Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Hands-On With Dyson's OnTrac Headphones
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Whatever the brand, these disposable and overpriced headphones are increasingly grotesque. What's next?
I would buy this in a heartbeat if they would have switches instead of buttons. Slide on, slide off. Right now I use Bose and I have to look at the light to see if I am turning my headset on and off. Also a slider for connecting to mac or iphone. Then I can choose and not have it automatically switch over. It is really annoying to leave my headset on my desk and go for a walk with my phone and then when I am getting back to my office have my phone automatically connect to my headset.
Why I purchased Beats Pro. They come with a cable mini. They have Apple internals and thus support Spacial Audio. Airplanes a good example of cable needs.
Dyson makes great vacuum machines, fans, heaters but now they have crossed the line. Bad omen when a corporation branching out to other areas. They should stick to what they do best. Hard no for me as well. Will stick with my Max and Sonos, which they gave me a great discount as an incentive!
This review is just plain bad.
"Dyson smartly did away with the unpopular air purifying mask design that it used for its prior-generation "
No... just no.
Dyson made a model that doesn't have the feature that was in their first headphone model which was the whole reason they made headphones! Why are you writing about a product when you don't understand where it comes from?
Dyson started out with vacuums. They came up with a great way to reliably remove debris from the sucked in air before it hits the filter resulting in you not having to buy replacement bags. As they went on they got more and more into air filtration and air-moving technology as they made newer vacuum models. That research resulted in them making new and innovative fans and air purifiers.
They also continued to make more complicated and well-designed electric motors which are basically in nearly all their products.
Dyson's headphone line started out as a portable air purifier. They figured out the best way to make a portable air purifier was to simply mount it on the head and avoid hoses etc. Then they were like hey, that'll be noisey. So they were like how do we get rid of the noise factor? Well, you could put music in people's ears and also use noise-cancelling tech to block out the hum from the motors/fans running on each ear.
That's how you get to the Dyson Zone headphones, which are fantastic and are beloved by people who use them. Why are they beloved? Because some of us can't breathe the same air that you take for granted. I get brutal migraines when expose to amounts of perfume that you can't even smell. I have four air purifiers in a one-bedroom apartment.
The Dyson Zone are INCREDIBLY POPULAR among people who aren't ableist twits! Just because you don't need the Dyson Zone doesn't mean that it isn't filling a niche. Now, is that niche big enough to sustain a product line for a company Dyson's size? I honestly don't know, but I do know from talking to other people with my condition online, for a lot of us this has given us our lives back and enabled us to go into public spaces like grocery stores or shopping malls safely in a manner that things like an N95 mask don't. (You can check out the documentary Stink on YouTube if you want to learn a bit more about why chemicals that destroy some people are allowed in almost any soap or cleaning product you buy. I will spoil it for you, the reason is rich douche bags and lax journalism.)
For anyone who cares about the sound, the OnTracs if they sound like the Zone (which I'm sure they do) will be quite good. You don't get the spacial audio effect of the AirPods Max, but if you want really good balanced sound, great noise cancellation and you don't want to get AirPods Max, I'd say feel free to give these a go. I will say that having these automatically connect to my iPhone was sometimes a pain, I'm not sure if that was the iPhone's fault or the Dyson's, but setting up a Siri shortcut to do it makes it work generally flawlessly which makes me think it's iOS's fault.
"Dyson smartly did away with the unpopular air purifying mask design that it used for its prior-generation "
No... just no.
Dyson made a model that doesn't have the feature that was in their first headphone model which was the whole reason they made headphones! Why are you writing about a product when you don't understand where it comes from?
Dyson started out with vacuums. They came up with a great way to reliably remove debris from the sucked in air before it hits the filter resulting in you not having to buy replacement bags. As they went on they got more and more into air filtration and air-moving technology as they made newer vacuum models. That research resulted in them making new and innovative fans and air purifiers.
They also continued to make more complicated and well-designed electric motors which are basically in nearly all their products.
Dyson's headphone line started out as a portable air purifier. They figured out the best way to make a portable air purifier was to simply mount it on the head and avoid hoses etc. Then they were like hey, that'll be noisey. So they were like how do we get rid of the noise factor? Well, you could put music in people's ears and also use noise-cancelling tech to block out the hum from the motors/fans running on each ear.
That's how you get to the Dyson Zone headphones, which are fantastic and are beloved by people who use them. Why are they beloved? Because some of us can't breathe the same air that you take for granted. I get brutal migraines when expose to amounts of perfume that you can't even smell. I have four air purifiers in a one-bedroom apartment.
The Dyson Zone are INCREDIBLY POPULAR among people who aren't ableist twits! Just because you don't need the Dyson Zone doesn't mean that it isn't filling a niche. Now, is that niche big enough to sustain a product line for a company Dyson's size? I honestly don't know, but I do know from talking to other people with my condition online, for a lot of us this has given us our lives back and enabled us to go into public spaces like grocery stores or shopping malls safely in a manner that things like an N95 mask don't. (You can check out the documentary Stink on YouTube if you want to learn a bit more about why chemicals that destroy some people are allowed in almost any soap or cleaning product you buy. I will spoil it for you, the reason is rich douche bags and lax journalism.)
For anyone who cares about the sound, the OnTracs if they sound like the Zone (which I'm sure they do) will be quite good. You don't get the spacial audio effect of the AirPods Max, but if you want really good balanced sound, great noise cancellation and you don't want to get AirPods Max, I'd say feel free to give these a go. I will say that having these automatically connect to my iPhone was sometimes a pain, I'm not sure if that was the iPhone's fault or the Dyson's, but setting up a Siri shortcut to do it makes it work generally flawlessly which makes me think it's iOS's fault.
If it's not from Apple, I'm not buying.
No other company strikes the right balance of quality, value, environmental ratings, privacy, unboxing experience, and design.
No other company strikes the right balance of quality, value, environmental ratings, privacy, unboxing experience, and design.
You want privacy from your headphones? Let’s not pretend Apple are all rosey when it comes to environmental issues either, removing stuff from the box and selling it separately to “save the environment and reduce e-waste” when in reality it doubles up on packaging, shipping costs and fuels, and of course helps their bottom line out to no end. You shouldn’t be basing your entire purchase decisions on a logo, certainly not under the false pretences written in your post. “Value” is also humorous. You’ve seen Apples profit margins in their products right? Their mantra is sell at a premium price because it creates an allure, it’s why even their older stock isn’t all that cheap.
I’m a big Apple fan, I own an iPhone, two watches, a MacBook Pro, AirPods Pro and AirPods Pro Max, and a long history of buying other Apple products, quality as you list it, and privacy (for my iPhone at least) are two reasons I do buy Apple products, but the rest is down to being in the ecosystem already and other more subjective matters that make each individual product suit my needs as and when I’m in the market for one, but it most certainly isn’t and never should be a foregone conclusion and certainly not a decision based purely on their being a piece of fruit with a bite taken out of it in the back.
“This video has been removed by the uploader”
I wonder what happened.
I wonder what happened.
Or colour, grumble grumble.
Now, you’re stepping on BBEdit’s toes. The original product that (still) doesn’t suck, for over 30 years.
500+ words about a headphone and this is more or less the only sentence we got about audio quality:
Just replaced ours with a Hoover, much better design and works a lot better.
Me. Not so much because i was planning to buy it. God no.
But they were genuinely different and now due to market pressures are just making something same as anyone else. Ho hum.
What on earth? The “unboxing experience” is one of your criteria for buying headphones? Apple headphones are incredibly mid with their sound quality. The only positive thing about them is their quick syncing between Apple devices. As for privacy, that makes zero sense.
A missed opportunity - I would have made one of the earcups magnetic (to replace), but atop a rotary encoder or jog mechanism to allow for volume control as a big knob. Those earbuds SCREAM to be turned like a knob.