Review: The AirPods are fine wireless headphones for a certain type of person

When we reviewed the iPhone 7 in September, we also got to spend some time with a pair of the fancy new wireless AirPods. At the time, the “final” versions were slated to ship in just a few weeks, but the planned late October release was delayed with no reason or time estimate given. AirPods didn’t actually start shipping until earlier this month, and quantities were limited enough that shipping times quickly slipped to January and February.

Apple doesn’t usually like to announce things early, and it doesn’t like to miss its own deadlines in public, but it also needed to have a bold statement about the wireless future to go along with the iPhone 7’s missing headphone jack. But the problems with the AirPods, whether they were wireless issues or manufacturing bottlenecks, were apparently severe enough for the timing to slip.

Apple sent us a final production version of the AirPods in exchange for the non-final version we tested before. The company wouldn’t tell us what the differences were, though, and everything from the packaging to the markings on the hardware to the pairing process and audio quality is apparently identical. With that in mind, we’ve revisited and expanded our original impressions—but final hardware hasn't changed those impressions dramatically.

Unpacking and using the AirPods

The AirPods come in a small cardboard box with a USB-A to Lightning cable but no separate power adapter—another small speedbump on the road to USB-C. It’s easy to miss the fact that there’s a cable in the box at all, hidden as it is under the box’s white cardboard insert.

The headphones themselves come in a small glossy white flip-top case reminiscent of a dental floss dispenser or a cigarette lighter, and the case's finish is identical in style to the one Apple uses for the Apple Pencil. Clearly glossy white-and-silver is the way forward for Apple’s smart accessories, even as the Macs and iPhones they connect to stick to aluminum or glossy black. The case also serves as a mobile wireless charger for the buds themselves, and there’s a small female Lightning connector at the bottom to charge it up. There’s a nearly invisible button on the back of the case for pairing—the W1 chip coupled with iCloud will make it so that many buyers never need to use it, but you’ll have to press it with the AirPods inside to pair it with any normal Bluetooth devices, and it’s helpful if things come unpaired.

A small indicator light between the two AirPods in the charger case tells you when the buds are charged and when they still need more time—green means charged, orange means charging. The light will also gently pulse white while the case is in pairing mode.

On an iPhone, pairing is accomplished by flipping open the top of the case near your phone—this works exactly the same way regardless of whether you’re using an iPhone 5 or an iPhone 7, which is pretty cool. Hit "Connect" on your phone, and you’re ready to go. After that, you can check your AirPods’ battery level in the Batteries widget, or you can flip the top of the case near your phone to make a custom battery status sheet for both the AirPods and the case. Take one of the AirPods out of the case while this sheet is visible, and it can show you the battery level for each individual AirPod instead of the battery level for both at once. For no obvious technical reason, neither the pairing nor the battery status sheet work on iPads or iPod Touches.

Apple says that the AirPods themselves can provide up to five hours of battery life on a single charge, that the battery case can charge them enough to get you up to a total of 24 hours, and that popping dead AirPods into the battery case for 15 minutes will yield about three hours of battery life. This is Apple’s standard answer to questions about longevity with its Bluetooth accessories: charging the Magic Mouse 2 with the port on the bottom, the Apple Pencil that juts awkwardly out of the bottom of your iPad, or the AirPods might be annoying, but in a pinch you don’t need to charge them for long to get you as much power as you need to finish doing whatever you’re doing. It’s a compromise, for sure, but it’s livable.

Charged AirPods sitting in their case will slowly drain the case battery over time. Completely unattended, the case discharges at the rate of 10-or-so percent a day. You won’t need to charge daily, but once every two or three days is a reasonable estimate.

The AirPods are shaped exactly like Apple’s standard EarPods, so if you hate the way the wired earbuds feel or if they physically don’t fit in your ears, you won’t like these either. But the sound quality is noticeably better than the 3.5mm or Lightning AirPods. In particular, the bass is clearer and louder, which is always the biggest issue with cheap or weak speakers and headphones. And you can attribute the improvement to the little cutout on the back of the headphones.

In regular EarPods, this cutout is just a tiny slit. In AirPods, it’s larger with its own little speaker grille. Put your fingers over that cutout on the AirPods while music is playing, and you’ll hear the bass tones fade out entirely. So AirPods may be expensive, but at least you’ll get an audio-quality upgrade if you spring for them.

The standard EarPods fit just fine in my ears, so I was never worried about the AirPods falling out even if I was running or tilting my head around. In fact, without a cable jostling them or getting caught on things, the headphones actually feel lighter and less prone to coming out than the standard EarPods do. Whether I was cooking or doing chores around the house or going for a jog, I never had any problem with AirPods escaping.

My main problem is that the controls on the AirPods are much more limiting than those on the wired earbuds. The standard headset comes with a small nub on the wire that controls volume and can play and pause playback, but it’s also capable of lots more if you know how to use it. You can skip tracks and go back to previous tracks, enable Siri, scrub forward and backward in audio, use it as a remote trigger to snap pictures, and answer or end calls. The AirPods can’t even do volume adjustments, and if you want them to be able to play and pause music, you’ll either have to get in the habit of removing one from your ear (at which point the AirPods stop playing automatically) or turn off double-tap-for-Siri in favor of double-tap-to-play/pause.

To replace these lost functions, Apple turns to Siri, which is more functional in some ways—you can ask for directions, check AirPod or iPhone battery status, ask about the weather, and all the other stuff you can do with Siri. But it’s not always appropriate or possible to use voice controls for everything. What if you want to adjust the volume but you’re already on a call? What if you’re on a train without Internet connectivity and can’t reach Siri? What if you just don’t like talking to your phone or if you prefer the instant feedback of a button to the delayed (and potentially misinterpreted) feedback of voice controls? As I’ve used the AirPods longer and switched back and forth between the AirPods and EarPods, this has become the thing I’ve liked the least.

On top of all that, the initial swift, unforgiving Internet reaction to the AirPods still resonates, and I don’t love having tiny white straws poking two inches out of my ears even if I do mostly like the way they sound and fit. It’s not a problem if I’m sitting at my desk or wandering around the house, but when you go outside in them you do feel as though there’s a giant white glossy arrow pointed at you that everyone can see. Now that they’re beginning to leak out into the wild, the feeling may disappear as they become more normalized. I found a similar thing to be true of the Apple Watch, which felt ostentatious at first but felt less conspicuous as the sight of them became more common.

If you do hate the design of Apple’s headphones, the W1-equipped Beats models should give you the same pairing experience in a different package. Otherwise, it’s Bluetooth or bust.