Apple’s new wireless AirPods, introduced today at the launch of the iPhone 7, deliver a “magical experience,” the senior vice-president of marketing, Phil Schiller, promised.
They will disappear before your very eyes.
The AirPods look exactly like Apple’s traditional earbuds, minus the cord. The cost of making your headphones five times more likely to fall irretrievably into a grate is a more than five times increase in price, to $159.
Apple is rolling out the AirPods alongside its new, headphone jack-free iPhone 7. In a presentation that denigrated the trusty (and conveniently universal) headphone jack as “ancient” technology, Schiller declared that the change was about something bigger than naked commercialism.
“The reason to move on, it really comes down to one word: courage,” he said. “The courage to move on to do something that betters all of us.”
These air pod headphone things aren't visible enough to signal to men that I don't want them to talk to me
— Veronica de Souza (@HeyVeronica) September 7, 2016
The phones will come with wired earbuds that connect through the Lightning connector, a change that will unhelpfully preclude users from charging their phones at the same time they talk on the phone or listen to music.
(Schiller boasted that there are now more than 900m Lightning-adapted devices in the world today, which may be less a testament to the cord’s popularity than its tendency to fall apart after a few month’s use.)
But wired headphones are for those who lack the courage (and cash) to go wireless, right?
“It makes no sense to tether ourselves with cables to our mobile devices,” Schiller said, apparently forgetting the meaning of the word mobile.
hi evreybody a good hack for never losing ur new apple airpods is to tie them both to a long string & then tie that string aroumd ur phone!!
— jomny sun (@jonnysun) September 7, 2016
The AirPods will come with a little charging case (they only work for five hours before needing a charge), and have sensors that detect when they are in your ear. They include a microphone that beams toward your mouth so you can still talk on the phone. And they respond to touch, so you can tap on your ear to pick up or hang up the phone.
As far as style goes, the AirPods resemble the EarPods from the Season 2 episode of Doctor Who in which a megalomaniac billionaire has convinced the populace to purchase the wireless devices as a means to conduct communication and receive all their information, only to turn around and deploy them as a weapon that hacked into their brains and turned them into soulless, emotionless, homicidal metal automatons.
But the real problem with the AirPods is the obvious problem with the AirPods: they are simply asking to be lost.
already lost one of my airpods
— darth™ (@darth) September 7, 2016
The beauty of the headphone cable is not its tendency to get tangled up or its antiquated technology. It does not add anything to the primary function of the device.
The beauty of the headphone cable is just like the beauty of a tampon string: it is there to help you keep track of a very important item, and help you fish it out of whatever nook and cranny it might have fallen into.
Apple’s apparent blindness to this blindingly obvious problem is perplexing. Perhaps Apple’s vaunted design team would benefit from hiring a few more women.
Poll: Are you ready for jack-less iPhone? Do you own wireless headphones? #AppleEvent
— Jana Kasperkevic (@kasperka) September 7, 2016
