Comment by holistio
17 hours ago
Maybe. But for now it's fascinating how $200/month has kind of become a normal tier.
It's similar to how AirPods normalised all of us having $300+ headphones. All of us would have scoffed at the idea a decade ago.
17 hours ago
Maybe. But for now it's fascinating how $200/month has kind of become a normal tier.
It's similar to how AirPods normalised all of us having $300+ headphones. All of us would have scoffed at the idea a decade ago.
Many people here spent a lot more than $300 on headphones long before AirPods appeared.
Those were hobbyists, audiophiles, professionals, artists (recording, performing, etc.).
They are talking about a much larger group of people.
I think OP meant noise-cancelling headphones, which were fairly ubiquitous in tech circles in open offices; before Apple launched AirPods.
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I had a really nice Sennheiser before that, too. But now you hop on the subway and everybody sports one.
But, it is not all about cost: models like DeepSeek v4 flash (I use the US company Fireworks.ai and also buy tokens directly from DeepSeek) is very fast, very low latency while working.
Would you want to use a text editor that updates the screen very slowly? Kind of the same thing for using agentic systems as coding assistants: don’t want a ‘sluggish’ experience.
I have, mostly, long running autonomous tasks, so it doesn't matter how slow inference is. If I optimize for latency it means I'm turning into the limiting factor.
The Sony WH-1000XM series and the Bose QC35 were the standard quality headphones years before AirPods were a thing, and both retailed at $300+.
Of course, premium headphones existed before. I have a WH-1000XM4 sitting right next to me.
But your aunt Josie didn't have one. Now Apple is selling 80 million units / year and the ~$300 price tag has become normal. Before that, most people had headphones that were 10 times cheaper.
$300 isn’t what AirPods cost though. You can get a pair of AirPods 4 for $129 on Apple.com, and I presume that is still the most popular model. If you’re paying ~$300, you are buying premium headphones.
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