Why 2021 was the year of wireless earbuds

The elimination of headphone jacks in new iPhones all the way back in 2016 left music and podcast lovers with a conundrum: using a dongle for wired earbuds sucks, and wireless earbuds introduce a whole host of problems of their own. Between high prices and limited feature sets on wireless ‘buds, abandoning wires has been a gamble for far too long.

But in 2021, that changed. Here’s how 2021 was the year it became reasonable to embrace the Bluetooth earbuds revolution.

What was wrong with wireless earbuds before?

In short: a small number of expensive options dominated the market, and anyone not willing or able to fork over the cost had to deal with annoying compromises.

Apple’s AirPods Pro are still the best AirPods around, and Bose’s QC Earbuds offer stunning audio quality and noise cancelation. But both of those products cost at least $250 and the AirPods Pro aren’t especially useful for Android phone owners. They’ll connect and play music, but you won’t get Siri and you need third-party apps just to check battery life. Apple’s wireless earbud market dominance (at one point measuring in at an astounding 41 percent) left people with different phones out in the cold. 

Samsung’s Galaxy Buds Live were a solid alternative for Android folks in 2020, but their relatively modest $170 price tag couldn’t hide their mediocre noise reduction (I consider lack of active noise reduction a deal-breaker) and comfort problems. If you wanted quality wireless earbuds with effective ANC, those were tough to come by for $200 or less. And to top it all off, Bluetooth has never been a fully reliable connection source. Signal interruptions and drops are commonplace, especially walking around big cities near lots of traffic. 

The good news, if you haven’t caught on yet, is that we can use the past tense to describe most of those problems now.

How did they get better in 2021?

If I could sum up the totality of all the improvements made to wireless earbuds this past year in a sentence, it would be this: You don’t have to settle for AirPods anymore.

2021 saw a flood of new wireless earbuds that can compete with the best AirPods in both functionality and price. Let’s revisit the fact that you need to pay $250 for AirPods with noise cancelation. Here are just a few models that launched in 2021 that offer ANC for substantially less than $250:

Not only do all three of those earbuds give you the choice to cancel out noise, they all do it well. Nothing’s Ear (1) is interesting in particular because it’s the debut product from a new company that sort of runs laps around more expensive products like AirPods thanks to great sound quality and snazzy looks. It’s not surprising when an established brand like Amazon or OnePlus hits it out of the park, but Nothing almost nailed it on its first try.

All three of those earbuds also work great regardless of whether you use Android or iOS, thanks to third-party mobile apps that handle firmware updates, settings, and other things of that nature. And if you really want something that takes advantage of iOS or Android, Samsung’s Galaxy Buds 2 and Apple’s Beats Fit Pro are excellent earbuds that work seamlessly with their parent companies’ respective hardware. You won’t need to install an app to take care of customization or check the battery with those earbuds.

Speaking of Beats Fit Pro, those are really the wireless earbuds to get at the moment. Their combination of comfort, sound quality, long battery life, and cross-platform functionality (there’s a Beats Android app) makes them basically unbeatable right now. You won’t find anything better on the market in 2021, and that includes the best AirPods.

Are there still big problems with wireless earbuds?

Of course, there are still a handful of reasons not to move to Bluetooth for all your music and podcast listening needs. 2021 may have been the best year yet for wireless earbuds, but there are still some very real concerns about relying on them exclusively.

The first and most important issue with Bluetooth is that it’s, well, not great for security. It’s been demonstrated over the years that Bluetooth signals are vulnerable to vicious attacks by hackers if they feel like putting in the effort. If they want, they can listen in or even alter the content being broadcast through a Bluetooth signal. While the likelihood of this happening in daily life might be low (it’s never happened to me, to the best of my knowledge), the risk is very real. Bluetooth isn’t as secure as running a wire directly from headphones to a phone.

Even if you accept those risks, Bluetooth isn’t always reliable. Signal interference is the biggest usability problem that hasn’t been fixed yet. Whether it’s due to nearby Bluetooth devices or just technology being wonky, anyone who’s used Bluetooth headphones has probably experienced random signal drops. Sometimes your phone and your earbuds may just not feel like talking to each other for completely unknown reasons. That’s the fun of using technology.

And of course, anything that runs on a battery is also susceptible to that battery slowly becoming less viable over time. You’ve probably experienced this with a phone battery before. That tragic point where a device no longer holds a charge as long as you need it to is also the point when you need to spend more money to replace it. This, of course, is not really a concern with wired earbuds. They can break in other ways (wires get frayed and so on) but they can last a good long time with proper care.

Even with all of those potential deal-breakers, you should really consider cutting the earbud cord. Thanks to a cascade of great earbuds that deliver top notch audio, cancel out ambient noise, work with any phone, and don’t cost too much money, there’s never been a better time to give the wireless lifestyle a shot. Just make sure you remember to keep them charged.