Earbuds to die for

Steve Jobs had to die before Apple made earbuds that fit my ears.

Mr. Jobs must have had freakishly large earholes. Either that or I have freakishly small earholes. I was still a writer at Apple when the first iPod came out in 2001, and scuttlebutt had it that the earbuds that came with it were custom-fitted for Mr. Jobs’s ears. They were far too big for mine.

Not that it mattered. I preferred to hear my music played out through speakers. It sounds more natural that way, at least to my ear. Because until recently, humans listened to music as ambient sound, not something piped into our ear canals.

This had been the case from prehistoric times, I reminded myself. The human voice was the first musical instrument our ancestors discovered before they progressed to tapping out drum solos on dried skulls.

Besides, I love listening to bands like AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Megadeth and Metallica on my road trips, and they sound pretty good blasting through car speakers. So screw the earbuds, I thought.

Was I making a virtue of necessity? You know I was.

Others had the same problem I did. They griped about the size of Apple’s earbuds, saying they’d need surgery to fit them into their ears. We must have been a tiny minority with a minuscule impact on sales, because the company ignored the issue for ten years. And then in September 2012—less than a year after Mr. Jobs died—Apple introduced the iPhone 5 with EarPods.

These were earbuds that actually fit most people’s ears, a concept so revolutionary that Apple felt justified in releasing a television commercial announcing it.

TBWA/Chiat/Day’s ad copy took the cake for sheer chutzpah: “Ears are weird,” the announcer said, managing to sound genuinely puzzled. “I don’t know what shape that is, but it’s not round. So why would headphones be round? They should be shaped like this. Ear-shaped. You know, so they fit in your ears.”

Jony Ive took that a step further in Apple’s official video when Tim Cook introduced the EarPods on September 5, 2012.

“We three-dimensionally scanned hundreds of ears and looked for a commonality,” Ive said, describing the Apple Industrial Design Group’s initiative to develop “a form to fit a broad range of ears.”

“The shape of the EarPod is defined by the geometry of your ears,” Ive said in that earnest way of his.

Bloody brilliant. I was sold, of course. Who wouldn’t be?