I agree with you as someone who had Airpods and still use an Apple Watch. For Airpods I fell for the hype in a moment of need and weakness: I needed new earbud

I agree with you as someone who had Airpods and still use an Apple Watch. For Airpods I fell for the hype in a moment of need and weakness: I needed new earbuds for a travel because they couldn't swap my old ones that needed a warranty return. I regreted it pretty fast after the honeymoon period. Sure, they wouldn't drop too much and the 2 buds were perfectly in sync (but that's a low bar to clear for earbuds...) but most of the rest sucked big time. In fact, their poor battery life made me regret the wire pretty fast and their mild sound quality doesn't really help being more forgiving of its shortcomings. Nowadays they make no sense for their price, and the "Pro" version is alright, but to get half decent battery life they had to increased case size wich was basically the only useful difference and in the end, they perform like buds half their price for sure. I think the iCloud sync bullshit to be unreliable and a stupid "feature" at that because it guarantees that it will only be useful with other Apple products when I definitely do not want to limit my tech to only one brand especially when said brand only sells at luxury pricing... What you really want is Bluetooth multipoint, a feature that many earbuds at this price have anyway. I bought the Watch to track swimming because it seemed like the thing that would integrate easier with iOS and it seemed not too bad quality tracking. But in the end after years of using an Apple Watch for sports tracking (including thousands kms of running) I don't think the Watch is really good and most will get it to show off or because it's actually the only that can properly integrate with iOS thanks to limitations put in place by Apple themselves. Considering the price, the only really useful features (health/sports tracking) is extremely lacking, especially if you do not spend time looking for 3rd party solutions. The only reason it got such success is because of Apple brand recognition and other secondary factors like social status. In the end it's not a completely terrible product but if evaluated on its own at its price point its really not great... Suffise to say I'm rather disenchanted with today's Apple gear and I feel they really need to make their products MUCH better for the price or lower pricing across the board. In the long term something will have to give because people won't be captivated by the brand forever and désillusion has already started.