News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord. Parent comment

Re:Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord by lh7777 on Friday November 02, 2018 @04:32PM (#18366467)
I'd never understood the appeal of wireless headphones, and I guess I kind of do now that I have AirPods. Mine fit fine and stay in while running, but that's the only use I've found for them. Anywhere else and I'd much rather use my 15 year old Sennheiser earbuds because I have so many problems with the AirPods:

* like pretty much all Apple earbuds, they don't seal to my ear so they're totally useless in loud places like airplanes (my #1 use case for headphones)

* audio frequently drops out, especially when outside (and there's nothing for the bluetooth signal to reflect off of)

* terrible mic quality for phone calls

* unreliable pairing to my Surface Pro

* one more thing for me to forget to charge

Some of this is anecdata and maybe I just have lemon AirPods, but my experience has been very far from "there's no going back and there's no comparison". I'd sell them without reservation if I didn't feel weird in general about selling earbuds.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord by askafriend on Friday November 02, 2018 @04:43PM (#18366568)
You should take them into the Apple store.

A couple of those points are not my experience at all. My audio never drops out unless I'm far out of range or in a weird weather environment and my mic quality is excellent (in fact, I take calls regularly).

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord by lh7777 on Friday November 02, 2018 @06:27PM (#18367248)
They're over a year old, so probably not worth the trouble. Just dug the AirPods out of the junk drawer and they seem to be working better than I recall. Recently got a new iPhone, so perhaps some of my problems were the old phone's fault instead of the AirPods. I don't have any other bluetooth devices so there wouldn't have been anything else to tip me off.
[ Parent | on HN ]