The Cord Is Gone and So Is Your Peace of Mind

Apple pulled the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 and everyone screamed about it for three weeks, and then the AirPods quietly arrived and most people stopped screaming. That’s the playbook: remove something people depend on, create dependency on its replacement, sell the replacement. It works every time because the replacement is usually genuinely good.

The AirPods are impressive in a narrow technical sense. The W1 chip handles pairing and device-switching with a smoothness that wired headphones never needed to bother with. Pull them from the case and they’re on; put them in your ears and music starts; take one out and it pauses. The product demo version of this is elegant. The real-world version involves one earbud falling behind the radiator while the other one dies at 15% battery forty minutes from home.

Battery life is the honest problem that the spec sheet papers over with clever arithmetic. Five hours per charge sounds reasonable until you realize you’re now managing the charge state of three separate objects—two earbuds and a case—on top of your phone. What wireless audio gives you in freedom of movement, it takes back in a new low-grade anxiety about depletion. The cord was annoying. But the cord never died on you.

I’ll probably end up buying a pair anyway. That’s also part of the playbook.