Apple’s newest headphones, the AirPods, are not actually headphones: they’re aural implants. Absent any wires, earpods are so unobtrusive that you may never take them out. Like the eyeglasses on your face, they’ll sit in your ears all day, and you’ll remove them only at night.
For Apple, this is more than just an incremental update to their headphone product. This is a paradigm shift, a Jedi move by Apple where the seam between human and computer is disappearing.
Default In
At first blush, AirPods seem the same as today’s headphones, except with the wires gone. Sure, we’ll use them just like the old ones, to make phone calls and listen to music. But the crux of what’s interesting here is what we’re doing when we’re not using them. Without the lanky wire getting caught on clothes, doorknobs, and backpacks, persistently begging to be wound up and put away, there’s no longer a compelling reason to take them out when you’re done using them. So we won’t.
AirPods are default in, as opposed to traditional wired headphones, which are default out. Much of the criticism lobbied at the design is that you’ll put them down and lose them – but what if you never put them down in the first place?
Whispers in Your Ear
When you’re expecting an important SMS during a meeting, instead of checking your phone (or watch), you’ll hear the message discretely whispered in your ear. Imagine having lunch with a friend, and your headphones whisper “your next appointment is in 10 minutes.” Message received, and you haven’t even blinked. Imagine sharing a glass of wine with your romantic partner, and the voice in your earbuds effortlessly lets you know that your dinner table reservation is ready. As though the maître d’ just whispered it in your ear.
Unlike vision, hearing is nondirectional. Eyes can only look one place at a time – you cannot keep eye contact while checking your phone for a text. But when you listen, you don’t have to point your ears anywhere. You can hear music on the radio and hear your friend next to you talking. Unlike vision, we can easily hear multiple channels of sound at once, so an audio notification is therefore a degree less invasive than a visual one. Apple’s AirPods are Google Glass done right– if Glass was meant to provide information passively though a visual channel, AirPods have figured out that audio is a better channel for passive information. You can interact with it invisibly.
And let’s not forget the microphone is always there, too. Yes, we’ll probably be able to say things like “Siri, call an Uber.” But that’s not the most creative use case . There will be entirely new uses we can’t possible know now, just like nobody imagined Snapchat when the iPhone first launched. Imagine organic keyword matching that allows invisible use within a conversation: “That’s a great point Rebecca–I’ll be sure to make a note to call Adam tomorrow about his new designs” and–voilà–the note is created without missing a beat. Or maybe it whispers contextual factoids, or pings you when you say filler words like “um, uh, y’know,” or lets you tap to save the last 30 seconds of conversation to send a great punchline to a friend.