This is Apple’s strength in general. Much easier for older folks to use.

Not even older folks. The technologically exhausted, too. I write code for a living and hack on hardware as a hobby. When I go on a walk or just want to chill out, I absolutely love when this kind of stuff just works. I will (and do) pay a massive premium for that. Major respect to the developers, it's obviously a feat. The haters can go recompile gentoo :)

Haters will continue to push the overton window back towards freedom. Your welcome.

It is appreciated, but we all have to choose our battles.

And when it's easy enough for older folks, they're also generally better for even savvier users.

I like hacking around a Linux workstation as much as the next nerd, but when I put BT headphones in my ears to listen to a podcast, I want it to just work.

That said, every so often I need to toggle my iPhone's bluetooth switch in Settings. Even Apple's software isn't 100%.

I’ve never really unpacked this idea in my mind before, but if you stop for a second you can quickly appreciate how powerful this type of experience is.

Older folks do not like feeling left behind. if Apple is causing them to feel liberated from their state of techno exile, that’s going to create insane goodwill.

And us younger folk appreciate not having to play tech support for the nthteenth time.

...with other Apple products. FTFY

Being Bluetooth, technically the Airpods will connect to say, a Dell laptop, but in practice they will have erratic behavior, which you can solve by buying a mac... and teaching said old folks how to use MacOS instead of Windows.

While they don’t have the excellent UX of Airpods with Apple products when used with non-Apple products, I’ve never experienced this “erratic behavior”. They just work like bluetooth headphones with no weird issues. I regularly use them with my desktop on both Linux and Windows, I’ve used them with my Nintendo Switch, etc… and no erratic behavior

Agreed. You put them in the case, hold the one button (basically the “pair” button) for a sec, and connect from your device.

Bam. Work perfectly after that.

For some reason on Windows AirPods show up as two different types of devices (not left and right) one of which sounds very bad with a lot of noise. And of course if you connect AirPods with your iPhone and your Windows laptop they’ll start fighting over who gets to connect.

This isn’t an AirPods specific issue, it’s a Windows issue. My laptop does the same thing with my galaxy buds where it shows two devices when I connect them. One of them uses the Bluetooth profile for headphones which sounds decent and the other uses the profile for headsets which sounds like garbage but that is needed in order to have the bandwidth to use the built in mic.

I believe the different Bluetooth codecs show up as different devices under Windows, so I assume the noisy one is the one for calls. Not sure exactly why it’s like this.

Windows and Bluetooth headphones just don’t work well together, regardless of manufacturer. And good luck of the headphones also have a mic and support the headset profile.

I recently went through this with a new Windows laptop. It was quite a shock after being in the Mac world for years how bad an experience Windows and headphones is.

Use the nicer one for listening. Use the shittier one for conferences. It's not an Airpod thing, Bluetooth just sucks and doesn't support high fidelity full duplex audio.

Same issue on Macs for what it's worth. If you are listening to music and a meeting starts and the mic turns on, the protocol will switch and everything will sound like crap.

Not just older folks. As a dev and tech enthusiast, even if I dig into technical bits of many things, at the end of the day I want something that works, battle-tested, and reliable. (okay a few failures in past years like keyboard failures, but still better than competition)

Apple just gives me that.

My only huge issue with Apple is that they create this 'them and us' mentality. I can't share a raw iPhone video with non mac users, because of the proprietary format. If Apple really wants to create a universal computer, it should work at creating the interfaces with the rest of us. It should not be a walled garden. Removing this boundary would make me love Apple.

Yeah, I agree, Apple has a reputation of doing things "its own way" which is sometimes frustrating for sure.

BTW for that specific use case AFAIK iPhone uses H.265 and H.264 (and ProRes but I don't think you're mentioning that when saying "raw", rather meaning straight out of device) videos inside a MOV container, which are both widely available (with H.265 having some license fees but available virtually on every device).

Much easier for everyone to use. When I first got my AirPods, they were the biggest single piece of life-friction-removal I've gotten from a piece of technology since my first smartphone