[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.