Less is more

After finding my destroyed Airpods a week ago, I did a little experiment and dug out my unused pair of cable headphones that came with the phone. Now I have been using them for a week and I have made some interesting observations. In a full week, I have used them only two times. I took a phone call while walking, and I listened to some Youtube stuff tonight for around 10 minutes. And it is not that I have improved my self-control. Simply put, the cable headphones are lightyears worse than wireless Airpods. They are extremely bad from a usability perspective. Paradoxically I can now confirm that it is also their greatest strength.

As a technical achievement wireless headphones are very good, but the social barrier they create is harmful. They also grab attention like nothing else. As if we weren’t addicted to screens already, AirPods take over our ears as well when we don’t look at the screen, creating a highly effective bubble that repels any spontaneous social interaction. I usually get a weekly notice with statistics on my screen time, but I wonder whether that takes into account time spent listening? I suspect screen + ears combined might be a LOT of time.

Airpods are super easy to use, battery life is great, the touch controls, comfortable, good loudspeakers, the list goes on. With the cabled headphones I have now remembered the unwritten law of nature that requires any cable to tangle itself harder than the Gordian knot if you even look in its general direction. So, whenever you want to listen to anything, you first must spend like five minutes to untangle cables. And that is often enough to discourage me from listening at all. I just put them back and stay alone with my mind a little while instead.

Another thing is that when you finally have managed to install the cable pods in your ears, the cable tends to get stuck on things in such a way that when you move your head, the pods are ripped from your ears forcefully and it will take a while to untangle them and put them back in. In the meantime, the playback of whatever you listened to will continue, because this device does not have sensors to detect whether they are inside your ears or not. The Airpods pause playback as soon as you take them out of your ear. So, you must now manually rewind to not miss out in the conversation. Very annoying, and obviously discouraging.

But then again, what kind of damage can you expect from the aforementioned social barrier that the great Aidpods create? It easily becomes a bad habit and borderline addiction to constantly listen to something. Anyway, I currently feel very satisfied with my old and horrible cable headphones. I will definitely keep using them to discover more of what I have missed.