What a silly feature list the AirPods have, too. Transparency? I use earbuds to avoid having to hear the outside world. Ear Detection? My phone does the same thing with my default music app when it detects the jack plugged back in. Multiple devices (up to two)? lol. Head Gestures? How many people even answer the phone at all now after years of relentless spam? Conversational Awareness? I got a $3 clip to attach the wire to my shirt collar, and if I talk to someone or someone talks to me I yank one or both buds out and let them dangle freely with no worry of getting lost or stolen: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BL44TW4
I would be totally down to adopt a new paradigm if it was actually better in any way I cared about, but it's just not and never was. People seem to like 'em a lot, though, so I'm still glad to see these supported on non-Apple gear :)
It takes effort even for the fanboys, but they are not going to tell you the hoops they jump through even in the Apple Soma Bubble (delete delete "Ecosystem"). You are expected to have the latest semi-broken iOS to even call your latest gen airpods airpods instead of generic bt audio devices lol. Let alone trying to make anything Apple work in Android.
I see the reason to liberate this corporate BT bullshit as a matter of principle, but I don't see the point of Apple fanboys today. In the 90s Apple was light years ahead of wintel, but today they are worse and more expensive than high end brands (etymotic for example) who don't engage in the silly marketing blending of brand and personal self worth the fanboys seem to ingest as if their life depends on it. They strike me as impoverished third worlders who think their internet cred will go up by buying Apple gear. Apple used to really mean "It Just Works", but not anymore by any stretch. On the other hand, the peace of mind of solving a problem for good and forgetting about it, like -radical idea- headphone jacks (removed because "courage"), using a stable environment on a computer you own with an environment you can recreate instead of the Apple merry-go-round, using your own infrastructure and ideas instead of hoping the Apple "Magic" will work when you really need to restore a backup. And when the Apple Machine(TM) eats your superior Apple creations, you simply were holding it wrong, man! Makes me wonder what the rest of the engineering world is thinking... for example, when are HiFi manufacturers going to ditch slimy, unseemly, dusty speaker cables for superior bluetooth sound quality? Why o why are Canon/Sony/Leica/etc still going with environmentally unfriendly, inefficient, heavy and dumb 35 mm image sensors? Don't they know about the miraculous-camera-assembly in iPhones? All 50 MP crammed not in 35 mm but in half the size, now that's sweet!
The idiocies keep coming, like "nano-textured" glass in Apple monitors that simply rehash the professional displays that for years have had accurate color reproduction, superior brightness, and -god forbid- matte screens. I think I must have a long-lost engineering prototype of a monitor with a superior, believed lost forever "nano-textured" glass. It's called matte screen, and it came in the superior display ratio called 16:10 once used by the dinosaurs instead of the retarded craze of everything you can dream of as long as it's 16:9 lol.
Apple fanboys: your identity brand has long since eroded, but by all means keep those credit cards warm, you need to finance the next Tim Cook yatch :)