Right, I'm not defending this decision, specifically. Just offering a counterpoint to the parent's:

> the biggest difference is that those technologies were all on the downward slope of their popularity when Apple made the move

This was not the case when Apple pushed hard on USB as compared to other peripheral standards with the iMac in the late '90s.

They say that the Airpods work with Macs too, so I assume they use bluetooth? W1 could just be their custom Bluetooth chip

But they probably can't be paired with any other device than Apple's.

Now that people are actually reviewing them, it seems very clear that you can pair AirPods with anything that does Bluetooth audio.

Would you like to revise your priors concerning Apple products?

Reports at the keynote were saying they were not pairable with other devices. But it indeed seems they are.

Not really; people who had preconceived notions of what they thought Apple would do were reporting this. And those people were wrong, and perhaps their preconceived notions are in need of revision.