They really do.
The sound great, and the ANC is great, but the “official” battery life for a brand new one (which these are not) is “up to 4.5 hours” with ANC on, and 5 without it.
It ends up being 2-3 charge cycles basically every day, plus a full recharge of the charging case.
They do, however, work amazingly well if you’re in the Apple ecosystem; for example they’ll swap between my iPad and Mac Mini if audio starts on one or the other.
But for actually sitting down with something and listening to a thing, I’d rather just plug in some headphones (via the lovely USB-C dongle) and not have to think about if the stupid things are going to die before I’m ready to stop listening.
(Disclaimer: I’m also a weirdo who doesn’t carry a smartphone, and still uses an iPod for listening to stuff outside of the house, so feel free to roll your eyes and disregard my obviously bad opinions :P )
Sound great? Either you’ve never had a pair of cans on, or you might want to consider getting your hearing checked. The membranes in airpods are too small to recreate full frequency spectrum. Yeah, they’re more clear than the earbuds of yore, but they can’t hold a candle to my $30 Gemini DJ headphones. No, they don’t have any noise canceling, but I like to hear the car that’s about to run me over when I’m out and about, and if you turn em up a little you won’t hear anything else anyway. Never have to charge, and pure, clean sound including REAL bass and not some distorted “bass boost”.
Might have been unclear; I listen basically exclusively to spoken word stuff. Podcasts, audobooks, “raido” plays, etc.
The Airpods actually sound remarkably good and clear (and ANC helps a lot with ensuring clarity anywhere even slightly noisy) with voices, so for my uses, they sound perfectly fine.
I have a pile of Chi-Fi earbuds that absolutely destroy them in sound quality for music, but it’s very much a 99.9% of the time it’s not music situation.
