A while ago, my friend got AirPods. Ever since, he's been telling me to get them too. He says they're life-changing and the best wireless headphones on the market. Just two weeks ago, I lost my wired earpods and so I decided I'll go the extra mile and give AirPods a try. Here are my thoughts! (That's what you came to this site for anyways, right?)
Disclaimer: I'm not an audiophile. I can listen to nearly any headphone and think the quality of sound is decent to good. I can obviously tell when one headphone sounds better than another, but either way it doesn't change my personal opinion on whether I would buy the headphones or not. That being said, I personally thought the sound quality was great for me. The bass is rich, the vocals stand out, and I can for sure make out the background instruments with ease. I listen to my music at 30-50% volume, which is loud enough to immerse me in my music.
To prevent from having to constantly control your music from your phone, each Airpod can be double-tapped to access any of these five functions of your choosing: activate Siri, skip track, previous track, play/pause, or none. After playing around with the options, I set my left Airpod to control play/pause and my right Airpod to skip the current track. This is most useful for me because I want to be able to keep my Airpods in my ear but pause my music when ordering food or talking to someone, and skipping tracks because I'm too lazy to get rid of the songs I never listen from my music library...
My AirPods last me a good 5-6 hours as Apple said they would, but this isn't the main spec that matters. What matters is the case. The case provides a total of 24 hours of charge, but even that spec doesn't matter. What matters is this: the AirPods, in the case, charge in 15 minutes. This is the holy grail for me. I listen to music on the bus and on the way to class, then during lecture place the AirPods in the case. When I leave lecture, they're fully charged. I go through this process 3-4 times a day, and so I literally never have to worry about my AirPods dying. And, for my personal use, I have to charge the actual case every three days, which means I can practically forget about being plugged in for the longest time. Thus, any complaints about battery life being a con of wireless headphones are completely void with the AirPods.
The range is really good, I can be a solid 10-20 feet from my phone and still hear my music, so I can keep my phone in my room and go to the kitchen to make food and not worry. It's cases like these that the Airpod double-tap functions really help!
Each AirPod has two proximity sensors to sense if they are in your ears. This allows for a special function: automatic ear detection. If the function is turned on, your music immediately stops playing, and as soon as you put your Airpod back in, the music begins again! This is incredibly useful when you quickly need to hear someone say something then get right back to listening to music.
It also means that right as I take the AirPods out of their case and put one of them in my ear, it automatically connects via Bluetooth to my most recently connected device (usually my phone).
The freedom of these truly wireless headphones is astounding. I went from wired earpods to AirPods, and it's the biggest difference. It's so weird to just be able to move around and not hit wires and knock over my laptop, etc.
By the way, the fit is perfect, just as it was with the Apple earpods. Obviously this will vary from person to person, but for me they just won't fall out of my ear.
With wired 3.5 mm headphone jack earpods, to switch devices you just unplug and re-plug. But with wireless headphones, there's a fear that switching is a pain. With the Airpods, it isn't. If the Airpods are connected to my phone but I want to switch to my iPad, I just press the button that outputs the sound, click "Danilo's Airpods", and it connects!
To sum it up, the Airpods have all the pros and none of the cons of wireless headphones, and a little extra functionality sprinkled in for good measure.