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by mikeash 3516 days ago
How is noise related to wireless? I was not aware that wired headphones enjoyed any advantage there, and I can't see how they would.

The others are certainly wireless problems, but some people prefer wireless for a variety of reasons. Lots of manufacturers sell wireless headphones. To say that Apple created those problems makes no sense.
1 comments
UVB-76 3516 days ago
I'm no sound engineer, but intuitively the design of the AirPods slightly exacerbates noise cancellation issues by:

a) Placing the microphone further from a person's mouth, or at least, removing the option for people to hold a wired microphone close to their mouth;

b) Significantly reducing the distance between microphone and speaker.

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mikeash 3516 days ago
I never see people wearing headsets that place the microphone near the mouth outside of specialized settings, nor do I see people holding the microphone to their mouth. I suspect they generally want to keep their hands free.

I don't think the distance between the speaker and microphone matters. Canceling out the noise you're emitting isn't hard with modern signal processing.

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