alt Hacker NewsAirPods themselves aren’t really that great from an audiophile perspective. The only part I like about them is the integration with the Apple ecosystem. This is a fun project and cudos to whoever pulled it off, but I fail to see the motivation.
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Airpods may not be "great from an audiophile perspective", but their sound is decent and they are actually well designed headphones. They are remarkably unremarkable. They have good (the new Pros even great) ANC. Their controls are intuitive and well thought out. It's hard for me to believe that I'm promoting an Apple product here, but they are what people often claim other Apple products to be – which I found to be BS for these other products. Someone sensible actually put thought into the product.
I'm not an apple person so this surprised me. I guess I have fallen for the "apple gear is expensive and must be the best" fallacy.
What are good options for similar wireless bud headphones?
I actually really like the airpod pros from an audio standpoint. I find that a lot of wireless earbuds are way too heavy on the bass compared to the airpod pro.
My thoughts exactly, what I’d rather have is the ability to integrate other stuff into Apple’s ecosystem (most notably my hearing aids, which despite being MFi can only really stream audio from my phone—I had a pair of Beats headphones a few years ago and the ease with which I could switch them between phone, iPad and Mac was so wonderful and I’d like to be able to do that with my HAs as well.
AirPods are widely appreciated in audiophile communities. Especially with some EQ applied, which is easy and common these days and easy to find for AirPods.
They're never going to appeal to the audiophile communities that pride themselves on being different and/or expensive above all else, but they're actually good hardware with decent out of the box tuning. Apply some EQ on top if you so desire and they're very good.