You've been able to get pretty decent Bluetooth in-ear headphones for $20-40 on Amazon for a few years now, can anyone comment on whether AirPods are really 10x better to justify the price? I just have a hard time believing that's possible, but I've never tried them.
I've never found a "decent" pair of Bluetooth anything. Pairing is almost always an annoyance and never quite just "works". If I'm heading out for a walk or a run, or if I want to answer a call, it needs to pair and work immediately or I may as well throw them in the trash. Airpods were the first headphones where they just worked every single time I put them on.
I've been eyeing BT headphones for years and years. I've had friends that found use-cases that suited them. AirPods were the first one that fixed almost all my grumbles and moved me from wired headphones.
That being said, hearing from other people I have a suspicion that a lot of it is due to Bluetooth 5.
I have a pair of those cheap ones, they are great except:
- Pairing is a chore / Sometimes loses all info, so you are forced to forget and re-pair which takes time and fiddling on the phone and the device
- Forget pairing to more than one device
- Battery isn't great (down to 2 hours per charge now)
- Mic is unusable. When I get a call, I have to interrupt everything and pull out my phone (often times when I'm using these, I'm usually working and my hands are dirty).
I tried switching to Bluetooth headphones around 2014 to terrible success. The entire pairing process seemed more complicated then necessary. This on it's own isn't great, and it was always a recurring pain if I wanted to repair it with a different device, but I kind of got used to it. My biggest issue was just reconnecting to an already paired device was incredibly unreliable. Every so often it just wouldn't pair to a device, and I would either have to just wait (30 mins or so), or redo the pairing process (and sometimes that didn't even work!).
Needless to say, I gave up after 2 months or so and went back to wired headphones. I've use Airpods now for about a year now, mainly at work or when I walk my dogs, and have had zero issues.
