[lskopwol]

Yeah the price doens’t really scale but if you consider your time worthwhile, then add up the total amount of time it has saved you from having to untwist a jumbled mess of earphones / roll up earphones into some easily tangled roll.

[jacobsenscott]

I have bose wireless earbuds that are connected to each other by a short cable. It never gets tangled. And when I want to take them out I just pop them out and they hang round my neck. As a bonus, since they aren't in a pocket I don't run them through the wash. I don't know how much time airpods uses spend fumbling around in their pockets (for the airpods....), but I spend 0 time doing that and 0 time untangling cables.

[rajataghi]

you should also consider the time it takes to charge the case and the times when you want to listen to music but alas, you forgot to charge your earphones! The jumbled mess of earphones don't need to be charged.

[lojack]

The airpods are the only wireless headphones I've owned where this is pretty much a nonissue in practice. It's easy to develop the habit to put the case on the charger when not on the go and to put the headphones in the case when not listening. At least for me those two things is sufficient to pretty much guarantee I'll always have charged headphones.

[navigatesol]

>It's easy to develop the habit to put the case on the charger when not on the go and to put the headphones in the case when not listening.

Except the original post said to "count the time you spend untangling the cord" (which, for most good, flat-wire headphones is almost zero). Habit or not, charging takes more time than properly rolling the cord on wired buds.

[huehehue]

That's an understatement. If your fine motor skills aren't impaired, you should spend maybe a few minutes each year rolling and unrolling your wired headphones. I'd argue it takes nearly as long to put your AirPods in their case and set them down on a charging station.

[lskopwol]

Ok start the timer. I bet you exceed one minute in a few days.

[peruvian]

I’ve never thought of charging my AirPods or the case outside of plugging the case for half an hour once a week. I don’t even check the battery percentage.

[ken]

Keeping cables nicely coiled is a solved problem. Humanity has used string and rope for millennia. There's been plenty of time to figure this out.

To this old fart, this sounds like the thousand other cases of "why learn a simple and generally useful skill, when we can use modern technology to avoid this one specific case?"

Learning a basic transferable skill is the scalable solution to this problem. You're not using wireless power cables, wireless rope to tie things to your car, wireless thread in your sewing machine, etc.

[dwighttk]

Keeping cables nicely coiled takes time. Perhaps not as much as untangling cables, but time.

Also there's a lot of time spent fiddling with the cables in use that I didn't realize I was doing until I used wireless and went back for a week.

[asdff]

Count to 5. That's how long it just took me to coil wired earbuds. Probably the same amount of time to pull the tic tac box out of your pocket, flip the lid, put them in one by one, and shut the lid back up.

[dwighttk]

I think you may be overestimating the time it takes me to do things, and also trying to double dip on time: Both of us have to take things out of pockets and put things in ears.

Only one of us have to coil and uncoil wires, and put wires where we want them and keep wires where we want them when they shift or are moved by external forces. Only one of us can use our headphones with a smartwatch.

AirPods aren't perfect: I've probably had connection issues ~5 times which seem to have gone away with the latest update. I haven't lost them, but they are really small and it seems like it would be easy to lose them. $170 is a lot tougher to lose than $8 (though there are also wired earbuds in the same price neighborhood). I do have to charge the case, but with my use-pattern I haven't yet run into a spot where I wanted to keep using my AirPods and didn't have charge available. Using them one ear at a time while the other charges for longer use is non-ideal, but that's mitigated by how quickly they charge.

Until I had to go back to wired earbuds for a week after using wireless for a while I didn't fully appreciate how nice wireless is.

[jclardy]

But this is missing the other problem AirPods solve, a problem created by Apple and other tech giants - the now missing standard 3.5mm jack.

I have a laptop, desktop, iPad and iPhone - for wired I would need USB-C->3.5mm, Lightning->3.5mm, and a 3.5mm extension cord for my desktop. AirPods "just work" with each of those with only a single click or tap. So no cord tangles and no bluetooth connect/disconnect dance every time you swap devices. To me that makes them easily worth the $170 cost.

[asdff]

It isn't hard or time-consuming or even thought-consuming to coil 2.5' of headphone cable and stick it in your pocket in such a way where it comes back out still in a coil. Ball it up and shove it among your keys and pens and wallet and phone and of course it will be tangled.

As an aside, this is the most HN justification possible for these. "Just estimate your time spent coiling headphones and multiply it by your hourly rate then you will see how $160 is fair." Absurd.

[unkulunkulu]

You can solve this problem once and for all too if that’s so important to you, there are even things you can buy that help with that