Airpods Review

My college friend Nicko is a long-time member of the Church of Apple. He's the one who turned me onto Apple's wireless Airpods.

That in combination with the fact that my new iPhone 8+ doesn't have a headphone jack.

Anyway, let's just cut the shit...

They're great when they work and they're great in theory but there are some big issues I've got with them.

PROS:

Paired with the latest iPhone, they sound great.

Not having wires is really liberating and the little charge case is a great way to store them in your pocket without losing them. It's a lot easier to slip them in that case than it is to wrap earbud wires around in a coil.

CONS:

Paired with the small iPod I've got, a few generations old, the volume is far too low to the point where it's not usable. Which is a pain because a large part of wanting to get these airpods was to have an easier time at the gym.

They don't automatically pair quickly and consistently with my iPhone. Sometimes, I'll pop in the airpods — I'll hear the little "paired" sound — press play on my iPhone only to have the audio come out of my iPhone speakers. This happens far too often. When this happens, I go to the bluetooth settings where it'll always say that the airpods are "connected", and yet it'll still play the audio over my iphone speakers. So I'll go through this process of turning off my bluetooth and turning it back on. Sometimes I'll have to take the airpods out of my ears and put them back in. Sometimes, I'll have to actually restart my iPhone. This is EXTREMELY shitty. Arguably far shittier than the inconvenience of unwrapping and untangling a coiled earbud cord from my iPod before popping them in. Wired earbuds always work when plugged in. Airpods don't work consistently.

Controls through the Airpods don't always work. You can't do a lot through the Airpods because there are no buttons, because of Apple's apparent hatred of convenience. Any control is done through "double taps". You can start and stop. And you can skip a track. But it doesn't always work. The start/stop is critical, especially when walking through the world and needing to turn a track off abruptly. It's super annoying when it doesn't work.

Conclusion:

They don't really replace wired headphones, in terms of convenience and consistency. Not yet.