“Can we all agree not to get too jaded about tech? Sure, there are a lot of superfluous gadgets out there, but there’s also a fair amount of stuff that’s actually pretty cool: high-flying camera drones, virtual-reality headsets, Web-connected devices you can chat with,” Greg Emmanuel writes for Rolling Stone. “Surprisingly enough, Apple’s new AirPods fit squarely in this category.”
“Truly wireless earbuds (nothing but what sticks in your ear) began showing up earlier this year, and while they were an interesting peek into the future they were mostly plagued by flaws that made their steep price tags hard to swallow,” Emmanuel writes. “The Apple AirPods – announced in September and then mysteriously delayed for nearly two months – have managed to eliminate almost all the flaws. We’ve spent some quality time with them and this is what we’ve found.”
“It’s become sport for some people to bash Apple’s every move and the AirPods got their fair share of abuse. Most of it centered around the design, and we don’t get it,” Emmanuel writes. “They’re almost identical to the standard Apple earbuds included with all iPhones, just without the cord. A bit of the device does extend away from the ear (in part to house the microphone), but it doesn’t look as strange as early critics argued, and wearing them around town I felt a lot less self-conscious than I do with huge-ass over-ear headphones. ,” Emmanuel writes. “”
Much more in the full review here.
MacDailyNews Take: An LTE-enabled Apple Watch and a pair of AirPods would supplant a great deal of iPhone’s current functions.
As for the AirPods looking alien: Tape a pair of wires on the ends of each and you’ll see that they look very much like the type of earphones that everyone is very used to seeing by now (which, for those who remember, we weren’t used to seeing before iPod – people thought those looked “alien,” too). We’ll all get used to the lack of wires soon enough. — MacDailyNews, September 14, 2016