my bluetooth headphones died mid-meeting yesterday and nobody noticed the quality improvement

$20 apple EarPods letttsss goooo. I use mine daily. If I lose them or break them, who cares??

It's obviously a fashion thing.

The drivers or whatever can influence the wireless experience a lot. Apple has the best bluetooth reliability of any manufacturer I've experienced. I can be out in a field next to my house and somehow the half-asleep laptop finds my headphones instantly unless I remember to switch its bluetooth off. On my windows machine sometimes, for seemingly no reason, you will be left standing around waiting and waiting for it to find the device right next to it.

The convenience of being able to get up and walk around the house, or got out with the phone without wires getting caught makes it worthwhile though. On the other hand for stationary peripherals like mice I would never go wireless. I hate that feeling of complete helplessness to the pairing/connection lottery and the time waste of it.

The DACs in most bluethooth earbuds are absolute garbage, but I think the bigger issue is people are tired of both having to charge them and having to keep track of where they are.

Bluetooth headphones with mics are absolutely trash at connecting to a pc.

I use them because they don't need to be charged constantly

Good luck finding a phone with a headphone jack anymore though :(

I love my wired headphones though. They support BT but I've used that maybe twice. Ever. Obviously was only because I was using my phone with them, which again don't have a port for the cord.

I can attest to this. I gave away my Sony WH-1000MX and my €80 Soundcore earbuds stopped charging. Headphone emergency! I got myself €30 AKG USB-c IEMs off a local shop. The sound quality is far, far superior to even the €350 wireless Sony headphones. I'm not even an audiophile, it's just noticably better. I had forgotten all the little details from the music I regularly listned to.

With your popular wireless headphones, you're really paying for the computer with ANC (and branding, packaging, depending on which version of the series the latest model is on).

The wired IEMs don't have an ANC but I realised I don't need it as often as I thought. I'm certainly going to look for Wired over-the-ear ANC cans next, but honestly I'm not sure if I need them.