Are Apple's wired EarPods still worth buying?
Apple continues to sell its wired EarPods despite the dominance of wireless AirPods, catering to users who prefer simplicity and reliability over advanced features. While AirPods offer noise cancellation and health sensors, EarPods provide the advantages of no battery maintenance, zero pairing issues, and superior wired audio quality. At a price of $19, EarPods remain a cost-effective alternative to the significantly more expensive AirPods lineup.
- ▪EarPods require no charging or Bluetooth pairing, eliminating common maintenance issues associated with wireless earbuds.
- ▪The wired connection of EarPods often provides better voice quality for calls compared to Bluetooth audio.
- ▪EarPods are available in 3.5mm, Lightning, and USB-C versions, though using the latter two on modern iPhones prevents simultaneous charging.
- ▪The $19 price point of EarPods makes them a much more affordable option than the $129 entry-level AirPods.
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| Original publisher | Engadget |
| Canonical URL | https://www.engadget.com/2251050/apple-wired-earpods-still-worth-buying/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-13T15:31:50.652Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-13T15:31:50.652Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
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| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | WbcrndheayHd · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
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| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
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| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Big Tech Apple Are Apple's wired EarPods still worth buying? Apple still sells its classic wired earbuds for a reason. By Filipe Espósito Sept. 13, 2026 11:00 am EST Stas Malyarevsky/Shutterstock Add Engadget on Google: Preferred Source Google Discover AirPods turn 10 this year, and they're everywhere now. They've also evolved over time; modern AirPods pack in noise cancellation, health sensors and even built-in live translation. If people ever had doubts about wireless earbuds, that's largely a concern of the past — though maybe not completely. As it turns out, there's a niche group of people who still buy wired earbuds, like EarPods.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Engadget.
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