The killer feature is the connection awareness. You put them in your ears and it immediately connects. You take them out and it pauses the audio. I’ve had several wireless earbuds and they all suffer from connection frustrations and letting audio continue playing when not used.
Even better, if you put that earbud back in it then continues playing in both ears - which makes it a perfect intuitive enhancement of the physical actions you'd already take to talk to somebody while you have earbuds in.
I hear people say this everywhere, but I still find myself needing to manually pair my iPhone with my AirPods around 50% of the time whenever someone calls me.
The battery life is also rubbish, they regularly fall out of my ears and they don't work with my (non-Apple) MP3 player.
Giving credit where it's due, though, the microphone quality for phone calls is exceptional given the orientation and how far away they sit from your mouth.
Otherwise, I really don't get understand why these things are so popular (which just shows how little I know about consumer goods and marketing). Mine were gifted to me, but mostly go unused for the reasons above. I probably wouldn't complain if they were $50 a set, but I'd never dip into my own pocket for whatever obscene amount they cost now ($200?).
This. Even the latest high-end sony offerings can't quickly switch between devices - you have to manually re-pair them each time you want to switch devices.
