Apple's AirPods Pro hearing health features

You can say a lot of things about Apple, but which other consumer-facing tech company adds features meant to accompany people throughout every phase of their lives? People are growing with their smartphones, and the need for some functionalities only starts to become obvious later in life.

It’s just marketing. A plus point in differentiation matrix from gazillion competitors. And a justification for a higher price tag. The products are nice though.

I understand your point and in someway do agree that it is marketing and it is a way of differentiating themselves.

But inly to justify a higher price tag? Yes it is true they are premium products, but I don't think it's true that they're that much more expensive than similar items occupying the same marketing niche from other manufacturers.

And they are far more than an order of magnitude cheaper than even a low end set of hearing aids.

But all of that is despite the point.

Samsung, Sony, Bose,… The list goes on. I have bought high-end headphones from them all, some with some without noise cancellation. In ear, over the ear, wired and Bluetooth... the list goes on.

NOBODY has a headphone that accommodates my hearing loss except Apple.

And they started doing it years ago as a feature buried in the accessibility settings.

But they kept improving it to the point where it is now FDA approved.

"A plus point in a differentiation matrix…?"

This is the kind of action that buys customer loyalty for life. I hope you never get to experience the depth of hearing loss that many of us have and how utterly transformative this kind of technology not just can be, but IS.

If all marketing had actual consumer benefit we'd be much better off.

I can understand the cynicism, but I think Apple's investment into accessibility and health (I'm talking heart attack detection, not gamified activity tracking fwiw) as a differentiator is one of these rare win-win situations.

How is are win-wins rare? They're literally what capitalism is based on.

Yeah fair shout. I guess my perception of their frequency’s been beaten down by HN cynicism over the years

Samsung has had amplified passthrough for years.

That's a very Friedman-esque take. Capitalism is nothing more than private ownership of means and capital (usually in a market largely free of government control). The recent inflation outbreak is a clear example where capitalism is not a win-win. Banks, hedge-funds, private equity are other good examples.

> which other consumer-facing tech company

SONY.

Apple really took Sony's playbook and ran with it, with the whole ecosystem play and strategy tax. Jobs famously took inspiration from there, Sony lost to Apple on the music market though, and got toasted again on mobile phones, despite having been researching the market for so long.

Bose made a product ~10 years back called Hearphones which were far more capable than what Apple is doing here.

IIRC Jabra earbuds have had "hearing aid" features for years. They, unfortunately, don't help with single side deafness the way the Hearphones do.

Apple isn't doing anything groundbreaking here but they are doing it at a very competitive price. The airpod features also do not help with single side deafness. :(

They even basically copied the iPhone design off Sony https://es.pinterest.com/pin/78742693455593417/

And then freaked out when Android copied that off them which seemed a tad hypocritical.

They've been at it for a while. One quote:

>At a shareholder meeting in 2014, a conservative finance group wanted Cook to make a commitment to doing only those things that were profitable. Cook replied, "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI."

Uh, no.

The original article instead of the Pinterest:

https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3189309/apple-sony-iphone...

Note the date. Here is a later article:

https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/30/3201162/apple-refutes-cla...

This is how court cases work. One side shows a gotcha thing, reporters repeat it, everyone forwards it. Then the other side refutes it, but that doesn't go viral.

The judge decided this wasn't a thing.

Have they confirmed these won't support single sided deafness?

I've been waiting to buy them until I confirm support, but their support reps didn't even know.

Ah ok - I got that wrong then.

I don't mean that capitalism only produces wins, I mean that companies are incentivised to produce things that consumers will want (the "win-win" the GP mentioned).

The people I've talked to that have been using them say there's no setting for it and they don't hear anything like audio picked up on one side routed to the other earbud.

That comment mentions "consumer benefit", which is something else that desire, sometimes entirely. It's the origin of the perversion of the free market.

In the classical view, consumer desire is called "demand", and demand creates the incentive. But that's also not the definition of capitalism, and it's also valid for non-capitalist systems.