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The big feature of Apple's newly announced AirPods bluetooth earbuds, is that they're entirely wireless. There's nothing to tether them to your phone, each other or yourself, which made some worry that they would be easy to lose. Never fear though, a third party has already developed something to tie them down: a wire.
The Spigen AirPods Strap is already available on Amazon in the U.S., priced at $10 (though no UK price yet exists) and essentially is just a rubber coated wire with a cup at each end for holding the base of the earbuds. It connects them together, so should one fall from your ear, it will merely dangle on the wire, rather than fall to the ground.
This does of course somewhat defeat the point of the AirPods, in that they are entirely wire-free. However without some sort of over-the-ear hook to keep them in place should you try jogging in them or are jostled by surprise, there is a real concern that you could lose a single AirPod quite easily. Considering they are priced at £160 in the UK, a little safety net between them doesn't seem like the end of the world.
Although available for order now, the AirPods Strap will not ship out straight away. According to the listing stock will arrive on 17th October, though you can pre-order them now if you wish.
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KitGuru Says: This seems like a smart enough idea. I wouldn't use any totally wireless headphones without some sort of tether. They would be too easy to lose.
£160 yea, fucking apple lol.
As far as i know the iPod Touch 6th gen is thinner than the iPhone 6 etc and manages to happily fit a 3.5mm headphone socket in it. And besides, what about the 2.5mm socket?
The ipod touch is almost too thin for my liking, any thinner and it would feel almost too fragile to use, they should maybe keep the size a little larger, and improve the battery capacity with a thicker cell.
The idea behind the removal of 3.5mm and the reason they didn’t bother with 2.5mm is quite simply because the lightning port can already do stereo audio so there’s no point wasting space on the motherboard for the headphone jacks functionality when they can give you an adapter.
I agree with everything though, the iPhones unnatural obssesion to thinner phones is just not a good idea as it’s not comfortable to hold, limits the internals in potential power and, well, bendgate just says enough really
The camera especially seems so vulnerable protruding from the back. And the adapter better be cheaper then lol, probably still £20+ knowing apple though
They actually can’t have freed up any board space here. The headphone jack itself lives off board, and the parts on board that drive it already need to be there for the stereo speakers. They literally just removed the jack and are making people use either Bluetooth (which isn’t a great choice for music) or Lightning (which introduces a previously redundant DAC into the source chain, probably reducing audio quality, while the higher quality DAC built into the phone stays there unused since it can only provide audio to the speakers). There are lots of reasons to keep the analog connector, but the biggest reason has to be that speakers (including the ones inside your headphones) *are* analog, and you have to convert from digital to analog somewhere. The best place for that is on the phone.