if openai’s serious about ai earbuds as a flagship product, they’re walking straight into the same wall every non airpods earbud has hit for a decade which is that pairing & unpairing is still a nightmare, os level integration is nonexistent, & you’re permanently at the mercy of apple/google. that alone makes them borderline doa. the only workaround is some pocket “cell bridge” device, which immediately means another thing to carry, another battery, possibly another cellular plan… aka congrats, you built a worse phone. meanwhile airpods have had ~10 years of ruthless iteration. they pair instantly, hand off flawlessly, sound great, have excellent mics, & basically disappear from the user’s mental model. any ai earbuds would also need to be elite at music & calls, not just smart, which is an insanely high bar. competing head on with airpods feels masochistic. they’re a rare flagship product that almost nobody dislikes, which makes dislodging them orders of magnitude harder than people think. idk how that ends well. i could be proven wrong obviously. if i were working on ai hardware, i’d approach it very differently.