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I've gone full Apple Cyborg
Feb. 14th, 2026 03:57 pmI guess it started with that free iPad Shuffle that I got at a company meeting my first week at QLogic (2005). I downloaded iTunes so I could use the Shuffle and it was all downhill from there. Several Shuffle generations later I graduated to an iTouch in 2009, but still resisted the full smartphone experience until 2011. Got an Apple Watch almost by accident because Apple Pay combined with my credit card hobby to make it free. Along the way I gradually went from one of those people who had a cell phone but never noticed when it rang to the modern citizen of the future with the cell phone always in my pocket or hand. Yesterday I completed the trifecta with a set of Air Pods - the world's most expensive earbuds.
I ordered them for two reasons. (1) I'm in one of those January back-to-the-gym phases, and I think I would be more motivated to go if I had some way of listening to music that didn't involve being tangled up in tiny white cables and earbuds falling out of my ears. (2) I am contemplating hearing aids, and learned that the latest generation of AirPod has a built-in hearing aid mode. It doesn't seem practical as a permanent hearing aid solution, but it would let me try out hearing augmentation and see if it improved my life at all.
So far I'm impressed with them. To start with... THEY STAY IN MY EARS. I have NEVER found an earbud, wired or wireless, that did that before. And they sound really good.
But the big revelation was how seamlessly my 3 Apple devices work together. Unsurprisingly, the pods can be controlled in multiple ways: manually by fiddling with the little stems, from Phone, or from Watch. What I hadn't expected was that the pods can play music FROM THE WATCH without needing the phone at all! The pods can also do all sorts of unexpected things like measuring heart rate (conferring with Watch to make the reading more accurate) and even serving as a remote control for the iPhone camera. And of course if I want to I can turn now turn myself into one of those annoying people that walk down the street apparently talking to themselves. If I had a more advanced iPhone with Apple Intelligence I could even configure the pods as babelfish to do simultaneous translation in my ear!
The Hearing Aid mode exceeded my (low) expectations, although it remains to be seen whether I will use it much. First it ran a 5-minute hearing test that produced a couple of numbers and a graph that are remarkably similar to the clinical hearing test I had 18 months ago (mild to moderate hearing loss, both ears similar in the lower ranges but left ear takes a deep dive in the upper frequencies). The hearing aid function works surprisingly well at amplifying someone talking to me from another room, but was not particularly helpful in a party setting.
I ordered them for two reasons. (1) I'm in one of those January back-to-the-gym phases, and I think I would be more motivated to go if I had some way of listening to music that didn't involve being tangled up in tiny white cables and earbuds falling out of my ears. (2) I am contemplating hearing aids, and learned that the latest generation of AirPod has a built-in hearing aid mode. It doesn't seem practical as a permanent hearing aid solution, but it would let me try out hearing augmentation and see if it improved my life at all.
So far I'm impressed with them. To start with... THEY STAY IN MY EARS. I have NEVER found an earbud, wired or wireless, that did that before. And they sound really good.
But the big revelation was how seamlessly my 3 Apple devices work together. Unsurprisingly, the pods can be controlled in multiple ways: manually by fiddling with the little stems, from Phone, or from Watch. What I hadn't expected was that the pods can play music FROM THE WATCH without needing the phone at all! The pods can also do all sorts of unexpected things like measuring heart rate (conferring with Watch to make the reading more accurate) and even serving as a remote control for the iPhone camera. And of course if I want to I can turn now turn myself into one of those annoying people that walk down the street apparently talking to themselves. If I had a more advanced iPhone with Apple Intelligence I could even configure the pods as babelfish to do simultaneous translation in my ear!
The Hearing Aid mode exceeded my (low) expectations, although it remains to be seen whether I will use it much. First it ran a 5-minute hearing test that produced a couple of numbers and a graph that are remarkably similar to the clinical hearing test I had 18 months ago (mild to moderate hearing loss, both ears similar in the lower ranges but left ear takes a deep dive in the upper frequencies). The hearing aid function works surprisingly well at amplifying someone talking to me from another room, but was not particularly helpful in a party setting.
