Highly likely I'm misremembering, but a decade (at least) or so, there was an iTunes promo where Itunes literally pushed a free U2 album to everyone who had an iTunes account for free.

I specifically remember the internet hate that received at the time haha.

Here's a link: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/09/09/the-free-u2-album...

Yup. And the hate and negative backlash is still here - I'm not kidding, my wife can NOT hear U2 without a visceral reaction! It followed her through like 3 cars, until she finally married a guy nerdy and persistent enough :-D

That's literally what the parent comment is describing

It bears repeating. I've tried to remove that f*cking album from my library so many times, on so many devices. It's effectively unkillable; and I'm no stranger to computers.

Why that tax-dodging blowhard felt he had the right to squeeze his turd of an album onto each and every apple product I buy for, presumably, the rest of my life is unfathomable.

It's as simple as Jobs thinking people would like a free album, but they had no mechanism to "offer" an album, so they just added the entitlement to everyone's accounts. Then they had no mechanism to "remove" an entitlement, because why would anyone want to remove content that they "bought"?

Jobs died 3 years prior to this.

It’s really weird how much love Apple has for U2. That whole episode was just so cringe and tone deaf. Knowing the internal politics around it would be fascinating as surely someone tried to stop it.

I totally agree with that, I didn't like U2 back then but I know actively hate them since that episode.

We should start a club!

My son just bought a 3.5 mm adapter for the phone. Turns out the younger generation prefers wired too.

I sometimes wonder what the world would be like without FAANG. I'm lead to believe the world would be a better place if all companies would have a max company size of Bose, or Sennheiser. Then no stupid decisions could be pushed through by force, like the removal of the 3.5 mm jack. If the market really wants it, they will eventually vote with their wallet. Same goes with social media, fb killed off local country-specific social media, which sometimes had much better features and less agressivity/conspiracy theories/scams.

Of course the true FAANG solution would be to include a 3.5mm jack but disable it in software, requiring £4.99 per month to enable it with a rent-seeking subscription service.

Can I get an audiophile 'Hi-def' tier for $9.99 that's almost but not quite 1982 CD quality?

Seems like that’s more the BMW solution (ref. heated seats subscription)

The market wants what the other segment of the market has, that's the purpose of marketing. Phones with no jacks, like laptops with no i/o, is something impractical that people self-justify because of the logo and the clout it affords. You're part of the in group, you made it, you have achieved sameness, you have an iPhone.

Airpods are just about the worst headphones money can buy and people fight over them, despite there being headphones sold for <$100 that blow them out of the water. I have in-ear-monitors that cost a fraction of what an airpod does, has detachable cords AND bluetooth to each ear, and they sound much better and balanced.

Whoever took away the audio port on modern phones should be dragged outside and beaten like an unruly fax machine.

The airpods do one thing much better than anything else I've tried: work with an iPhone.

I went through a few other pairs of bluetooth "true wireless" ear buds and every single one of them would exhibit the normal bluetooth problems. Sometimes one wouldn't connect. Sometimes both wouldn't connect. Sometimes trying to resolve this I'd "forget" them and then not be able to pair them again necessitating pulling out the manual and figuring out how to do a hard reset on some ear buds. And then ending up with only one paired. Etc, etc.

I pretty much exclusively use in-ear headphones to listen to something to fall asleep to, so this is generally happening as I've already wound down and gotten into bed and... now it's tech support time!

I paired the airpods to my phone the first time and have never had them fail to connect immediately since.

This is why AirPods are popular. While this drives audiophiles and geeks who obsess over performance of their technology (not knocking them, I’m one of them for many devices) up the wall, the reality is most people are not audiophiles and can barely tell the difference. What they want are reasonably comfortable headphones that just work, and Bluetooth is so famously bad at this that AirPods stand out.

> the reality is most people are not audiophiles and can barely tell the difference.

That hasn't been my experience at all. The differences, even to a lay person, or not subtle.

Now, I can believe that many don't care, I can't believe that they can't tell.

The work every time...and my hearing is shot so the last 5% worth of fidelity is lost on me.

And my wife experienced their noise cancelling once on a flight and bought a set the next day.

And we can share the audio between two airpod things when watching a movie, but not with non-Apple products.

I've gone through a few different high-end bluetooth buds from Jabra to Sony.

I keep coming back to my Airpods, something that was gifted to me a year ago, when the other ones break. Most recently, one of my Jabra Elite buds plays audio at 50% volume from one ear 50% of the time.

Not a fan of the tap interface nor the shape of the things nor the need to use a rubber condom (that doesn't fit in the case so I have to remove/add every time), but my Airpods are the ones that I can count on, so I have to give them that.

Just a note: I had faltering volume on my Jabra Elite earbuds and I found an unauthorized repair [0] that brought it back to life. It requires some delicate cleaning of build up in the vent hole.

[1] <https://crt.the-mori.com/2020-09-25-solve-jabra-elite-active...>

Thanks, I will try that. I wouldn't be surprised if my ear gunk liquefied into them and then crystallized deep inside the inner sanctums.

This. I am honestly bewildered when I see the tech press comparing true wireless earbuds to AirPods and not mentioning the enormous ergonomic differences.

Bluetooth experiences will be largely software-dependent. Comparing Airpods on a Macbook to a Windows laptop and some Sony earbuds? It's no contest, Airpods will win every time. If we're, say, testing the Airpods on Windows and the Sony buds on Linux (where they have LDAC support), the tables will be completely turned. All of these headphones are context-sensitive, and will behave differently on different hardware. You're not exactly writing a novel thesis here.

Airpods are still just Bluetooth with an extra chip for NFC pairing. All of the "magic" your Airpods provide are software-based, not part of the actual hardware you're buying. I think Tech Press is totally justified to ignore software that isn't part of the headphones itself.

> All of the "magic" your AirPods provide are software-based

This is actually not true. AirPods contain custom silicon from Apple for the controller that speaks bluetooth, whereas most true wireless headphones use a Qualcomm chip, and therefore suffer the exact same ergonomic issues almost regardless of price. The most obvious way this is shown is that you can be on a call with the right airpod in, then seamlessly add the left to the call and put the right back in the case all without dropping the call, developing sync issues, or making the switch obvious to the other party. It's especially useful if your airpods are low on power. Airpods also better than average (in my experience) at switching devices when clicking the connect button from a device they are not currently connected to. This is most obviously good with apple devices (where there is auto pairing based on apple id), but in my experience it works better than the average even on non-apple devices. I am comparing the experience to Sony WF-100XM3 as well as cheaper devices like soundcore liberty neo.

Of course you are correct that there are additional software derived things that make airpods nice on apple products. When they work well, they can be pretty great, but I still find those hit or miss. For me, the way the controller can switch easily between the right and left as well as easy pairing are what makes airpods great.

The only feature the wideband chip provides is the device switching and pairing, which is largely redundant with multipoint Bluetooth spec and NFC, respectively. I'll appreciate what Apple did ergonomically, but I found the "smartness" of Airpods to be less reliable than using my XM4s connected to both the devices I was using. I understand the layman's struggle here, but I honestly think most people's bad experiences with Bluetooth were in the < v3 era, where things like multipoint hadn't been introduced and reliability/pairing were... shaky.

Nowadays, I think any phone running Android 10+ or Linux device using Pipewire has the best wireless audio experience I can think of. You can have high-bitrate audio codecs with excellent latency and a connection that's as good as the antennae you have plugged in. AAC and the funnel of buying U1 chip devices doesn't really put up enough of a fight, especially for a company that's long prided itself on delivering quality audio experiences.

Isn't all that it just works software "driver quality"? If we were talking about a graphics card that couldn't detect monitor resolution and keep connected, we wouldn't give the card a pass just because it is a driver issue.

I mean, there are plenty of perfectly functional graphics cards that are given a pass because their drivers don't work with Wayland or refuse to implement resizable BAR. These are pretty solidly driver issues (ones that have persisted over decades, at that), and nobody really ever brings it up because it's not necessarily Nvidia's responsibility to address it.

The larger factor (in my eyes) is implementation. Bluetooth quality is all over the place: mobile Bluetooth stacks used to be abysmal until ~5 years ago, and desktop OSes still don't have it ironed out yet. It makes perfect sense that reviewers would focus on the hardware, as opposed to enumerating how each device works on each operating system, and so on.

>> You're part of the in group, you made it, you have achieved sameness, you have an iPhone.

I assumed I was just a grouchy old man (because I am:) but I recently found out what level of social stratification happens for teenagers without iPhone. Immediate judgement, plus the continued dreaded green text box. It is brutal

I thought I was exaggerating the iPhone as a status symbol as opposed to actually convenient / technical solution, turns out I was naive.

(there ARE things that Apple does very well, when it comes to integrating within ecosystem, though some of them are CREEPY - like being prompted to share my wifi password with another person who happens to be looking for wifi around me; just because they happen to have an iPhone doesn't make them my best friend... or does it :P )

Imagine how I feel, I don't carry or use phones, period. The level of outright indignation I experience is pretty high. People resort to levels of disgust when met with someone who openly rejects carrying around a little bother-box in their pocket as if I'm some type of unwashed knave.

I don't think I can fully imagine; I prefer my ergonomic keyboard and massive monitor to be sure, so I dislike phone-first solutions (GRRR Whatsapp GRRR), or phone-priority design, and computers are definitely my hammer of choice.

But between Winnipeg winter storms and kids and experience of civil war and strife in a previous lifetime, mobile phones as a safety lifeline were a strong priority for me early in my life in late 90's; and then I was one of those nerdy guys with Palm Pilot (I used to read entire books... many many books... on a 320x320px screen - which is why I find it hilarious when people so righteously proclaim "Retina or bust" :), then Palm Treo then HTC G1 then Galaxy S2 and so on. I am too self-absorbed or something to worry about social media (I genuinely don't care what anybody else had for lunch or the cute picture of their cat or the latest copy pasted platitude that's 5 words but 3MB overcompressed JPEG grr!), so scrolling Facebook or twitter notification etc are not a real threat vector in a portable phone for me. Which is to say, I don't care one iota if anybody else has a portable phone or not, but I personally find it much too convenient; and I can see it impacting me if somebody else doesn't have a phone, not from status perspective but from practical perspective - there's a change of plans, but oh, Bob is still going to the CoolCafe and we can't tell him to meet us at the NiceRestaurant; or my tire is blown, how am I going to call anybody; etc. How do you handle stuff like that?

Yeah that sucks. I graduated collage in 2008 and I refused to get a phone before that point. The amount of people complaining how it is inconvenient that they have to call your room phone instead of texting, how they can't make plans(in reality, it is a crutch for lack of planning), etc.

For a while, it was the same with Facebook.

If it may be a helpful perspective - I don't care if I phone one's room phone or cell phone; but texting/messaging is a completely different mode of communication than a phone call to begin with.

Texting, like messaging and email, are async whereas phone is sync. For 99% of my communication, I don't need to talk to somebody right now (and they don't need to talk to me right now :). I don't care if other party has a cell phone or not, but written comms is preferred to voice comm for large number of my requirements.

Similarly, email/messaging/text can trivially be a group conversation, and plans can be narrowed down or many people can be informed quickly; again, don't care if other party has cell phone or not, but in many circumstances I'd prefer to send one quick message/email/text, than to call 7 people.

(lest you think I lack empathy, I am of course on the other side of the equation too! My family is all on Whatsapp, which for me is the worst messaging system that an evil mind could possibly invent, so I feel the pressure :)

Not that I don't understand the difference between the communication modes, mostly just empathizing with the parent.

Personally I hate text because most people will reply with one or 2 word answers and it takes much longer to get a decision vs a minute phone call.

In collage my reasoning was purely financial and this was the beginning of the mass adoption wave. I can only guess that the pressure to conform is so much greater and the scorn/ridicule for not is as well.

I also wonder if we will see a counter wave similar to the "I don't watch TV" that happened. Phones are great but they are also insediously great time wasters.

Agreed; with text, and possibly since the days of BBM, there's also the personal pet peeve when a simple answer is spread across 7 individual messaged :D

I think some counter movements are already seen; and more mainstream, people are trying to learn how to limit / constrain their phone interactions. Part of the problem is that our labeling is horrible outdated - it's not actually the "Phone" part of the rectangular device that's usually the problem, it's the "massively powerful computer and media consumption device" part :D

It's almost a requirement out in the world. Recently the following come to mind:

- A food truck sends a text when your food is ready

- The menu at the restaurant is only available via a QR code which sends you to a website

- You have to take a picture of your license plate for some parking requirement

I'd never look down on anybody without a phone. In fact, I'd really respect it.

But I would be frustrated if it was somebody close to me, if (if!) there was no other way to contact them.

> You're part of the in group, you made it, you have achieved sameness, you have an iPhone.

Orrrrr we tolerate repeated mistakes on Apple's part because every time we poke our heads up and look around at the rest of the market (or even try switching for a while!) it's clear we'd just be trading every one problem for three others.

I sincerely wish any other tech companies would at least credibly pretend to actually be competing with Apple head-on, rather than just avoiding them and trying to fill other niches.

The thing I never liked about Airpods is, instead of having one thing that is hard to lose, we now have three easy to lose things.

I see the same happening with a certain new EV that I won't name. It has a nice design, but often gets people stranded, outright bricked through OTA. To the point where dealers advise users not to perform OTA updates. Literal pieces falling off the car while driving. The need to call the tow truck after 2k miles is very common. In normal car terms, it's junk. But people fight tooth and nail to defend it. Exactly because of the 'tribal' thinking you mention. It's our 'tribe', so we close in.

Sounds dire. What car is this, and where can I read about these cars that very commonly fail after 2k miles?

When I was a kid, I mowed the lawn for a neighbor who was a mechanic. He exclusively worked on Porsches. He claimed most luxury cars would break down if you bought one and tried to drive it across the country. He rattled off some known issues that were baked into the manufacturing process, but rich people didn't care since it's mostly a status symbol.

This was in the late 1900's....

I am extremely puzzled by true wireless bluetooth headphones to a point where it's hard to find high-end wired bluetooth headphones.

True wireless have so many drawbacks: - lower battery life yet people got convinced that they last long thanks to powerbank, I meant ,,case" which you need to carry.

- bulkier so they stick out of ear one way or another. They fall down easily when changing t-shirts, huddies .. - easy to lose

> it's hard to find high-end wired bluetooth headphones

pre-covid we had an open floorplan office, typical valley startup layout, no noise dampening etc

Everyone had the bose 35 quiet comfort i or ii noise canceling headphones. I was one of the new guys so started off with a $60 panasonic noise canceling headphone, and later when released got the sony ...mx4000? noise canceling headphones because they had USB-C in ~2016 and I brought them with me on my most recent trip here in 2022

I don't know anyone who has ever complained about their bose or sony bluetooth noise canceling headphones. They just work, all the time, every time. Except that one time I forgot to charge them and let them run down to 0% (and it even warned me about an hour before)

> I don't know anyone who has ever complained about their bose or sony bluetooth noise canceling headphones.

My Sony XM4 cans often give me trouble with bluetooth. Once in a while, there is no sound from the device. The device says "connected", the phone app says it's connected, the computer says it's connected. The way to fix it is to plugin the 3.5mm jack, and take it off. The device powers off. The next time it is powered on, it works properly. Lots of other people have had this trouble too. I did not discover this "fix" myself, but was written online somewhere.

Yeah those headphones are great, but they are not true wireless.

I use them at the gym because I hate having things on my face/head while I'm sweaty. I don't have a use case for wired bluetooth headphones that isn't better served by something with a 3.5mm jack.

> you have achieved sameness, you have an iPhone.

You mean "....you have iPhone". Gotta get the weird marketing right if you want to be in the club.

I hope the community will find it in their hearts to be swayed by my humble appeal, I mean no harm. Who will help the widow's son?

I have some Bluetooth speakers from Teufel. They are pretty big and heavy and supposedly good (actually way too bassy for me, hard to listen to podcasts on). And they have a battery, so they are mobile.

They heave this “feature” where they turn off after 10 min of silence. And they’re Bluetooth, so once they turn off, u have to walk to the damn speaker (no remote), push the power button that’s hidden on the back for several seconds (less used buttons are visible on top), then go to your playback device and reconnect the Bluetooth.

People on the forums have been complaining about this for years, and the support still says this feature can’t be turned off.

For a company that supposedly makes very carefully designed, great Audio equipment made in Germany, this user interface is infuriating, pointless and feels never actually tested. (Also, Nowadays nobody reviews products anymore so bad user interfaces are not caught). Btw, I have some Bluetooth speakers with a tiny battery that will stay on for a day and not turn off, idling takes nearly no battery power.

So yeah, this is like the laziest product I have owned, that just dares u to stop a movie for a bathroom or snack break lest it goes back to sleep, and it wasn’t designed by some big monolithic FANG but a supposedly user centric design focused hiish end shop.

Interesting; is there some connection between waterproofing and 3.5mm I'm missing?

There's plenty of phones and devices waterproofed to any given standard with 3.5mm. To my ignorant mind, a USB C or Lightning port is not fundamentally different exposure / difficulty than 3.5mm when it comes to this - this is far from my area of expertise, but a cursory google search, and plentiful of counter-examples, indicates this is just a post-hoc justification for Apple's removal, not a real critical path.

Understanding that "if you need something, get an adapter / live the dongle life" is the core Apple philosophy, and agreeing that most standards should eventually die (parallel port, Firewire, etc), 3.5mm still seems a uniquely standardized, useful, and time proof feature that's is sorely missed with no adequate replacement (dongle, of course, is not it, for many reasons - expense, inconvenience, losing them, and if you want to charge your phone while being on a call things get very wonky very quickly - does Apple even offer a 1st-party solution for this common office-worker use-case?)

Sony solved open headphone jack while being water proof nearly a decade ago. The idea the phone can't have a headphone jack and be waterproof was a lie pushed by Apple to save money on not having to put in a headphone jack.

I've been using Sony phones in the shower and at the beach for years now and only briefly switched to a different company when they tried to pull that headphone jack removal of crap briefly when I needed a new phone.

My understanding was that it’s always been about the physical size and the impact it has on the stack-up of iPhone components. Looking at a standard mini-jack vs. my iPhone 13, the connector itself is close to 40% of the thickness of the phone. Add the additional size for the jack’s structure and you quickly get to a point where the phone has to be thicker.

Now, has Apple gotten too obsessive about thin phones? Maybe - but that’s a different discussion.

If that is the case, I have a hard time believing it's still true on any model past iPhone X. There's plenty of space to fit a 3.5mm jack in there, I would happily trade any/all of the FaceID hardware or Lidar components for a headphone connector.

I don't see how that could be true. The thinnest ever iPhone was the 6, and it had a headphone jack. The phones since then have been 3-20% thicker.

Some searching suggests that 5mm is about the point where it won't fit, and iPhones are comfortably 7+. One of these phones is 5.6mm thick with a headphone jack and has near-zero bezels.

Phones exist that have both waterproofing and a headphone jack. I’m sure it’s a challenge, but it’s not technically an either or decision.

Is there? Last time I checked there doesn’t seem to be a dongle that both outputs and charges my iPhone in the car. Or the non Apple ones have terrible reviews that they set off the persons coffee maker scalding the persons dog or something.

so you're saying that a 3.5mm port cannot be waterproof, yet the stupid Apple proprietary power/data port can?

It's stupid in that it has exposed pins. It's stupid in that its proprietary. It's stupid in a lot of ways. It's not not stupid because you like it.

It's patently ridiculous how much better the microphone on $15 wired headphones is than the ones on a $50 set of wireless earbuds.

A 25 dollar logitech wired headset with a boom is brilliant. I have people with $200+ airpods on the call and I hear their cat dog air conditioner wind spouse keyboard car and everything. But they cannot be told this - they have expensive earbuds and they can hear ME fine, so it's all great!

But you're starting with the wrong assumption: that people focus on having the best option in each situation. The people buying Airpods probably know they're not the best headphones or microphone. They are the best jack of all trades even if master of none. They are the best package. And you rarely choose what's best for others, others probably do the same.

So when you WhatsApp from your mobile someone else has to see you type slowly, full of autocorrect errors and typos. You don't switch to the web Whatsapp from a computer, or a model M attached to the phone despite knowing they are faster because you get their messages fast and correct so it's all great.

Boom mic is always the superior choice.

Yes. All the software / DSP processing can't help if the physics is against you.

By placing the microphone close to the mouth noises you make, you are increasing, by many orders of magnitude, the signal-to-noise ratio.

Cars and other large BT devices (like an Amazon Echo) can use multiple microphones and some fancy processing to really isolate the voice signal coming from a specific direction (relative to the device) and also cancel out surrounding noise sources.

With ear-bud systems, you can't fit in many microphones, nor can you spatially separate them enough for the software to do the job.

In an absolute sound quality sense, yes.

But they also pick up peoples' gross mouth noises. You hear them chewing food, wheezing when they have a cold, or even eating food in waaaaay too much detail.

Obviously mute buttons exist but... I've had multiple remote coworkers with boom mics and even if they rememeber to mute 90% of the time over the course of a year that other 10% really adds up lol

The solution to that problem is not a better microphone, the solution to it is noise-canceling software. It filters out something like 95% of gross mouth noises, and 99% of stupid background noises (Cars, fans, ACs, etc.)

Most cheap wireless headsets are cutting the bandwidth down to like 4k for voice when you're talking.

It's also not surprising when you realize no one buying these things is testing the mic before the purchase. They probably aren't even testing how it sounds. It's hard to sell better things when most customers will never know how bad they sound, and even the ones who do probably won't care. And worst of all they'll blame zoom, or the telephone network, or their internet, anything but the cheap piece of crap mic and half bandwidth connection they're using.

Sorry for the rant. The economics of consumer audio are why I personally quit the industry. Some of these things are easy fixes but no one cares enough to make them.

I prefer wired because, for some reason, car audio via Bluetooth has adaptive volume, i.e. I start coasting in the car and the music becomes almost inaudible. I speed up and it returns to normal.

This....

I have exactly the same problem with the U2 album. In general, I like U2, but that album is a pain. It starts up every now and then in my car with carplay. Especially if I have my phone on with no app in the foreground when I plug it in.

I feel you man...

The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone) must be our most listened Song of all time.

For me it was The Jackson 5's ABC that would play as soon as I plugged my phone into my car. That opening "A buh-buh buh buh" is ingrained in my memory forever.

There's an app by Apple that allows you to remove the U2 songs

Looks like that might be retired going by https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251184844

> Customers are no longer able to remove the album on their own. You will need to reach out to Apple Support directly to have the album removed

I guess this is the essence, of why I never wanted an apple device. And I bookmark this comment, in case I forget ..

I would need to ask my apple masters, if they please remove U2 from my device? No thank you.

You can remove the album from your device just fine; This is about removing it from your account, which is contingent on the provider you have the account with no matter what company you're dealing with.

I remember raging about this back when it happened and my coworkers couldn't understand why I just wouldn't like a free album, and am I bothered by two half-naked men embracing each other?

Boulder people are strange.

Same. Happened twice, really. Once on the ipod and then the iphone. Made U2 haters out of my wife and myself. I wonder how many people hate U2 music now because this.