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There’s a pair of these in a drawer in almost every house, mine included, and there’s a reason nobody ever bins them. The Apple EarPods with USB-C are the standard answer to losing your headphones an hour before a flight. They don’t seal your ear canal, they sit in the bowl of your ear the way iPod buds always did, and that shape either suits you perfectly or doesn’t suit you at all. You get an inline remote with volume and a microphone, a USB-C plug that covers current iPhones, iPads, and most Android phones, and about twenty dollars off your card. No charging. No pairing.
Sound is honest and unspectacular, which at this price is entirely fair. Mids are clear, dialogue and podcasts come across well, and there’s enough treble that acoustic music doesn’t sound flat. Bass is the casualty of that open fit: it turns up politely and then leaves early, and the overall character is somewhat dry and grainy. There’s no fixing this with tips, because there are no tips. If bass matters to you at all, spend your twenty dollars somewhere else, because this is the one thing EarPods will never do for you.
The remote and microphone are why people keep buying them. Call quality is genuinely good for the money, the buttons are real buttons you can find without looking down, and everything works the second you plug in with no setup whatsoever. Comfort is where opinion splits hard. If your ears take the shape they’re feather light and you’ll forget them; if they don’t, they’ll fall out every time you look at your shoes and there is nothing to be done about it. The open design also blocks nothing at all. You’ll hear the entire train, which is handy for announcements and useless for music.
Wired means no battery, no pairing, and no software, and USB-C covers a current iPhone, an iPad, a Mac, and most Android phones. There’s a Lightning version as well, so check your port before ordering because they are not interchangeable. There’s no water resistance rating here, so a serious gym session is at your own risk. And because this is digital audio over USB-C rather than a simple analogue jack, the occasional older or unusual device just refuses to talk to them.
These make sense as a spare pair, a travel backup, or the ones that live at your desk for calls. They’re cheap, they’re comfortable if you happen to be the right shape, and the microphone genuinely punches above the money. Don’t make them your only headphones if you care about music, because a small step up in budget buys a surprisingly large step up in sound. Almost any sealed budget earbud will beat them on bass for similar money. But as the pair you’ll never once worry about losing, they’ve been quietly winning for fifteen years.
Pros
• Microphone and remote are genuinely good for the price
• Plug in and they work, on almost anything with USB-C
• Light and comfortable if your ears suit the shape
• Cheap enough to keep spares everywhere
Cons
• Almost no bass, and no tips to fix it with
• Fall straight out if your ears don’t suit them
• Block no outside noise whatsoever
• No water resistance rating
Our score: 6.8/10
