Wireless, Mostly

For most of 2018, the sight of those white plastic stems dangling from people’s ears looked wrong—the aesthetic of someone who’d forgotten to remove their earphones after minor surgery. Then gradually everyone had them. Then I got a pair. Now I understand the slightly blank look people wear when they’re in: it’s not rudeness. It’s a polite Do Not Disturb. The modern equivalent of headphones on in the office.

Apple has updated them. The second-generation AirPods run a new H1 chip—faster pairing, better call quality, Hey Siri activated by voice rather than a tap. There’s also an optional wireless charging case, which is the one feature I’d actually pay extra for. The original case required a Lightning cable, which was fine in isolation, except I also had a wireless charging pad on my nightstand that the case could only stare at uselessly.

They work best inside the Apple ecosystem: iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, Mac. The seamless device-switching they advertise is genuinely seamless when everything around them is also Apple. Wander outside that and it becomes a negotiation. They also fall out of certain ears—not mine, but I’ve watched people reach up mid-sentence with the resigned expression of someone who already knew this was coming and had been resigned to it for months.

When they work, they disappear. That’s the actual design goal—put them in, they connect, forget about them until the battery warning chirps. No controls to learn, no fiddling. Whether that frictionlessness is freedom or just a shorter leash is a question I keep answering differently depending on the day. Probably both.