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Apple CEO Tim Cook Calls AirPods 'a Runaway Success' (cnbc.com)
It turns out the $159 AirPods Bluetooth earphones are selling well, or so CEO Tim Cook would have us believed. Cook dropped by the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday while on vacation, and talked about the AirPods sales. From a report on CNBC: In comments to CNBC, Cook declined to talk specifically on Apple's outlook, but he said it has been a "great holiday." He added that the company's new wireless earbuds, AirPods, are "a runaway success." When asked if more would come into stock, he said Apple's "making them just as fast as we can." AirPods debuted at September's splashy event, but saw shipping delays through most of the fall and finally hit shelves just days before the crucial Christmas shopping rush. The limited shipments were sold quickly -- ship dates are now six weeks out on Apple's website.
or so Taco would have us believed.
They literally run away from your ear so you have to buy another pair.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
1) iPad Pro: Meh.
2) Apple Watch: Meh.
3) MBP 2016: Meh
4) iPhone 7: Meh
5) Airpods?
I'm going to go with "Meh".
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Sell a car without a steering wheel (or with an awkward extension bar), then sell the steering wheel later at a premium and claim "our steering wheels are a huge success!"
Table-ized A.I.
Maybe they're popular, maybe they aren't... but what else is the CEO going to say?
#DeleteChrome
And yet people are shilling out that $160 for the upsell.
SOME people are paying that because they like bluetooth headphones.
I don't; I just use the headphones included in the box. You know, the wired ones that plug directly into the phone? I have a set of noise canceling headphones too; I just leave the adaptor on that set, so to me there's no difference as I just grab a set of headphones and plug them into the phone.
What is your damage hating on people who like wireless headsets? They could use anyone else's you know, not just Apple's - as usual the Apple ones are just really well designed and so some people chose to buy them even though they are expensive.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Are they selling well because they're great, or are they selling well because people don't have much of a choice, with no headphone jack? I'm not an Apple guy nor am I an Apple hater, but this seems almost as disingenuous as Microsoft bragging about Windows 10 'adoption rate' when they fooled, lied, tricked, or literally forced their way onto people's computers. False news much?
I think what many people aren't aware of (because Apple sure doesn't go to any effort to market it) is that the new Bluetooth EarPods use a proprietary "W2" chip which adds a number of proprietary extensions to the Bluetooth standards.
The iPhone 7 has the W2 chip functionality embedded in it for any devices able to support it, and defaults back to standard Bluetooth support for everything else.
The additional W2 functionality is supposed to address some of the glitches and hassles inherent in regular Bluetooth headsets and provide a better experience.
If you're a customer who prefers using wireless Bluetooth headsets with a cellphone to begin with (and MANY people I know do), the EarPods and iPhone 7 combo promises one of the better usability experiences you can get out that combo today. Yes, it may be at the expense of giving you a traditional headphone jack. But how much that matters to you really does depend on your use case.
"It turns out the $159 AirPods Bluetooth earphones are selling well, or so CEO Tim Cook would have us believed."
I didn't believed it then and I don't believed it now.
Editing faux pas aside, the only thing they've been a "success" at is 1) making Apple mo' money and 2) locking users into ever-more-expensive gadgets that cannot be repaired.
iFixit gives the Apple AirPods a '0' out of 10 on the repairability scale, also known as the "worst possible score achievable". In other words, they can't be repaired, period. It appears that even Apple can't repair them, which is kind of amazing when you consider that they're the ones who built the fucking things.
AirPods make iPads look positively consumer-friendly in terms of service, and we all know what a total shit show it is to open an iPad....
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Actually the Apple price point for its mobile products have always been consciously set to position them as "affordable luxuries". What that means I can explain by analogy with the popular disinfectant, "Bactine". Pouring "Bactine" into a wound stings because it has got alcohol in it. However it's not the alcohol that kills the germs, it's the benzalkonium chloride. So why is the alcohol there? Well, when they test marketed a version without the stinging alcohol consumers didn't like it, because they couldn't feel it working.
So the price of an "affordable luxury" is chosen to be low enough to be within reach of most people, but high enough to give you a little sting that tells you that you've treated yourself to something special.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The W2 chip isn't going to help at all with the two biggest flaws in the earpods:
1. Crap battery life
2. Easily lost
The only thing you can do about the battery life is remember to turn them off and carry the charging case around with you. Preventing loss will no doubt create a market for expensive bits of string to tie them together. Might as well just have had a band and stuck a bigger battery in it, solving both problems and costing a fraction as much.
Apple seems to love these anti-features. 0.01mm thinner phone so you can wrap it in a chunky case for protection and it will still bend in your pocket. Take away the headphone jack because ha ha fuck you, chump.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC