Health monitoring is surprisingly good these days on wearables. My Apple Watch can confirm I’m under the weather before I can. And it’s also very good at noticing I’ve had too much to drink the evening prior.
But most of that requires you to wear the device while asleep.
I take all health monitoring on any wearable as a “guide” or an “indicator”. If it keeps beeping I’ll look into it. I think it’s useful info.
I wonder if the distinction is between noise cancelling vs noise isolating, which are two separate things.
Noise cancelling is essentially a software application that tries to cancel out a wave by using the opposite of what it’s “hearing”. It’s never going to be perfect and there will always be some of the sound that isn’t cancelled out. You can experience this easily on an airplane by using Bose headphones and AirPods Pros. The engine sound is still there, but it’s very muted and in the background.
Noise isolating earbuds however will fill your ear canal with the tip, essentially plugging it from sound.
When I would wear my Shure noise-isolating earbuds on a plane instead of Bose noise cancelling headphones I could hear very, very little. The airline steward could be talking to me but I’d hear nothing at all.
Looking up the earbuds that were in the link, they include noise isolating silicon and foam tips to go along with the noise cancelling. Maybe that’s where the majority of the protection comes from?
The noise isolating headphones were very uncomfortable and were kind of unnerving to wear for extended periods of time. It really did block sound, almost too well.
Yeah, I think what you’re saying makes much more sense to me now than what I thought you were saying before. This makes logical sense.
Do you have the oxygen sensor that currently isn’t available in the US?
I don’t mean to pry into personal details, but you’re OK sharing, what type of things do you track?
If I’m going to try and protect my hearing I might as well make an effort to ensure the rest of my body sticks around too.
Yep! I am in Australia. (20 characters)
Interested in the hearing aid function as I have an appointment on Friday to look at getting hearing aids. Need to confirm Costco’s return policy on them if my AirPods 2 will suffice.
I switched to memory foam tips on my AirPods which stay in better.
I’m in my mid thirties, so I’m not using the features aimed at aging folks. Fall detection, for example, isn’t something I worry about. But I do try to work out for several hours every week. I track all my workouts. I also “track my sleep,” which is to say I wear the Watch while I have my sleep focus turned on.
Neither thing is intensive, but I find it enough to track all sorts of things about my health. It falls a little flat on occasion. For instance, I row on my rowing machine for 4-5 hours throughout the week. It doesn’t count that as cardio, so it’s losing track of my VO2, and it doesn’t define something like VO2 well (nor could it, really, given its limitations).
It tracks my heart rate, of course, and that information is actually very useful for me. Thanks to the Apple Watch, I know I can handle two alcoholic beverages and be in good shape. If I have more than two, I will sleep poorly. I don’t get hung over or anything — that takes many more — but I will feel it, and it’s because it affects my sleep. I genuinely hadn’t put two and two together before I started sleep tracking.
The Watch’s persistent nagging surrounding standing helps me take breaks during the workday. It tracks my Time in Daylight, which is also a surprisingly helpful metric in my Canadian climate, particularly during winter when daylight can be harder to come by. Heart rate variability, which is tracked at night, is very useful in determining how rested my body is. So I use that and the Gentler Streak app to tell me how hard to push. Sometimes that can motivate me to get going even if I don’t feel like it.
It also tracks a bunch of stuff in the background that might be useful if you’re older or struggling with certain illnesses: how steadily you walk, for example.
So it’s all normal stuff within the parameters of the Apple Watch. But I’m much healthier with the Apple Watch than I am without. Tracking my weight and how active I was over time made me realize I need to invest in some gym equipment at the house (like the rowing machine) because I could see the weight going up and the exercise time going down over time after we moved out of the city.
I’m also oddly passionate about this; the Apple Watch is one of the products I would insta-order again if something happened to mine. Wouldn’t even think about the cost. I can’t say that about my iPad.
Edit: Just wanted to add I’m also obviously tracking calories burned. In my early 20s, I wanted to lose weight, and calorie counted every day and ran 6 days a week and hit the gym until I lost 50 pounds in four months. I was intense. But it got me good at eyeballing calories, so I just assume the Apple Watch’s caloric counting is in the ballpark of accurate and try to eat accordingly. I find the rings very motivating, personally. I used to go to the gym a few times a week when we had one in our condo, but now I use my home gym five days a week and consider myself a real athlete, and I think that’s because the Watch has changed how I see myself.
I only want a watch for health and activity tracking. Your experience and use gives me a lot of good info to think about. I really appreciate all the detail you shared.
Unless Apple introduced much-improved active noise cancellation (which they didn’t announce today), I wouldn’t use these Air Pods or Air Pods Pro to protect your ears from loud noise unless they have new tips that have a very tight seal in your ears and at least as much attenuation as good, foam earplugs. And for being next to a jackhammer, shooting guns, etc., really good over-the-ear muffs.
I have bad tinnitus caused by exposure to loud noise. I haven’t heard silence in 30 years. I can’t go to indoor concerts, even with ear plugs, or otherwise expose myself to loud noise because I can’t risk my ringing becoming any louder. All ANC headphones and ear buds I’ve tried have caused the ringing in my ears to increase in volume after wearing them, even with only the ANC on and nothing playing. This is a common experience among tinnitus suffers. In fact, Apple Air Pods Pro are themselves notorious for causing tinnitus in people who didn’t have it to begin with.
The leading theory on Reddit r/tinnitus is that the ANC in all current headphones and ear buds are not fast enough to make an opposite sound wave for high frequency sounds. They cancel out low frequency sounds, but–the theory is–they actually double the volume of high frequency sounds, even if you’re not aware of it. It could be something else entirely, though.
Most people have no problem with Air Pods and Air Pods Pro. But if you try them out and find that your ears ring after using them, stop using them immediately. And I would use actual, physical barrier hearing protection when you’re exposed to loud noise until there is a lot of info about whether any new Air Pods model protects your hearing from loud noise. Tinnitus sucks.
Six months ago I spent the equivalent of 6 iPhones on hearing aids and, although I was annoyed when I saw today’s announcement, I’m actually glad I got them first.
My hearing aids are tiny, lightweight, invisible … so I happily wear them all day.
On the other hand, I don’t want to wear the AirPods Pro all the time.
Soon I’ll have two different types of hearing aid - the traditional ones that I wear most of the time, and the AirPods Pro version that I’ll wear when I go for walks or bike rides.
If I only had the AirPods Pro version, I suspect I’d have concluded I didn’t need the hearing aids.
Purely by spec, the S10 is 46 and the Ultra is 49.
I’ve done a lot of music work, and this all checks out to me. Interesting about ANC and AirPods Pro. I didn’t know. I don’t typically have volume over 50% on anything, ever, but I’ll admit I crank up my guitars now and again. Thanks for contributing here!
@webwalrus Watch size is the size of the case in mm, not the size of the screen. It’s also not diagonal. Screen and case size are not necessarily related anymore.
Diagonally, but the aspect ratios are different, so the S10 screen has a larger surface area, which is what counts.
The iPhone X had a nominally larger diagonal measurement than the 8 Plus introduced at the same time, but it still had a smaller screen because it was a bit taller but narrower.
@Clarke_Ching Thanks for your comments. That was exactly the experience I wanted to hear about. Your use case sounds very similar to how I would use the two devices.
USB-C isn’t enough to make me want to upgrade, H2 would’ve been the sole reason to update, so without it - I’m out. Beats Studio pro don’t feature either the H1 or H2, so I’m not sure I agree about them being a viable alternative.
I’ll ask a question- Will the AP2, once they get FDA clearance to be (in essence, I guess) OTC hearing aids, be eligible for FSA/HSA?
I don’t remember, do they cover OTC products? If they only cover prescriptions, I’d assume no.
… or does the fact that the hearing aid functionality is software, rather than hardware, make them “something other” than…