Club Benefits
It’s official, EarPods are cool again. Everyone from Harry Styles to Zendaya is ditching the Bluetooth for the retro, wired version. Never one to miss a trend, I swapped my $250 AirPods Pro 3 for the $19 EarPods for a week, and I was pretty surprised at the results.
As a caveat here, I’m no audio expert — as Tom’s Guide’s Senior Fitness Editor, I spend my days deliberating the pros and cons of the Garmin Fenix 8 over the Apple Watch Ultra 3 for my next marathon. I won’t be talking too much about bass levels and spatial audio, because, quite frankly, I don’t know what these things mean.
Ask me about the drop of my go-to running shoe, however, and I’ll bore you to tears.
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Research from the University of Chemnitz identified that people are often stuck in a constant charging loop, checking the percentage of their devices and deciding whether they need to charge or risk their devices dying.
The study focused on electric vehicles, not headphones, but found that this creates a persistent mental background task that can interrupt other deep-thinking activities.
In cognitive psychology, remembering to charge devices is a prospective memory task — in other words, remembering to perform a planned action in the future. This means we’re probably all suffering from micro-task overload, and that charging our devices is probably, without us even realizing, making us a little bit stressed.
I wear an Apple Watch most of the time, use a tablet to watch TV or read on my commute, own a phone, and am writing this article from my laptop. That’s a lot of devices to remember to charge, before I’ve even considered my son’s white noise machine, my dog’s tracker collar, and the countless other smartwatches and smart rings I’m reviewing for work.
I definitely suffer from charging fatigue, and not having to worry about my EarPods dying on me when I leave the house was refreshing.
I can’t drop them
In the Apple store, while buying my EarPods, I dropped my AirPods twice while trying to pay. I’m frustratingly clumsy, and it’s a miracle I haven’t dropped an AirPod down the drain at this point — although I have dropped one perfectly into my dog’s water bowl. The huge plus of having wired headphones is that, like those glasses chains popular with grandparents everywhere, they are undroppable.
Did I miss noise-cancelling? Kinda
Of course, the $250 AirPods Pro 3 have a heck of a lot more technology in those tiny buds. They can read my heart rate, translate conversations, and they do a pretty perfect job of blocking out unwanted noise on my commute, in the gym, or in the office (sorry, colleagues).
The EarPods, of course, have no noise-cancelling technology, but for $19, what do you expect? While I did miss the noise-cancelling on the subway on my way to work, I didn’t miss it as much as I expected, and the call quality was still excellent.
I liked the physical buttons
There’s something particularly nostalgic about having physical buttons to turn my music up and down. While the EarPods were pretty annoying on the run (more on that later), the physical panel was super easy to use when I was on the move to control the volume of my music.
I didn’t have any connecting issues
Another first-world problem I experience most days is my AirPods connecting to the wrong device, meaning I’m always doing a wild panic to stop music playing in public. Of course, with the USB-C port, this is a thing of the past.
The wires are still annoying in the gym or on a run
This experiment really took me back to my early days of training for my first marathon, where my headphone wires would permanently become lodged into my ponytail by the end of every run. Nothing has changed in the past decade on this front, and when running and in the gym, the wires really did get in the way.
However, for $19, I can safely say that Harry Styles and Bella Hadid are onto something here. These little affordable headphones are back, and for good reason. I’ll definitely be using them as often as my AirPods for the foreseeable future, but if you’re training for a marathon, head to our best workout headphones roundup instead.
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