Back in september, when Apple unveiled the iPhone 5, the new iPod Nano, the new iPod Touch and the EarPods, they made sort of a big deal of how they measured hundreds of ears to come up with the shape of the EarPods.
The idea, presumably, was that this allowed them to create a shape that would fit a large portion of human ears.
This scared me somewhat. I’m one of those seemingly rare people, who found the previous apple earbuds extremely comfortable. In fact, after having tried dozens of other earbuds and in ear headphones, I settled on the Apple earbuds. They never sounded that great, but since I listen to podcasts and audiobooks way more than I do music, they were wholly sufficient for my needs.
So I was worried. Would the funky shape of the EarPods sit comfortably in my ears?
It instantly made sense to me, that directing the sound more directly into the ear canal would be better – but what if my ear canals weren’t in the same place as “hundreds of ears”? As reviews came in – most people found them to be an improvement, while some absolutely hated them.
Well, today I tried the earpods, and once again, Apple seems to have made them for my ears specifically. I’ve already worn them for a couple of hours in complete comfort, and don’t have any plans to remove them for the next couple. There is absolutely no discomfort. The sound seems to be greatly improved as well, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s mostly because the sound is directed into my ear canals more efficiently.
The EarPods are very easy to get into the ears, because they’re slippery and yet they don’t fall out even if I shake my head quite vigorously. Now I’ve seen some videos to suggest, that some people have a very different experience with retaining the Pods in the ears, but for me, the fit is close to perfect.
Something that has not traditionally been awesome about Apple headphones is the durability. Without fail, they have failed on me yearly for about 4 years now. Each time I got a replacement with no problem, so that’s good, but they really shouldn’t break that often.
My feeling is, that the EarPods will have equally lackluster durability, but they do seem to have a little more in the way of stress relief on the wires. The same kind of stress relief that I have instantly ruined on all my previous Apple earbuds.
The sound quality of the EarPods is definitely very good for the price range, but there are others that are good as well, and obviously some are a lot better. If you can tolerate the in-ear style, they are most often the superior choice for sound quality.
However. If you’d like to spend $29, and the EarPods fit your ears well. Then I can highly recommend them. The in-line remote seems a lot nicer as well.
Month: November 2012
We use Sitecore where I work. It’s a pretty good CMS, and our site is big enough and complex enough, that something like Squarespace or WordPress would instantly break down. Not necessarily break down technically, but conceptually, the hierarchy we have would break down in a simple CMS.
But why does the individual page builder have to be so god damn awful? It’s modular, so if you know exactly what you want (within the rigid confines of the system), it’s relatively simple to plug some content in to the predefined modules. Widgets (spots in the Sitecore parlance) can easily be used on several pages, and be updated centrally. It’s all very good for such a huge site (probably thousands of individual pages, though I don’t know for sure). It’s just incredibly cumbersome, ugly, and uninspiring. And you have almost no concept of how the page you’re making actually looks.
To be honest. WordPress is not that much better. It’s a lot better looking. Almost ridiculously better. The content editor is quite good (and very easy to replace if you disagree) and the full screen mode makes it very easy to get rid of the distractions. Perhaps not surprisingly, this is enough to make WordPress great for actual writing. But constructing a new page is still cumbersome and hard for the visually creative.
Squarespace
The poster child for this is Squarespace. The page builder in Squarespace 6 is second to none, when it comes to creating a page, while actually getting af pretty good idea of the result. For a creatively minded person, it is a lot easier to feel inspired by Squarespace’s approach with different kinds of blocks, that can be moved around freely.
The templates seem less flexible, or at least less easy to heavily modify, than in Squarespace 5. However, once your overall site design is in place, the pages are incredibly easy to work with, and the page builder is very visual.
I find it a LOT easier to write copy, when I can get a feel for the context. It makes the final site feel more cohesive because the writing is written with a clear idea of where it needed to go.
This is all pretty much irrelevant for writing articles and blog posts, but for most other kinds of pages, I think it makes a real difference to many people.
I think it’s the same way some people feel about writing a letter in Microsoft Word vs. doing it in Text Edit on the Mac or Windows Notepad (or Writeroom, BBEdit, Writemonkey, or any other plain text editor). Some people need the context of the “page” to feel like they’re writing a letter.
In that context, I’ll take the plain text, but I do get the appeal of word processors for stuff that will eventually end up on paper. Writing in the context the text will be used can be a lot easier sometimes.