Apple's Airpod Tickles

Tampons in the ears

Original, unedited photo from Cnet

(I had to censor this photo like this because it is my policy to never embarrass any innocent individual by revealing their identity in my blog posts.

I can't speak for this guy of course, but if it was me posing for the pic, I personally would be embarrassed with those tampon-lookalike thingies in my ears.)

Trying hard to look ridiculous? You don't have to put in so much effort to achieve that nowadays, since it's 2016 afterall. Just get yourself a pair of Apple's new airpods and you're good to go.

How does it work? Well, just pop those suckers in your ears and have people around you wonder why you'd walk around with tampons stuck in your ears. Easy. Just don't mind them asking whether you're suffering some rare and new medical condition that causes you to menstruate from the ears. Watch them widen their eyes in awe as you tell them that those tampons have the capability to blast music. Neat.

I'm always looking forward to the Apple keynotes because the best thing about them is the inevitable humour that follows. You just have to put up with cringeworthy marketing bullshit like "it's magical!" done to death over and over again ad nauseam - akin to puking out fruit juice you drank, swallowing the puke and then puking it all out again to be reused onstage every single time. Don't rinse, don't wash, repeat.

Just keep hammering the same marketing one-trick-pony into their heads and they will eventually believe it and kachink, in rolls the cold hard ca$h, eh? Marketing is essential, yes, but discerning consumers ought to find too much of the same wordplay gimmicks to be a tiresome earache by now, cringe?

And there's this thinking that since the airpods are truly wireless (which is a feature I really like), one can lose them too easily. If I were to go off my nerdish rocker and get mean, I'd say:

"So apparently, Apple's new wireless AirPods are like tampons missing their strings. So I'm gonna look down at the ground more during the coming months, expecting to find dropped AirPods so that I can sell them to iFans so that they will lose them again, after which I can find them again and re$ell them back to the same iFans. Kachink. Sounds unapologetically lucrative."

But I won't say such a thing even though I just did. That's because I do not like dealing with pesky cables myself if I can help it.

While it may be true that you could lose the airpods easily because they are small and separate from each other without wires connecting them together, when it comes to safeguarding one's possessions without losing them, it all boils down to user responsibility and some prudent common sense. Hell, you even run the risk of losing your phone, your relationship with someone or anything else for that matter if you're careless and not mindful and sensitive enough. Such a thing comes down to the individual.

Compare using wired earphones while watching a movie in bed and you will value a truly wireless set when you toss around in bed. A crowded bus is also a good place to realize that, as yours truly have lost count of the number of times I've muttered curses under my breath whenever my wires got snagged on somebody's bag or whatever and watched my earphones go kaplunk onto the dirty floor.

Credit where credit is due

As much as I don't like Apple as a company because of their holier-than-thou arrogant attitude towards their own customers and their hypocrisy towards their competitors, along with their trigger-happy litigation fingers which to me as a fan of mobile tech, impedes the progress of the industry, I would be adopting the dreaded and myopic ostrich strategy if I were to ignore the actually beneficial implementations of Apple that truly benefit the consumer.

What Apple nailed right with the new Airpods is just how easy and hassle-free it is to pair them up with an iDevice, along with how the airpods can tell when you pull them out of your ears (just pulling one out will do), at which point they will automatically pause the music. Now these are nifty and useful features in my non-fiction book, I'll give Apple that.

So in conclusion, despite their fugliness, the airpods certainly have their usefulness. If you happen to buy them and you really really end up liking them, don't let anyone or anything including this blog post tell you differently. If you find them truly a joy to use, just enjoy them and I'll be happy for you, really..

..even though I still think you have tampons in your ears.