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Are any Apple peripherals worth the price? From Beats to cables, it’s all overpriced but doesn’t quite meet the hype of the mainline products.


>Are any Apple peripherals worth the price?

Well, most people swear by their Airpods, people also like the Magic Keyboard, Apple Watch is better than any smart watch out there, and the Apple Pencil has been universally praised as better feeling than Wacom's (that had a 20 year headstart). So there's that...


The main benefit of their wireless headphones is the relative ease of switching devices if you're using multiple Apple devices. Use an iPhone, iPad, and Mac? They'll switch (somewhat intelligently) between devices. I'm listening to music on my computer, get a call on my phone and answer it (which I could technically also answer on the computer), it'll pause the music and switch the headphones to the phone to use with the call. When the call ends, I manually resume the music on the computer and the headphones switch back. Listening to an audiobook on my phone, and I switch to the iPad for a video it pauses the audiobook and switches the connection to the iPad. When I start up the audiobook it does the same in reverse.

The quality seems to be on par with many other wireless headphones I've used over the years, but I'm no audiophile.

Using other headphones, though, aren't that big of a hassle. But you do have to manually switch which device they're connected to (a two or three step process depending on device).


For myself I'd say the AirPods Pro (and the AirPods I had before them) justify their price many times over. Same with the watch for me but I've been on the smart watch bandwagon since the Pebble so I might not be a good example.

I avoided AirPods because "I had tried BT headphones and didn't like them" in the past. I got some for Christmas one year and found out how magic they were to use. Pop them out, put them in your ear, instant audio. That has been unmatched by any other BT headphones I had tried before.

I've never tried Beats (neither they nor the new AirPods Max interest me) so I can't speak to that. As for cables I only by Anker with the exception of the Apple Watch changer which no one (other than Apple) seems to get right.


IME: the quality/convenience/size of Airpod Pros very much justifies the premium over competing products.

Crucially though, the premium in this case is more like $50-$80, not $200




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