Month: December 2008

Apple’s new high-quality earbuds now available… as a suppository?

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Apples high-quality earbuds

Those new Apple earbuds that Steve Jobs announced back in September are finally available for order on the Apple Store. I am actually interested in getting these. I’ve never been happy with the quality or the fit of Apple’s standard earbuds. These have 2 sound drivers for higher fidelity and come with 3 sizes of silicon tips, for best fit. They also have an inline remote and microphone.

The new earbuds retail for $79 and are currently listed as shipping in 7-10 business days. As of this morning the product page still says, “Coming Soon”, but if you click the Coming Soon button in the lower right of the page you are taken to the store.

Right now the new earbuds are only listed as being compatible with iPods, and not iPhones. This seems like a big oversight, and I’m hoping that changes with the next iPhone update. It’s been suggested that most of the remote functions will probably work with iPhones right now, but Apple typically doesn’t say things like, “mostly compatible”. I’ll probably wait until the first reviews show up online before I grab a pair.

On a side-note, Anne Marie saw me looking at the image above and said, “I don’t like that packaging… it looks like a diagram of a uterus and a suppository.” :)

via AppleInsider

UPDATE (12/08/2008): Here’s more info about compatibility with various iPod/iPhone models.

UPDATE (12/15/2008): AppleInsider has published a glowing review.

We’re back in San Francisco

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flight from Milwaukee to Atlanta to San Francisco

We made it back from our Milwaukee trip. We had a great time, but the travel home was a bit grueling. Several hours were added to our travel-time because we had to fly to Delta’s hub in Atlanta before heading home. It was about 12 hours from the time we arrived at the airport in Milwaukee to the time we landed in San Francisco. We touched down at SFO at about 2:00am Sunday Morning. We missed the last BART train so we had to take a cab home. We were exhausted. We pretty much slept all day on Sunday to recover.

We had delayed flights. We almost missed our connection in Atlanta. We flew with crying babies, broken video systems, and a guy who barfed all the way to Atlanta. And, just like our trip to Milwaukee, our luggage didn’t follow us all the way home. It stayed in Atlanta, and apparently got left out in the rain as it was soaking wet when it was delivered Sunday night.

I’m not a big fan of flying anyway, but this trip was probably the worst experience I’ve ever had. I did learn 3 important lessons:

  1. Always take your essentials with you on the plane. You may not be seeing your luggage when you arrive.
  2. Anything you put in your suitcase that can be ruined by water should be wrapped in plastic.
  3. Be very suspicious of packages sold by Travelocity. Based on our own experience, and info we got from the flight attendants, Travelocity tends to sell packages that have unrealistically tight transfer times. It’s likely that you, your luggage, or both, won’t have enough time to get to the next plane when you land.