I personally own a pair of Beats fit pros - which are great for running, Zoom calls. But I recently acquired a schiit vestri and I pair these with some old wired seinheisers (HD1). I cannot overstate the drastic difference in quality.

It is quite absurd (but categorically true) that the quality of audio that folks were generally listening to in 2005 was better than what we are doing today.

I finally capitulated to earbuds when they started giving them away with the Pixel phones. The "find my" feature basically justifies the pro-prices, to me, because my biggest complaint about bluetooth earbuds in my own use case was how easily they're lost. I've lost and recovered my Pixel Buds Pro 2 a couple of times now. When traveling a lot by train and plane, the convenience of pocket-sized noise-cancelling earbuds has become worth it for me.

But when I'm on meetings, I'm wired in. During the pandemic, I lost track of how many times my colleagues' Airpods would sputter out and die in the middle of a client meeting. Then they'd switch to wired headphones and their Macbook microphone. They sounded better, they could hear better, and there was no battery power sword of Damocles anymore.

There is a reason premium audio car packages cost over 2000$

Ripping the car apart to install sound insulation might void your warranty.

I have a Bose sound system in my car with 11 or 13 speakers (they're everywhere), but the car is so poorly insulated that I have to turn up the volume quite a lot at highway speeds, or even after about ~ 35-40MPH.

On my Toyota it only involved basic removal of interior panels, I can't imagine that affecting warranty or resale

To further this concept, the reason why you tolerate variable quality isn’t just convenience or accessibility. It’s because you can’t carry your setup around, yes, but furthermore you don’t habitually listen to music because you have the best setup. You do it because you love music. In that regard, the user experiences do become interchangeable. Quality music is accessible on every device and you will listen to it with anything if you love music. The user experience enjoyment levels are ultimately similar with most devices for you, purely when it comes to music listening, just because you love music. It’s a consistently good UX for you.

I say all of this as someone who has also wasted money on expensive listening devices (and loves music) and also someone who isn’t like, crazy about the modern Apple UX. They just got earbuds right when it comes to the experience of an Apple ecosystem user.

Every 'pod' type headphones I've used do this. It's odd you admit to only knowing Apple, then use it to support Apple being superior.

I always assumed it was more about the position and size of the microphone.

It's technically not a bandwidth issue, AFAIK, it is a "profile" issue. When listening to audio only you are using a different bluetooth profile than when you are using it for two way mic+speakers.

Try playing some music on your computer and then start a video call. Even before I jump into the meeting, as soon as I hit the Google meet site and it opens up the meeting "camera preview" page, the music quality goes straight into the toilet.

This also happens to my "puck" speaker+mic array that is connected via USB.

Argh. Isn’t this direct evidence that it is not the “Bluetooth profile”? Since it’s directly connected via USB?

Comparing Apples to Apples, AirPods are definitely sound better and are more useful than the pack-in iPod earphones that everyone used back then.

Honestly for me the Airpods 4 with ANC are one of the greatest feats of audio engineering ever. For such a tiny form factor they reproduce really great sound, big soundstage, AND they have good ANC without needing a closed earbud seal. They also have internal mics that listen to the response of your ear to adjust the sound profile, which you can hear happen in real time after bumping the earbuds. Obviously you can get better sound if you make different tradeoffs and wear over-ears, but they are absolutely cutting edge for what they are.

Sure, unless you want to do something rare and exotic like, say, have a microphone on your headset. Then you get the HFP/HSP profile, which makes two tin cans linked by a string seem high quality by comparison.

But it sure is nice to be able to make phone calls where people don't sound worse than they did with digitally-switched analog landline telephones in 1995. Bluetooth doesn't get there at all.

The losses of Bluetooth even compound generationally: The inescapable tin-can audio of Bluetooth at one end first gets transmogrified by at least one intermediate lossy codec for transmission across/betwixt the network(s), and then gets tin-canned harder when the far end of the connection is also using Bluetooth.

For perspective: 1995's phone calls were ultimately limited by the G.711 codec, which itself dates to 1972. I'm not setting the bar very high here at all.

Of course that sounds like a tin can either way, it's coming in encoded with the quality of a tin can! People here are talking about modern VoIP calls (Teams/Slack/Discord/Zoom/etc) which have a snowball's chance in hell of sounding decent in the first place. HSP/HFP will often crank that right back down to traditional phone network quality again. You also lose stereo, which isn't so bad if the only thing you're doing is having a 1:1 call but kind of sucks for a background group call.

But now that you mention it: Yeah, the state of common VoIP (Teams/Slack/Zoom/whatever) is also usually not very good. It's like there's some huge bandwidth crunch here in 2026 that is driven by the strenuous demands of VoIP, except: There isn't.

When I was doing some live streaming with others in a studio a couple of years ago, we worked with some of that. It never sounded very good. (It doesn't sound very good when the big-time acts at CBS or NPR or Fox News do it, either.)

But! When we occasionally had remote co-hosts who had enough technical competence to make it work properly on their end, we were able to use SonoBus[1]. That audio was positively pristine, like they were sitting unseen in the same room as everyone else.

[1]: https://www.sonobus.net/

It's an inscrutable mess.

Wires don't have these problems. Plug them in. Use them. Clean the contacts every now and then if/when they get crudded up.

That only works with A2DP one-way audio. The two-way HFP mode still uses the horrible classic BT compression unless the new BLE-based LE Audio is used(but IIUC Apple still don't support it). Besides there are still many devices that only supports BT's own 2000s-optimal SBC codec.

All that to say.. what's best, cheap, no wires, no headaches and happy or expensive, wires, having to download music and make a library etc and always looking for the next high, the next minor improvement?

One of the happiest days of my life was when I listened to my music on a 10$ mp3 player with 2$ earphones after 3 months of not listening to it.

So yeah, you may be right, even though I've tried 3000$ open-ear audiophile headphones, with an amazing amplifier, listening on tidal and it didn't blow me away but even if it did, I'd be stupid to even try, then I'd know what I'm missing and craving a 5000$ setup when I'm already happy with the 1 inch box I can easily carry wherever I go.

The market has spoken. People drastically prefer the convenience of Bluetooth over the quality that comes along with having to constantly untangle wires or having audio cut in and out from failing wires.

On top of that, universal adoption of noise cancellation has resulted in dramatically better quality in practice than what people were using in 2005. Yes, wired headphones with noise cancellation are even better, but not to a point that people are willing to sacrifice the convenience of going wireless.

The early 00's transition from CRT to LCD monitors was similar. The early desktop LCD panels were expensive, had worse refresh rates, worse contrast, and worse colour rendering. To this day, even very good modern displays struggle to match CRT motion rendering.

But LCDs are so much thinner and lighter, and that was enough to overcome the disadvantages.

A 20" viewable area, 1920 x 1440 CRT in the late 1990s? $800 [1] and that was the king of monitors.

A 22", 1920 x 1080 flat screen today? $65 [2] and considered the most basic, mundane screen out there.

And inflation-adjusted? That $800 monitor was $1500 in today's money.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/comparison,497.html [2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CVM2GJCN

But, as soon as I could get an LCD with DVI-D input, I never wanted to go back to a CRT. I just got whatever high resolution Dell LCD monitors I could find. I was much happier with perfect pixel addressing and zero bleed for rendering my text terminals and source code. I didn't care about color rendition and hardly cared about ghosting from scrolling.

This isn't really true in any applicable way though.

Firstly, most people in 2005 were ripping CDs onto their ipods at itunes' 128kbps default - you're still only getting 160kbps today if you're running the free ad-supported Spotify plan but more people are paying for full quality.

More importantly though, the biggest impact on sound quality is noise isolation. People listen to music on the street, in an office bullpen, or public transport: in 2005 your wired sennheissers would need to be overear to deal with that environment in any reasonable manner.The ANC in even the non-pro in-ear airpods is giving you a night-&-day improvement.

In 2005, you had serious and expensive high end audio from the established brands (Sennheiser, Beyerdynamic etc.) and you had consumer audio for consumer prices that sounded pretty terrible: no bass extension, flat mids.

In 2026 you have:

- Serious and expensive high end audio from the established brands (maybe even some of the same models as 2005...)

- A new category of convenience driven "mid-fi" like all the Sony, Bose etc. ANC headphones and AirPods Pro - often with the "laid back, a lot of bass, slightly recessed mids" sound signature but still producing very acceptable sound

- Consumer audio for consumer prices, but now even the cheap earbuds and headphones (JBL, chinese brands etc.) sound by all means passable, are wireless, have good battery life

I would say there has never been a better time to be a "good sound enjoyer" than now.

These sound better because they're $500 full-size headphones, not because they lack Bluetooth.

> It is quite absurd (but categorically true) that the quality of audio that folks were generally listening to in 2005 was better than what we are doing today

The AirPods use 256kbps AAC. If you set up a true ABX test, you would not be able to tell the difference between 256kbps AAC and lossless using the same gear.

I have several sets of high end headphones and have spent more on audio equipment than I probably should.

I enjoy my AirPods very much. They're great. They don't replace full-size headphones, but that's not what I bought them for.

I find all of this brand-bashing and talk about "normies" to be funny. The AirPods lineup is actually really enjoyed in the kinds of audiophile circles where they actually measure stuff and don't care which logo is on the box.

I don't get the comparison to the $19 IEMs because they're completely different product than the AirPods.

Quality is governed by your subjective experience. The HD1s are tuned in a way that, paired with the Vestri and the files, creates the experience that you enjoy better. That's it. It's not about "better quality" and definitely not about "fidelity."

You also paid probably $99 for something that Apple perfected and sells for $10 -- that USB DAC. Which is fine! You should spend money on things that make you happy.

>The quality of audio that folks were generally listening to in 2005 was better than what we are doing today.

This sentence doesn't have enough detail. What is quality supposed to mean here?

Unfortunately not giving wired headphones away (with the phone purchase) and not including the standard 3.5 mm headphone jack, means that 'normal' people just put their phone calls and play their video on speaker, to the annoyance of everyone (on public transport).

There are many, many people who are even technically minded who would be surprised that their expensive AirPods Max cannot reproduce lossless audio from Apple Music when used wirelessly.

The average audiophile can't either.

Don't believe me? Try it for yourself, bust out your most expensive DAC and headphones, but be careful, you can't unexperience this

https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_abx

Modern codec at a decent bitrate: inaudible.

Ironically, it could be the expensive DAC and headphones that helps the codec conceal itself.

That is to say, an audiophile who prefers gear that causes pleasant distortion might hear a difference through that gear, because the codec doesn't account for trying to mask its artifacts through equipment distortion (perhaps distortion in the ear itself only).

Say the codec removes something from the signal on the psycho-acoustic hypothesis that it is masked by something louder occurring close to before or after. That hypothesis is correct under hi-fi conditions, but suppose that the user's distorting tube power amp brings out that something, making it audible. Then removing it is potentially audible!

I seem to recall most people being perfectly content with 128kbps MP3s on iPod earbuds back in the day. Only audiophiles/nerds (of which there seem to be more now) were into actual headphones and amp setups and there's never been greater market choice in this regard.

Is it tho ? I remember back in the day, most of my music collection is in 128kbps mp3, well under the bandwidth of bluetooth

The AirPods were the most convenient piece of electronics I’ve ever owned, but the sound is earbud quality.

I have a pair of wired Seinheisers, and they sound great, but 99% of the time, my priority is convenience, and anything that makes sound will do.

Sounds much better than some 80% of YT videos

All possible but not common

Now I just embrace the convenience of Bluetooth and usefulness of noise cancelling.

(But then again, even my AirPods or Sony XM4s are high fidelity compared to what many of the kids these days are listening with, small mono bluetooth speakers or playing music out of their phone speakers)

I don't believe this statement is true, as someone who cares about audio quality and has been making my own audio equipment and buying high end audio gear since well before 2005. The bar for the average has raised considerably in the last 21 years, even though it was always possible to have better. I use AirPods when I'm traveling on a plane or walking/commuting by public transit and to take phone calls, when I want to listen to music critically I have a >$10k headphone setup that obviously puts a pair of AirPods to shame. They're not the same device for the same use case, and that doesn't make them somehow "bad". Use the right tool for the job.

> Force sensor with volume swipe arrives on AirPods 5, a first for the open-ear form factor, adding the ability to quickly adjust volume by swiping up or down on the stem.

Pure apple marketing juice this one.

> a first for the open-ear form factor

That is being called out as comical.

It's not a particularly crazy innovation but the statement is true.

This is exactly the assumption that the carefully worded juice hopes you'll make. That Apple's claim to innovation precludes even a cursory glance at the competition

Miss that a lot. Nowadays it's all touch and I hate it so much because for some reason I have a problem spatially locating them and always end up touching it the wrong way (and yes, I know... ;)

They're not doing anything deceptive or clever.

Cheaper than last gen too.

I’ve been having to throw away my earphones and getting new ones whenever I needed a new volume setting. Going up and down in the same device is truly a game changer.

/s

Would you rather have generation old Pros or brand new standard airpods which have the pro features you actually want.

Do you want open ear (AirPods) or closed (AirPods Pro).

Some people can’t stand having something in their ear. The volume control is a nice feature to have and now it’s available on the cheaper ones. I’ve missed it on my 4s.

Yeah the marketing copy is marketing copy and Apple never references competitors. But if you like the non-pros it’s a nice upgrade.

I'm holding out for the next Pro model as I genuinely benefit from closed headphones/earbuds. Open is nice in a controlled environment but I'd rather have that slight seal when I'm somewhere noisy.

My Pro 2s are genuinely very comfortable and still work great after 2+ years of moderate use, so haven't felt a need to upgrade to Pro 3 yet. I use aftermarket foam-like tips and find they seal great FWIW.

Both versions put something in your ear.

There are wireless earbuds that stay outside next to the ear, that are actually the ones legitimately called "open ear", but the AirPods aren't that type.

Airpods Pro are isolating, Airpods are not.

Apple isn’t going to mention things they don’t sell.

Because it's a non-feature even the cheapest $30 wireless earbuds have had since forever, often even better, like with physical buttons.

Power steering

Jet engines

Anesthetics

Rubber tires

Flat screen TVs

How grubby of them to take a high end feature and make it more affordable.

On the other hand in the past few years I have noticed a lot of people wearing Sony's Wireless headset and Earphones. Apple used to dominate this category when they first launch AirPods. I am wondering what happened they people discovered they could use other brand and Apple's brand loyalty don't quite work.

*without a case

I have no idea why Apple has made AirPods harder to handle, impaired mic placement, and limited the battery capacity with shorter stems.

The longer stems offered more room for battery, got the mic closer to your mouth, and were so much easier to handle, manipulate etc.

Can't really fathom why they shortened the stem and made it harder for everyone, themselves and users alike.

The long stem may have been a necessary but suboptimal engineering tradeoff to get the first version out the door. A lot of design tweaks have gone into making AirPods less likely to fall out.

The first-gen Airpods fit my ears perfectly, and were secure. When I lost them and upgraded to the 2nd gen, I was initially upset - aside from the body being fatter (and so less comfortable in my ears) they were very insecure - I couldn't even walk around without them loosening and dislodging.

I was on the point of returning them when I saw the advice online to 'twist' them into a different position. I now use them with the stalks horizontal, and they're secure. Still a touch less comfortable than the v1s, but easily tolerable.

The longer stem used to have a better chance at contacting your face for some staying power. The shorter stems don't.

Form vs. function

They looked sleeker and more balanced with the longer stem and in the ear more like jewelry.

I don't want to feel like I'm wearing one of those customer support head mics. I'm ok with shorter stem, and never had a problem.

Or different SKUs. Just saying.

Not that hard for the most profitable trillion dollar company on the planet.

Same thought as well. It doesn't have to be much bigger, but even 10% longer would be much more useful from mic placement and battery perspective.

I find the “true wireless” form factor finnicky and comically easy to lose and easy to drop. I don’t really see much utility in it either aside from the cool technology flex. If they’d put the modern audio quality and noise cancelling on the BeatsX (and the more neutral AirPods response curve) I’d be first in line.

I'm afraid to try expensive over the ear headphones again after a pair of XM3's started making the most hideous screeching noise right after the warranty expired.

I have the Sony earbuds, and while I agree they fit a little better, I find the memory foam disgusting. It also degrades over time and becomes brittle. My solution was the Alza SednaEarfit Max, which are silicone earbud tips that fit the Sony. They are easy to clean and come with the tiny mesh that prevents ear wax from getting into the electronic part of the earbud. Of all the tips I've tried, these stay the best.

However, they still fall out too easily if I'm eating (from jaw movements) or lying on my side.

PS. You mean Sony WH1000MX4. Not Sennheiser. Although Sennheiser makes the Momentum True Wireless, which comes with silicone earbud tips.

The linkbud S's are comparable in pricing tho

Thing that only happens in the minds of SV marketing gurus.

This is a weird product feature versioning. Would people pay an extra $20 for these two features specifically? With the AirPods 4 the upsell SKU was ANC which made exponentially more sense.

$20 is a single meal at a fast food restaurant, which I’ll have forgotten about the very next day. This is a much better long term investment.

I prefer the regular AirPods to in-ear. But I still keep an old pair of Pro's around purely because the stem is so convenient for changing volume when I'm walking the dog or out for a run and I'd rather not get my phone out my pocket.

Let's feel some excitement in your voices!

But in the end, it'll be the desire to eradicate the lightning port from my life that forces my hand on the upgrade

I have an iPhone logged in to my iCloud account.

My wife has her iPhone logged in to her own iCloud account.

Both of these iCloud accounts, plus a few more from my kids, make up our "Apple Family" thingy.

My wife bought AirPods. Paired them to her iPhone.

Why oh why every few weeks, when she gets the AirPods from their case, do they automatically connect to my iPhone and steal the audio from my (non-Apple) wireless earbuds I was using?

Do AirPods truly traverse devices based on the fact that separate devices/iCloud accounts are part of a family?

[holding two items at a store] "Siri.. which one of these should I buy"

im just so tired.

A bit strange for Apple to let fairly popular products just go so long without a refresh. Just the vision component of the new AirPods could have been delayed, not really a critical feature anyway.

Apple Watch seems to be getting pretty good, might finally switch away from Garmin if the Apple one is as durable.

I have a pair of airpod pro 2 and i have to scrape the leads almost every day

would be amazing if they did it thru induction charging (tho i guess thats really slow)

Cheap foam eartips from Amazon are even better than stock for my AirPods Pro but they need to be replaced more often.

I'm the opposite, the rubber ones are annoying and give me headaches. Love the open ear feel.

Are there non-Apple alternatives that also accomplish this?

That said, the masses have had noise cancelling earbuds for years at this point and while there definitely are cases of people getting hurt or killed from being unaware of their surroundings, it’s not really been that big a deal.

Firearms have been the leading cause of death for people ages 1-19 since 2020.

[0]https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761

I live in a city. Nature for me means the squealing breaks of cars and trucks + people trying to get my attention so I'll take their religious flyer. No thanks.

I've seen people with no earbuds be completely oblivious and almost walk into traffic...

Not all electronic recycling ä works well some non working electronics are shipped to Africa . The "recycler" takes the profit in the pocket. People have put airtags to track where such electronics to goods end up.

Also, landfills work really well. Most recycling doesn't work and pollutes more.

Whenever I have a call on my AirPods I feel terrible for whoever’s on the other end of my call because the quality is so bad, even when they’re connected to an iPhone. I originally thought I had hardware issues until I heard from others that all AirPods Pro are like this.

I dunno, can someone tell me what I’m missing here?

Like yeah, obviously anyone would understand "Thanks" but come on. Was this part of the discussion of some long meeting? Like if she said a word in Spanish it would imply the Air Pods translate your words?

I'm obviously nitpicking but I just found it oddly funny.

It was Union Station in Los Angeles, one of the busiest and most iconic train stations in the country.

A masterstroke of corporate gaslighting for their disposable product.

Environment

Available starting September 14th, 2026.

Please Apple let me easily swap out Siri for chatGPT voice! Work together .. buy them or something. Their voice conversation tech is superior and can help save lives when driving!

Don’t expect it any time soon.

If you have ever used chatGPT voice for directions you could forsee that super intelligent contextual directions are safer then looking at a screen. I.e. "That new mechanic is across the street from the McDonalds on Dorset," in a locale you are familiar with.

Open-ear is more general cause there are ear-hook and clip-on models now.

the apple tech confirmed it had the issue but it was too long outside of their coverage. Like... if it has a known manufacturing defect with a defined timeline, that means i basically rented the damn things.

their only remediation was like 10% off the latest airpods. which is just a massive slap in the face.

You've mistaken a press release for an article. This is Apple's own site and announcement of Apple's own product. Of course it's an ad.

> One need never pluralize Apple product names. Ex: Mr. Evans used two iPad Pro devices.

https://www.iphoneantidote.com/blog/dont-pluralize/

Which ones are those? I've owned a couple of generations of airpods and dropped them probably hundreds of times (both in the case and out of it) and it has never had any detectable effect on their appearance or functionality. I even had a pair go through the wash and they still mostly worked afterwards (only issue was that the ANC performance was worse and slightly weird).

I don't remember whether my first airpods were the gen1 pros or the gen2 pros, but you may have been a victim of early teething issues. I don't really have anything negative to say about the ones I've owned.

Although that may be in part due to vendor lock in and not sharing some of their connection handling API / tech.

You’d do your case favours by not exaggerating. My AirPods have proven perfectly rugged, I’ve dropped them plenty of times.

You would be fine then, too. My daughter makes a sport out of how often she can drop airpods and even put them through the wash. She's on the hook for buying her own pair next time but the old ones keep on working.