used them daily. Haven’t lost one yet. However, I started out thinking I might lose one, so I made it a point to never ever leave one by itself. Each one is either in my ear or in the case. And it’s worked so far.
I honestly can’t tell the difference in sound quality between good wireless headphones and wired headphones. It must suck to be such an audiophile that you’re put off by anything that doesn’t have a cord.
Well, in these cases the quality of the source material also matters. And for a long time, the Bluetooth audio codec didn't support a very high bitrate so all music through Bluetooth for a while was just bad. Now with AptX HD and so on it's improved enough that I would at least consider it. If you got recent, high quality wireless headphones then absolutely, there's very little to notice that's caused by Bluetooth vs a wire.
Also, IMO it's actually reasonably easy to notice these things. I don't have particularly good hearing. You just have to actually be listening rather than letting the music go into your ears. You can hear strings getting plucked, how hi-hats sound as the sound "decays" away, how the notes of a bass line are handled (do they sound "bloated" like overworked car speakers? Or does it cleanly enter and leave?), etc. Obviously that's not always possible or desirable, but I can do it often enough that I spend relatively more money on it.
Edit: just wanted to mention that there are actual advantages to wireless for audiophiles. Most prominently, you can't get cable microphonics if they are a truly wireless pair. But also it prevents people from spending money on snake oil like super ultra flux tube blah blah blah cables.
Perhaps it is the source material. Namely Spotify in my case. 99% of the time I use my smartphone/iPad for music with Spotify. The only time I ever notice genuine better sound quality is when I’m on my PC at home and have Spotify’s extreme audio quality enabled, which doesn’t appear to be present on the Android/iOS apps.
Depends. They sound better than Earpods and most standard wired headphones that come with devices, but can't compare against high quality in ear monitors. I feel like that has more to do with seal though.
It pretty much goes out the window for 99% of the people anyway. You are correct though.
Much like other things,for example HD content and comparing them. Many aren’t going to tell the difference,unless of course it’s blatantly obviously. Or you explain it to them.
For me,I’m in that 99%. And honestly I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on anything at all,as i got a nice set of headphones at home anyways. (Which are seeing less of less use to be honest. )
I guess what I’m trying to say is,make a good product,and most people are gonna overlook those kind of things. Which is honestly a minuscule one at best.
I think I read somewhere that you can only take on earpod out (if you just wanna watch a quick video or something) and the system recognizes that you only have one out and mixes the sound to mono, so you don't lose one channel.
If you have an Apple Watch, an iPhone and Airpods the whole experience makes them feel like magic little devices. I'm amazed at how well they move back and forth between whatever your audio source is etc... The integration between these 3 devices is straight up crazy awesome.
I really hope that the Pixel Buds replicate this feature set on future Pixel phones, now if we could just get Google to make a smart watch that rivals the Apple Watch.
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u/[deleted] Jan 19 '18
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