I just did a 10 hour flight from Tokyo to Sydney and I wore my Bose QC2 buds for the whole flight. I watched some pre downloaded YouTube videos, and then fell asleep for about 6 hours of actually restful sleep. I cannot express how amazing the noise cancellation is on those things. I was in a 787, seat 29A, window seat, just behind the wing and I could barely hear the sound of the plane. I'm never flying without them again.
Then you didn't care to look for them. Sennheiser, B&W and other traditional companies have buds that sound light years better than greatest tech Apple can currently produce, and do cost more correspondingly.
On top of things like much longer lasting battery, much better support for advanced HD bluetooth codecs (I can plug them into anything like some cheap TVs anywhere). But to me overall sound quality is still #1 reason to invest into premium quality.
Of course then somebody from A team comes with 'but they integrates greatly with my iphone' argument, which is probably true but not that relevant to above. My Senns integrate effortlessly with my Samsung phone/tv/laptops too, thats kind of baseline in 2024.
To be fair, when I bought them it was only because I thought they looked cool and I already had other apple devices I knew they would work with; I was willing to pay the premium for the brand, it was a spur of the moment kind of thing and I never factored in competitor value. The funny thing about the Vision Pro was that as soon as I saw it I thought it, and anyone who used it, was really dumb, and I didn't want to be caught dead wearing it--not so for the airpods.
This is likely because you bought a pair of AirPods when they were already very popular and everyone thought they were stylish.
I bought my first pair of AirPods very close to their initial release and everyone looked at me like I was an idiot for wearing such an ugly and expensive device that couldn’t really do anything better than a $20 pair of earbuds. Do you remember everyone making fun of them at the announcement? It wasn’t until around 2 years later that AirPods were widely worn and accepted.
I’m not sure Vision Pro will go through the same adoption curve, but I am not confident that it won’t happen by late v2 or v3.
If V2/3 doesn't make you look like an idiot and actually works for work and leisure, then perhaps, but its hard to develop an VR/AR headset that would do that, since it inherently cuts you off from the social world in which the esteem of the product would be evaluated.
What do we think of people who sit around with a VR headset on all day? We think, usually, that they are anti-social, that they are afraid of going outside, that they want to trap themselves in a world that generates and serves their fantasies. How does a company which makes so much of their money off of people associating their products with high social status break into a market that appears to be solely for those who stand on the other end of the continuum?
The rational is contradictory: technology (according to the Silicon Valley playbook) profits by transforming the world into a place of further alienated and isolated individuals whose entire lives are shaped by and for tech companies which only exist to exploit them; and yet, such a world, in its total form, could never appear, since people could not work and live in that world unless they participated in it collectively, at some level. Phenomenologically, we can't view this move as anything more than an extreme error of judgement, a move from a post-jobs apple that doesn't seem to understand the magic of great design, the element of the sublime that technology can create--but it would always have to be this way, since the philosophy would never overcome the profit-motive.
Its why I said that computers can only go so far. We're at the end of the rope of the transformational power of technology, and everybody knows it. The world will not change on the whim of the market, the market will just constrict and eventually kill us all.
Not that I’ve found. Maybe on individual features, but not as a whole product.