Apple Delays AirPods Beyond Original 'Late October' Window (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple's new wireless, $180 AirPods have less than a week to meet their original shipping target of "late October," and now the company has confirmed that such a launch is officially off the table. A Wednesday statement, given to Ars Technica just one day ahead of the company's latest Mac-related press event, confirmed Apple's decision to delay the wireless headphones' launch. In the statement, Apple tells Ars that the company "needs a little more time before AirPods are ready for our customers." "The early response to AirPods has been incredible," the Apple statement reads. "We don't believe in shipping a product before it's ready." Apple declined to offer any estimate or release window information about when to expect the AirPods' official launch.

Comments

An idea for Apple

[Bueller_007]

Next time you feel like doing something brash, like removing a ubiquitous, standardized, and completely functional feature from your products, such as the headphone jack in order to promote wireless listening, why don't you go ahead and make the Bluetooth headphones available FIRST?

Or better yet, don't eliminate the jack at all. This isn't the 3.5" floppy in the age of CDs that we're talking about here. The headphone jack works well, it's standard, and it's on literally almost EVERYTHING that outputs sound.

And now Apple is set to announce tomorrow that its professional line of laptops will be moving completely to USB-C.

This company has lost its way and its mind.

Re:An idea for Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet iPhones users have been buying/using 3.5mm corded headphones by the hundreds of millions, WHILE bluetooth has been available.

For something soooooo superior, you'd think no one would be using corded headphones.

Yet another device to plug in, and other synced devices to pull away the iPhone from your bluetooth headphones. That simply means it's not ready yet.

Re:An idea for Apple

[jabuzz]

Right because fully waterproof to IP68 3.5mm jack sockets have not been available for years already?

Sony have been doing waterproof phones now since early 2013 at the latest with waterproof jack sockets that required no plug and/or cover. By the time they got to the Z5 they even had waterproof microUSB sockets that don't need a cover as well.

The claims about needing to do it for waterproofing is just utter rubbish that Apple fan boys lap up because they don't know any better.

Re:Courage

[ASDFnz]

Yeah, he should just shove things through whether they are ready or not, Samsung did do just that and they haven't had a problem yet right?

I am not really trying to defend Apple, I am just pointing out that unless something is ready the end user experience can be flammable at times.