The biggest problem with hearing aids (and doctors/calibrators/whatever) is that they are ridiculously expensive... the attitude/stigma much less so. (And in any case airpods are about the opposite of "imperceptible" so I fail to see any appeal other than the price)
On the other hand, I can't bring myself to keep earbuds (airpods or w/e) in my ears while talking to someone, regardless of if I can hear them properly, I just seems incredibly rude.
My uneducated opinion, is that someone using airpods as hearing aids is more likely to face stigma for that reason, than someone wearing what are clearly hearing aids, unless people actually know they have hearing issues.
She admitted she disliked wearing the hearing aids, due to such things. But the alternative was not following conversations, which meant she'd get excluded because she missed important information.
Gave me a whole new perspective on hearing loss.
As to being excluded: one of my jobs is funeral officiant. Several times I've found the spouse of the deceased being left out of the funeral conversation because of hearing and I've even been told not to bother talking to them because they won't hear. Every time I've found that we can talk perfectly well - it just needed a bit of effort on my part.
And stigma is probably not the right word, it’s an internal acceptance issue.
When Borg bluetooth earpieces first came out, they definitely carried a tech bro/fin bro/VC/etc. vibe that, at any moment, someone more important than you might want to get in touch with me.
I do think Airpods today carry a certain I'm not necessarily giving you my full attention vibe whereas an obvious hearing aid is a medical prosthetic. To the degree that Airpods replace hearing aids for some number of people or just assist people who aren't quite at the prescribed medical device level, that probably changes.
Neither have I. On the other hand, I have seen people wearing air pods and thought they looked ridiculous, as if they had qtips sticking out of their ears. Especially if they're sticking out at different angles.
She was then able to hear our conversations even though the xm4 are not as good the real thing.
She didnt want hearing aids before that, but afterwards she wanted ones.
My father-in-law however doesn't like hearing aids because he feels they amplify things he doesn't want to hear. Granted he's never been fitted to actual hearing aids. I understand his concern, but he's told me multiple times his hearing loss leaves him isolated during conversation. He told me one night that he has a lot to say, but can't hear so he spends a lot of time just smiling. It makes me sad that his pride (and stubbornness?) is causing him this stress.
I mean that's kind of the whole point of having them adjusted with an audiologist. They're tuned to your specific needs.
It's too bad so many people think they're just mics and amplifiers. Modern hearing aids do a lot of signal processing.
This is what I'm still trying to convince my dad of, after he found the pair he was fitted with ~20 years ago absolutely useless. He found that they simply made everything louder which did nothing to help him pick out what he wanted to hear.
But he's always been picky about his soundscapes, wanting the TV muted during ad breaks etc etc.
I'm with him on this one. Commercials always end up being louder than the rest of the content, and are just.. annoying.
IKUK but that's like having bad vision so you put on a pair of your glasses from 20 years ago, still having bad vision, and deciding glasses just don't work well. Hearing and vision change over time. And that's assuming those were good hearing aids 20 years ago compared to what is available today.
I hope your dad ends up taking a chance.
Could that be your mother-in-law telling him things to do?
Is he afraid of losing plausible deniability - "Sorry, honey, I didn't hear that, you know how bad my hearing is."
Modern hearing aids can be adjusted to amplify only the things you want to hear, and even reduce the things you don't want to hear.
I used to be like your father-in-law, pride, vanity, stubborn, not wanting to be told what to do, whatever it was. And my dad was like this too (the hearing loss is heritable), I used to mock him about not wanting hearing aids before my own hearing declined. When I finally got fitted, it was shocking to me how much my hearing had suffered. Suddenly I could hear birds and crickets again, and most importantly speech!
Maybe you can get your father-in-law to first play around with AirPods as hearing aids to win him over to get proper ones. The latest generation hearing aids, like the AP's, have amazing AI signal processing that will suppress noise and enhance speech. It's always cool when my Phonak's detect noise and shut it down.
The important thing about hearing loss in elderly, especially if someone has an elevated risk of cognitive decline, is the resulting social isolation, and the increasing risk of dementia [1]. It should be addressed sooner than later.
To sum it up, the AP's have the potential to provide an affordable on-ramp for more hearing impaired people to experience hearing restoration and warm up to better ones (hopefully covered by insurance). I don't think AP's would a permanent hearing solution, other than for people who are uninsured and can't afford real hearing aids (sadly).
Edit: I could not imagine wearing AP's all day, great as they are, while I don't even notice my receiver-in-ear hearing aids anymore.
Edit: While AP's are not perfect, having any kind of hearing aid is a 100% improvement over having none, which is probably also why the FDA allowed OTC hearing aids.
Edit: [1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/hearing...
- I've always (decades) had issues with distinguishing speech when there's background noise. Even when my hearing was "perfect", my brain just had problems separating the two. This is _especially_ true in a crowded area (mall, restaurant, etc) where the background noise _is_ speech. My father had the same issue, tried many different aids, and _never_ managed to get a pair that worked.
- Cost. I'm not interested in experimenting at thousands of $ per try. With the expectation that I'll wind up at the doctor's office a dozen+ times while they try something new to help me (with the first issue), and a likelihood that they'll never succeed; I'm very hesitant to shell out the money involved.
What's the downside of waiting?
I have this issue with AirPods too, in the "adaptive" mode. It feels natural outdoors, but sometimes indoors and especially in rooms with echo it feels like it makes distant chatter unnaturally loud and closer-sounding.
Also will entrench the user in a walled garden ecosystem from a very specific giant tech company that isn't big on making their products compatible with other companies.
- it's not an argument against using AirPods as an aid with mild hearing loss if you're already an iPhone user
- it's not necessarily a great argument against buying an iPhone and iPods Pro anyway, given that hearing aids can easily run hundreds or even thousands of dollars more than that combination
- the vast majority of smart phone customers, both on and off HN, have either factored "walled garden" into their buying considerations at this point or never will
- let's not pretend Samsung is not already trying to figure out how to cram this into their next Galaxy Buds for Android users anyway, which will somehow work best with Samsung phones, not so well with other Android phones, and not at all with iPhones, but nobody will really complain about it because whatevs, it's not Apple
This is GP's problem? What should GP do to solve this problem? (Seriously asking, even though this probably sounds sarcastic). Should GP tap them on the shoulder or try to wave them down or something to get their attention? What if they don't want to be bothered? What about the sibling comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41533796 ) about it being a feature not a bug? If GP were to tap that person or get their attention someway, it seems that it would be unwanted.
Are you suggesting AirPods aren't Bluetooth 5.3 and aren't compatible with Bluetooth audio sources? Or that it doesn't play AAC, MP3, and FLAC?
The proprietary capabilities (such as instant smart switching between active devices) are all incremental, taking nothing away from normal Bluetooth usage.
Better wait for more open competition to catch up unless you are already deep in their ecosystem and not intending to move.
It's frustrating that the settings can't be changed on Android, and macOS seems to have a subset of settings compared to iOS.
Automatic device switching doesn’t work but that doesn’t work on my Sony headphones either.
They're not FDA approved as hearing aids, so they're not hearing aids.
Either way, pointing to another company being shitty isn't really a good justification of the first company being shitty.
Personally I thinks it's shitty when anybody does it.
isn’t it good to have multiple options so consumers can pick what they value?
In fact you mentioning how they are like hearing aids has made me justify never wanting a pair.
If i see someone wearing AirPods or headphones my initial reaction is they don’t want to be talked to or interacted with. Even if that’s not true and they have passive throughput.
> you have a type of (casual) plausible deniability about why you're wearing them
"He doesnt even give enough of a shit about talking to me to remove his earbuds" isn't a good thing.
> They won't draw people's attention in the way that hearing aids (because they're different/unique) do.
They won't draw peoples attention in the same way because normal humans only begrudgingly interact with people wearing earbuds in conversations and only for a bare minimum.
I really can't stand this website sometimes. But at least you all got the AirPods™ branding right instead of just calling them earbuds.
Whereas I can see myself wearing a hearing aid (and probably need one) because people will recognize that I'm not trying to shut them out but I may have difficulty hearing.
Why? Because hearing aids are unsightly? Are wheelchairs unsightly? Canes? Prosthetic legs? It looks to me like this idea of what’s “unsightly” is being fed by a cultural bias against the disabled. Interestingly, glasses were “unsightly” a few decades ago, and now they’re in fashion. It would be nice to see the same thing happen for other assistive tech.
They also own the consumer of Sennheiser since a couple of years.
Just looked up AirPod battery run time. Wow - that's short. I have Anker A40 earpods.[1] 10 hours, and the case has enough charge for 50 hours. 10 minutes of charging gives you 4 hours. They're a lot cheaper than Airpods, so you could easily buy a pair (for much cheaper) and be good!
Not sure how accurate they'll be as hearing aids.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B1LPNDGF/?tag=thewire06-20&linkC...
I'd say 4-6-8 is low-average-high duration for the standard form factor and ANC will reduce the duration by 25-30%
10 hours is exceptionally high, i don't think i even seen that claim
But year, they don't even have ANC, they are just a good pair of buds, the 10h claim is good.
Pro tip:
You know that a pair of buds is good if they offer Multipoint. It is such a hard feature to find in the mid and low end market
Are you talking about the ones I linked to? They clearly have ANC, and Wirecutter claims it's among the better ANCs they've tested.
> 10 hours is exceptionally high, i don't think i even seen that claim
The claim is right there in the product description. Wirecutter also confirmed it with a test:
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-wireless-ear...
They do say it can be reduced depending on how you use it.
Finally, here's a snippet of an Amazon review:
> I just played 7 hours of continous music with the noise canceling activated at high volumes and there's still almost 30 percent battery avaliable.
And another:
> I used the earbuds for 8 hours between ANC & transparency mode, ... Considering how often I use the earbuds after 8-10 hrs per day and 4-5 days of use from a full charge, the battery life is still 2 lights remaining.
One review does state lower life with ANC:
> But, a full charge only lasts me 6 hrs with anc on auto and volume at 50% or less.
A few reviews talk about even lower battery life, but given Wirecutter's tests and the preponderance of those who get long battery lifes, I'll assume the exceptions are defective products.
In any case, is ANC even relevant for hearing aids? I would have thought ANC would be a hindrance.
(In general, several reviews refer to using it continuously for their work shift).
The one thing that may not be particularly good is the mic.
Edit: Here is someone who tested with ANC on. They got 7hr 55 min:
https://www.soundguys.com/anker-soundcore-space-a40-review-8...
But lithium is not at all rare so it's not going to be hard to make more batteries.
I may be ready to drop $$ for my next pair..... do you work with an audiologist or did you do everything at Costco?
I also checked out earlens.com, a pretty cool concept that’s supposed to be superior in audio quality. But they are pricey, and need to be fitted by a doctor/audiologist with a transducer that sits directly on the eardrums (and stays in your ear canal) and is driven by induction. Ultimately turned off by cost ($12k/pair).
I think the technology in hearing aids has profited from the advances in chip manufacturing [1]. So the latest models may also be on 5nm and thus have more transistors for fancy AI and longer battery life. You may have a better experience nowadays.
"Compared to the previous generation of Oticon Opn S™ which is powered by TSMC’s 65nm low-power technology and contains 64 million transistors, the newest model features one of the most advanced chips with AI sound processing and analysis capabilities. The migration to TSMC’s 28nm opened the door for Oticon to utilize DNN, which is trained with 12 million real-life sound scenes. This new feature allows hearing aids to mimic how the brain would hear sounds and aims to respond the same way as the brain. As more functions are added, more compute performance and improved power efficiency will be required to support future generations of hearing solutions."
I have been wearing hearing aids for a few years now (Phonak). I've also used the AirPods Pro with the accessibility audiogram feature (basically making them hearing aids), which is really good and has also been around for a few years. I'm very glad, that Apple has made this official and even gotten FDA approval.
When I started to loose my hearing a decade ago, for a long time I refused to wear hearing aids, probably due to the perceived stigma. Even though it made life harder and harder -- imagine work meetings with a mumbling boss or me accusing my family to intentionally whisper -- it took years to change my mind. In hindsight I should have gotten hearing aids years sooner.
My 'real' hearing aids are nothing short of a technological marvel. They are tiny and run for a few days on zinc-air batteries (312/Costco but made by Varta), while providing all-day BT streaming. Btw, funny how most hearing aid brands come from Denmark. In contrast, the AirPods run out after a few hours and are also destined to become landfill due to their built in battery.