As a long-time iPhone mini fan (insert your own “THERE ARE DOZENS OF US!” gif here, I’m too bitter to find one), I have sat out a number of new iPhone purchasing opportunities over the last few years.
The rent it too high, the phones are too big.
This year, however, knowing that I would have to eventually give in to Big Phone™, and the addition of the Camera Control button on the iPhone 16 got me. I ordered an iPhone 16. It’s nice. I like it. Is it too big? Yes, it’s too big. It’s also not the most exciting thing I bought that came out of Apple’s September event.
The other thing I bought was the jauntily named AirPods 4 with ANC. (What’s wrong with AirPods 4+, Apple?) These new devices don’t do anything the AirPods Pro didn’t already do–they do less–but there are two types of ears in this world: ones that can handle plug-style earphones and ones that can’t, and mine cannot. The AirPods 4 with ANC are AirPods Pro for the rest of us.
EarPods were fine but Apple knew that a wireless future was coming.
Foundry
Remember EarPods? Sure you do, you have a drawer full of them. They worked and they worked fine. Some people still use them. The world could have continued spinning with Apple including EarPods with every iPhone, and people who wanted to go wireless had to buy unreliable Bluetooth headphones until the heat death of the universe. The Verge certainly seemed to want to do that.
But Apple then decided to do away with the headphone jack on iPhones, which shoved us into a certain direction that just happened to make the company more money. Funny that. But it was also a direction in which we have more functionality, accessibility options, and just general enjoyment.
AirPods are a classic Apple product. They’re often annoying and sometimes do things you don’t want them to do that can make you want to scream, but what they do right is so magical when it happens you forgive them for all their flaws. I can’t imagine living without them now.
Yes, sometimes they switch to a different device just to play an alert sound, even if I was listening to something on the first device. Sometimes they don’t switch to a device I clearly want them to switch to even when it seems clear I’m shifting focus. Some people find them easy to lose (mine are always in that little pocket in my jeans I never previously had a use for). The batteries are a long-term problem without an easy solution.
Apple does a pretty good job of demonstrating a commitment to making AirPods a great product.
Lewis Painter / Foundry
But Apple has relentlessly added features to AirPods over their eight years in existence. The original AirPods were wireless headphones with easy-to-use controls that simply paired easier and worked more consistently than other Bluetooth headphones. And that was enough. AirPods Pro came three years later, bringing active noise cancellation, transparency mode, wireless charging, and other features. Now Apple has pushed those premium features back down the line into the non-Pro AirPods, added other features like being able to shake or nod your head to answer Siri, all for just $20 more than the original version.
And the AirPods Pro? It made them hearing aids. Just, you know, because. Apple has shown that it is seriously committed to making AirPods a great product and a continuing part of its lineup.
Apple gets plenty of credit for AirPods on its quarterly conference calls with analysts, but otherwise they’re not a silent hit but certainly one on which the noise has been canceled. (See what I did there? Yeah, you see it.)
Tim Cook often gets chastised for not producing products as life-changing as those Apple shipped under Steve Jobs. But AirPods and the Apple Watch are huge successes on a level comparable to the iPod or iPad, if just not the iPhone. Apple’s wearables revenue in the second calendar quarter of 2024 was $8.1 billion. That’s as big as Visa, Air France, Subaru, or Heineken (all of which together sound like a rich’s kid’s spring break toolkit).
So, it’s not making AirPods great out of the kindness of its heart. But it didn’t make the Mac out of the kindness of its heart, either. Sometimes is nice when one of Apple’s best products is also one of it’s smallest and least expensive.
