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Next-Gen AirPods With 'Health Monitoring' Features Said to be Coming in First Half of 2019
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The battery life thing is related with fast battery degrading over time. Like, I cannot get more than an hour with a full charge which is not nice. I understand that the batteries are small so they will wear out faster than other products, but still would be nice if they could work in that direction. About the audio quality - it's not about the ambient noise, but in general they don't sound as good as EarPods, for example. Which is also to be expected, but still I guess it can be improved. I honestly think that people who are looking for health-related features should be looking for "different type of product", because AirPods are headphones, so audio quality should be the most important thing, not health-related stuff.
Seems to be a perennial issue with the “experts” here. Always so quick to criticise.
Well if your ears are odd, so are mine...i bought them tried them on in the store and returned them in 10 mins..didnt stay in
I accidentally left my AirPods in my jeans pockets and washed and dried them. That was almost a year ago and I still use them.
Yeah. All I need with either my 6S+ or my LG V40 is a cable charger for the phones (Lightning and USB-C, resp.), and a working headphone jack to plug in my Sennheiser, which needs no charging and blows Bluetooth away in lack of lag and great sound quality. The V40 even has a 4 channel DAC accessible via the jack. Bluetooth/wireless may eventually catch up with high quality wired, but it isn't there yet. I may have to fork over for one of the SE phones just to get another iPhone with a jack.
The AirPods are not water resistant rated, but they seemingly do very well in environments with moisture, such as rain, ect. I’m sure they are underrated for what they can survive, and even though Apple doesn’t talk about the water resistance, being it’s nonexistent, they actually do very well with moisture. I just make sure to wipe them down with a microfiber cloth if they do get wet.
In my EarPods, I would like to see:
- Pulse Oximeter
- Temperature
- Heart Rate and Heart Rate Variability
- Running stride difference from left to right using accelerometers
- Glucose, ketone, and triglyceride monitoring using some sort of non-invasive black magic.
Credit to be given when credit is due, they are pushing on the health sector with the Apple Watch. But they should just leave it to the Apple watch, and when it comes to AirPods focus on sound quality and battery life. I can't imagine anyone has wished AirPods had a health tracking features.
AirPods are treated as wearables just like apple watches. There is no reason why health-tracking features would be limited solely to the watch. I guess the question then is which features make sense on a pair of earbuds you wear for anywhere from a couple of minutes to a few hours max at a time, compared to a watch which you can easily have on you the entire day.
You don't block out the external sound with AirPods. No noise cancellation. The product isn't great if you want to compare a very expensive noise cancellation headphones with it. But I am so used to it for my day to day life, that it's near indispensable now. I use it for office calls and listening to audio books especially while doing chores. I easily get 3 hours of use per day out of them. Wired headphones just feel incredibly clumsy for those use cases now.
Sorry if you didn't get the sarcasm on my statement. Nevertheless Cook would probably agree with me anyway.
Bingo! My AirPods are on and off my ears all the time. I don't know how would they bee any good for anything else apart from some planned exercise (when running and using them) and maybe heart rate. My Apple Watch only comes off my wrist when I go to bed and back on my wrist soon as I am up. AirPods go into my ears only when I want to listen to music or watch a video.
Perspiration rate maybe?
I can't say that I am excited about the in-ear health monitoring, but I did see an article that suggested that they might add accelerometer/gyroscope, etc. to them to detect head movement and gestures. That could allow a head tilt to one side or the other to skip a song or repeat it or a not forward or backward to increase or decrease volume.
My guess is it that if implemented, it would only work occasionally and we will all look like idiots doing repeated head gestures trying to get it to respond
I am curious about that as well. My first thought would be fall detection like the Apple Watch.
If you cannot get more than an hour on a full charge, something is wrong with your product, not the product design. I've been using my AirPods almost daily since December of 2016 and I still get over 3 hours with the original battery. That's a fair amount of degradation from the original 5 hours I was getting but these are tiny, fast charging batteries being used regularly for over 2 years so it seems reasonable.
As far as audio quality, that's a more subjective thing and is more about the kind of audio you listen to. I don't hear any difference between my AirPods and my EarPods but I also don't usually listen to classical music. In all the side-by-side music tests I've ever participated in, the only difference I can discern between wireless and wired headphones has been when I was listening to classical music with a full orchestra. I cannot hear any difference when listening to rock or pop for instance and have difficulty believing when people tell me they can clearly tell the difference between wired and wireless sources for those genres. But that's just the wireless aspect and my own opinion.
You might be interested in this comprehensive test comparing audio fidelity of AirPods to EarPods. AirPods come out ahead in most of the measurements:
https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tools/compare/apple-airpods-vs-apple-earpods/405/406
It is the same one, which means both will be released in the second half of 2020.
I remember seeing nearly every thread and review glowing with praise. Yes, there was a lot of skepticism prior to lunch (mostly about the aesthetics), but once people had them in hand it was almost universally positive. Assuming they fit well in your ears.
You should try the Sony WF-1000X then you would realize how inferior the sound of the AirPods are. We are not talking audiophile quality here at all, but If you think the sound quality of the Airpods are just fine, then you haven’t had a chance to try out something else. I own both the Airpods and the Sony WF-1000X and even the most tone deaf person can hear the difference.
I forgot my Airpods in my swim trunks and swam half an hour in the open sea while they were in their charging case. When I got out of the water, I thoroughly rinsed them in fresh water and immediately put them in a glass of fresh water until I got home. At home I put them in a glass of rubbing alcohol for another hour and dried them with a hair dryer. Well, the charging case died and never came back to life but both ear pieces work just fine and all I had to do was to get another case. Since that incidence they have been working perfect for more than a year.
As for them staying in ears, try to wear the right and the left pieces in opposite ears. The stems stick out a little forward rather than hanging straight down but they fit much tighter, at least to my ears anyway.
There is more to a good wireless earbud than sound quality. The reviews suggest inferior connection strength, battery life and price when compared to AirPods.
If you can’t get the basics, sound quality doesn’t matter.
AirPods are impressive because they do so many thing right, even if the sound is average.
DigiTimes reports today that Apple will release next-generation AirPods that include "health monitoring features" in the first half of 2019.
The mention appears in an article focusing on how wearables are expected to drive market growth of rigid-flex printed circuit boards (PCBs) in 2019, but the report cites no sources for the AirPods rumor, and only mentions that Tiawan-based PCB makers Zhen Ding Tech and Flexium Interconnect supply components for Apple Watch and AirPods "at the moment."
DigiTimes' sources often provide reliable information, but the site has a mixed track record when it comes to interpreting that information and accurately deciphering Apple's plans. The news site receives a flood of data from the Asian supply chain, some of which it claims pertains to prototypes or test products that never make it to market or change significantly before launch, skewing its accuracy.
With that in mind, and without corroborating sources, DigiTimes could be referring to a prediction from well-connected Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo that new AirPods with a wireless charging case would debut late in the fourth quarter of 2018 or early in the first quarter of 2019. Kuo later clarified that report to say that he expects new wireless AirPods in early 2019.
Listings for New AirPods were added to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group's regulatory database in November, suggesting a refreshed version of the accessory could well be coming soon. No new features are listed, but upcoming AirPods in the database do support the Bluetooth 5.0 specification, compared to Bluetooth 4.0 in the prior-generation AirPods.
Apple is also said working on third-generation AirPods that are set to be released in 2020 with a new design and perhaps improved water resistance that will allow the AirPods to hold up to "splashes of water and rain."
The AirPods aren't likely to be entirely water resistant, however, and won't be able to be submerged in liquid. These third-generation AirPods are also rumored to include noise cancellation features and increase the distance that AirPods can be listened to away from an iPhone or iPad.
Article Link: Next-Gen AirPods With 'Health Monitoring' Features Said to be Coming in First Half of 2019
Usually when one complains about Apple's "One size fits all" philosophy one is being metaphorical (in griping, for ex., that we are stuck with wishy-washy pale blue on white interfaces for no better reason than that Jony Ives happens to like that look and refuses to offer us any alternatives). In this case I mean this complaint very literally. The damn things just don't fit my ears to the point I feel secure wearing them (and I'm a very sedentary guy). These are probably the world's only in-ear phones that don't come with a variety of tips. So my set spends its time floating around in my sock drawer.
Before buying, you should try the wired set that came along with your iPhone, which are exactly the same in shape. If they don't work for you, don't buy these ones. I wish I hadn't.
I love my Airpods... they're great for watching something in bed, the gym, etc.. but my BeatsX is where my heart is... they just sound so good, I can crank them up to ear-damaging levels in the office and the outside world can't hear a thing, and most importantly, I can't hear them