Oh, I thought of something after that last post. I’ll give you an example from another consumer electronics product. I have a Samsung S95B QD-OLED TV that I bought a couple of years ago, the very first QD-OLED ever. Its claim to fame was incredibly bright OLED, better than WOLED, the LG version. Inexplicably Samsung nerfed the brightness in one of their infamous firmware revisions. It was so prominent that some people returned their TV’s and bought new ones with original firmware and would then cut off their Internet access to their TV to prevent any updates. Ever since, Samsung forums have people insisting brightness was nerfed again and again with each firmware update, yet when professionals put light meters on their TV’s, sometimes it improved in brightness and other times it didn’t, but never by any dramatic amount. Samsung never explained why they nerfed it, so there was that lack of trust from then on.
That one time traumatized people into expecting the worst, and that’s what I think is happening with AirPods. Apple had to do it once by court order and ever since, people are paranoid they’ll do it again. Once you lose trust, it’s gone. It doesn’t matter why they had to do it.