Apple Give Signal For New Airpods
Anyone waiting eagerly for Apple’s new earphone solution, the Airpods, might be lucky enough to get their hands on them in time for Christmas.
When the iPhone 7 was released, the absence of a headphone jack caused a bit of a furore.
Apple’s response was that hard-wired headphones were old hat and wireless ones were the future.
The wireless Airpods were promised for October, but did not materialise.
Now, Apple has announced that Airpods will it the shops next week and are already available online for shipping to customers.
The challenges for anyone keen to have them for Christmas are that online deliveries will need to elbow their way through the seasonal rush and that stocks, both online and in the stores, will be finite, possible even severely limited.
There are some rumours that only Apple’s own stores and the largest of stockists might get any stock at all before January.
It will be case of getting the tactics right.
A more significant rumour, though, is that the two earphones cannot connect independently to the iPhone.
Instead, one is the ‘master’ and takes a Bluetooth signal from the phone, the other the ‘slave’ and takes its signal from the ‘master’ using Near Field Magnetic Induction.
The ‘slave’ has to take its signal from the other one with no delay, otherwise what the ears hear is ‘out of synch.’
The word on the Net is that two different technologies are used because the human head absorbs and delays Bluetooth signals, which can’t actually get from one ear to the other reliably, whereas NFMI signals can navigate their way straight through the head.
Still want them for Christmas?
