As a musician, you possibly have custom ones, but for anyone else who’s not an audiophile, you can get decent ones that mostly preserve the sound while lowering the volume for around $15-20. A godsend for concerts.

Everybody has vastly different sensitivities to sound exposure.

Even identical twins with identical sound exposures can have drastically different hearing profiles especially as they age.

I actually have always been very careful with my hearing; there is some evidence that I may have a very very mild congenital birth defect that makes me prone to hearing loss, but that's largely speculation.

My wife is actually older than me and has a spectacularly sensitive hearing - as does her mother! - and she's the drummer! (The wife, not her mother :-) I just do keys and vocals...)

That's why it's so important that everyone protect their hearing because even though it's not too loud for the people around you, it might be too loud for you - and you won't know until it's too late.

My Apple Watch is screaming at me that its damaging levels of audio, and I can’t imagine listening to the show without protection.

They even know the mechanism: the slow imperceptible year by year withdrawal from rich communication patterns with our environment.

I found that it took me a little while not to feel "old" when I discovered that I needed hearing aids.

But my oh my what a difference.

It's difficult to describe to someone what it's like and how much less cognitive energy you have to put into even simple things like discussing lunch with your wife!

I've had hearing aids for years. People don't notice unless you don't have much hair or you have to have the industrial strength ones.

The Apple RDF seems strong here.

Capitalism just lets you scale it out to new heights! :)

For some kinds of music it is more or less ingrained in the culture -- think of the "It goes up to 11" in Spinal Tap. But in fact it's worse than that; almost all music is played way too loud.

During the Covid period I attended a number of smaller scale events, that for some reason used a lower sound volume. It Was So Much Better. Those events proved what I already heavily suspected: you do no need those high sound volumes to fully enjoy music.

Ear plugs reduce the volume to a level where you can still hear the music, but the risk of long term damage is reduced. (You can get "musician's ear plugs" which attenuate all frequencies equally, so they don't make the music sound weird.)

Good earplugs (I use Etymotics myself) can do this without affecting the sound quality, making concerts enjoyable and safe.

And then freaked out when Android copied that off them which seemed a tad hypocritical.

I can understand the cynicism, but I think Apple's investment into accessibility and health (I'm talking heart attack detection, not gamified activity tracking fwiw) as a differentiator is one of these rare win-win situations.

>At a shareholder meeting in 2014, a conservative finance group wanted Cook to make a commitment to doing only those things that were profitable. Cook replied, "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI."

But inly to justify a higher price tag? Yes it is true they are premium products, but I don't think it's true that they're that much more expensive than similar items occupying the same marketing niche from other manufacturers.

And they are far more than an order of magnitude cheaper than even a low end set of hearing aids.

But all of that is despite the point.

Samsung, Sony, Bose,… The list goes on. I have bought high-end headphones from them all, some with some without noise cancellation. In ear, over the ear, wired and Bluetooth... the list goes on.

NOBODY has a headphone that accommodates my hearing loss except Apple.

And they started doing it years ago as a feature buried in the accessibility settings.

But they kept improving it to the point where it is now FDA approved.

"A plus point in a differentiation matrix…?"

This is the kind of action that buys customer loyalty for life. I hope you never get to experience the depth of hearing loss that many of us have and how utterly transformative this kind of technology not just can be, but IS.

You know who in your life has the hearing impairment, but the vast majority do not have this disability thusly "taking your ears out" is respectable.

The glasses analogy only works if general society has hearing impairments, but that's not the direction we're going as the human race, so we won't see this.

Happily, 'banter' still is. And - watch out world - the Ami's are getting used to it. A very, very, tiny little bit.

That’s what I remember hearing.

Obviously that changed when they got super popular. Your AirPods comparison is fantastic I had totally forgotten the phenomenon of “blue tools”.

Hearing aids are actually a a lot more complicated than just boosting frequencies. At the very simplest, these days they are wide/multi band compressors that try to balance discomfort with natural hearing, generally focusing on speech intelligibility since that is by far the most important target.

If you have severe hearing loss I would strongly recommend putting yourself in the care of a professional. Costco is a great source of probably the lowest cost versus highest quality hearing aids these days... but the reason I say "professional" is because there are so many kinds of hearing loss and they all affect your perception markedly differently.

It's a lot more than just "missing some sensitivity at some frequencies".

Comfort? To me, very comfortable. I just leave them in there with Active Noise Canceling on all the time.

I may be showing my age, but if you remember "Get Smart", AirPods Pro 2 are like a Cone of Silence -- except they actually work.

Do most research teams have to build their own app?

The hearing aid stuff was only recently certified by the FDA as an OTC hearing aid. Apple has had a mode for a many years where AirPods + iPhone could act like a hearing aid. But it didn’t meat the medical classifications.

Also, everybody I know who has hearing aids eventually ends up getting them at Costco.

But if they’re $4000 a pair, that’s _sixteen_ pairs of AirPods 2 Pro. Assuming you don’t get them on sale.

So if you lose/break ‘em every 6 months, which seems quite excessive, that’s still 8 years to break even with “real” hearing aids.

And that’s not to mention the fact that you can buy replacement individual AirPods or cases cheaper than a full set. Or just get AppleCare so replacements are even cheaper if you tend to lose/damage them a lot.

Even if you buy them and they convince you hearing aids would be useful but you want more traditional hearing aids, it still seems like it might be a good value. Compared to risking $4000 on something you might not even feel is that useful to you.