I lost my AirPods and I simply refuse to pay to buy new ones. The latest 3rd generation AirPods, which are fantastic! I checked them out! – starts at $169. The previous second-generation version costs $120 (yes, there are sometimes deals online). These prices are not ridiculous; After all, they are luxury products and the price is in line with other high-quality wireless headphones.
However, I just don’t want to pay $169 for headphones. I would prefer to pay much less. Say…$20, maybe $25? I don’t think I need to explain myself here. I would like to have more money in my pocket. This seems quite reasonable.
And yes, I am perfectly willing to settle for quality. Apple AirPods have spatial audio with Dolby Atmos, great pairing functionality, and long battery life. I don’t expect a $20 game to do all of that, but I want something that’s perfectly decent.
Fortunately, Amazon has a dizzying array of affordable wireless earbuds that look like AirPods available. They have strange brands you’ve never heard of and the prices seem arbitrary (and there’s often a coupon on Amazon, which makes their prices even more confusing). I set out to try them out to find out which one suits my needs: cheap, but still usable.
I tested five different white earbuds from anonymous brands, or as I like to call them, ShitPods.
My criteria for selecting which of the many options were:
• It had to look like an AirPod. I skipped the differently colored or shaped headphones that might have been nice.
• Price less than $25.
• Lots of reviews and a good or high rating. (Yes, you can play with this, but at least it’s a start.)
• Free shipping and returns through Amazon Prime.
But first, two big warnings:
1) I mainly use headphones to listen to podcasts and audiobooks. Music quality is not my main concern. If you are an audiophile or music is your passion, you should probably spend more money to buy better headphones. I also use them for phone calls, so the quality of the microphone (the person on the other end of the line must be able to hear me well) is important to me.
2) These were all available on Amazon, but when I tried them for a month, two of the five original listings were already gone. This is because Amazon’s cheap electronics marketplace is a playground of hypercapitalist accelerationism, as New York magazine’s John Herrman illustrated in his recent article “Amazon scrap.” There are fake and strange brands like “CXK” or “Raviad”. Reviews are often misleading or false, Sellers are often not manufacturers and prices are constantly changing. It’s possible that if you read this a few months after it was published, the product links may have changed once again.
