So Friday morning I set an alarm for 4:55 AM, which is not a thing I do for basically anything else in my life. Preorders for the AirPods Pro 2 opened at 5 AM Pacific, and I wanted to be at my desk (well, in bed, phone in hand, one eye open) when the button went live. $249. Same price as the last ones, which I guess counts as restraint these days.
I've had the original AirPods Pro since like 2019. The tips are gross now in a way I don't want to describe. I never once tried switching to a pair of Bose or Sony, even though at least two friends have told me their noise cancelling is better — I just never got around to it, and at some point brand loyalty stops being a choice and starts being laziness wearing a nicer outfit.
Anyway. The new ones have this touch control on the stem now where you swipe up and down to change volume instead of the old system, which was either "no volume control at all" or asking Siri and hoping. There's an H2 chip in there doing whatever chips do, adaptive transparency mode, and a case that finally has a speaker in it so Find My can make it chirp instead of you just staring blankly into couch cushions. There's also a lanyard loop notch on the case now, which is such a small thing but I already know I'm going to use it because I lose things that don't have a string attached to me, this is just a fact about who I am as a person.
One thing that annoys me and I'll say it plainly: the case still charges over Lightning. Not USB-C. Apple put USB-C on the iPad two years ago and everyone assumes the iPhone is next, and here's a brand new $249 product in 2022 still shipping with the old connector. I have a drawer at this point that's just cables, sorted by nothing, a monument to nine years of "oh this one's different actually."
I hit buy around 5:03, half asleep, and the confirmation said ship date of September 23rd. Checked again at lunch out of curiosity and it had already slipped later into the month. That always happens on preorder day and it always gets treated like breaking news, but it's just what demand curves look like when there's a fixed number of units and a global userbase with disposable income and fast thumbs.
What's been strange isn't the earbuds, honestly, it's the timing of everything around them. Apple did the whole "Far Out" event Wednesday (new iPhones, the Watch Ultra with the orange action button, all of it) and by Thursday the actual news, the real news, was the Queen's death, and it made scrolling through my phone feel like two different timelines stacked on top of each other. Order confirmation email for wireless earbuds sitting in my inbox two lines below a news alert about a monarch who'd been on the throne longer than my parents have been alive. I don't have some grand point to make about that, it just felt weird, the way certain weeks do where the trivial and the enormous end up sharing the same scroll.
I'm not really an Apple Watch person (I tried one for about four months back in 2020 and went back to a normal watch because I got tired of charging something on my wrist every night) so the Ultra doesn't do much for me even with the titanium case and the 36-hour battery claims. But the AirPods thing I'll actually use every single day, on walks, on the train, pretending to listen to podcasts while actually just enjoying quiet with something in my ears so strangers don't talk to me. That's the real use case nobody puts in the marketing copy.
Ship date's supposedly the 23rd for me, assuming it doesn't slide again. I'll believe it when the box shows up on the porch and my downstairs neighbor's dog barks at the delivery guy like she does every single time, no matter how many times he's been to this building. She's not paid enough for that job, honestly. Neither of us is.