slprescott

boltsfan17 said:

... I highly doubt the executive orders are affecting that many people at Apple or any other tech firms. 

The issue is not how many people this affects.  The issue is whether such a ban is ethical to anyone.  It is not.

This is definitely a problem.

While I love my AirPods overall (in terms of convenience), they + iPhone 6s + Apple Watch + WiFi (sometimes) show 3 problems for me:

1. AirPods disconnect from phone calls.
2. AirPods disconnect from playing the Music or Podcasts app (and thus pause the playback)
3. AirPods have frequently gaps/skips/blips in music playback

One workaround to the phone-disconnect problems seems to be using only ONE AirPod during a phone call.  This decreases the  disconnects.

I'm not badmouthing AirPods; I love the vision and the convenience.  But we also need to be honest and transparent about the shortcomings of v1 so that Apple engineers can continue improving them.

I like the 60 second spot. The shorter ones were not enough for my tastes.

After 1 week with the AirPods and my iPhone 6s:
Pros: convenience, fit, stay in ears, freedom from wires, sound quality, case with battery, tiny size
Cons: disconnects from phone calls when using 2 AirPods; frequent brief sound-dropouts during music playback

Others on the Apple Support forum have reported similar cons. Hopefully Apple can fix these with a software or firmware distribution (no hardware replacement). We all love the AirPods design and just want them to work as advertised.

egreene59 said:

Apple is ... overly focused on improving hardware instead of focusing on software and the user experience they were once known for.

watchOS 3.0 was a significant upgrade of the Watch software and user experience.  Most reviews praised it as a major improvement.

I'll be interesting to see how & when Apple publicly acknowledges this project.  Given the need for extensive road-testing of the product in a wide variety of circumstances, I imagine that Apple won't be able to keep it under wraps until the last moment (within months of release) as they do with personal devices.