Looking for BeatsX replacement earphones

A bit more than two year’s ago I bought my very first Bluetooth earphones: BeatsX by Beats by Dre. While I had to replace them on warranty due to the on-off switch breaking after a couple of months, they’ve been working very well ever since.

Sadly, they finally broken two weeks ago: I can no longer switch them on and if I try to recharge them the status LED only blinks red and white before settling for a constant white light (red would be the expected status light for charging). So I contacted my local Apple service & support partner (as Beats is owned by Apple) and they told me that repairing them would probably cost as much as getting a new pair.

At first I thought that I would simply get another pair of BeatsX but it seems like they no longer ship with ear-wings, which is a deal-breaker for me. For some reason, my ears are shaped in such a way that earphones and especially Apple’s EarPods don’t stay in my ears. I always need some kind of wing/hook/clip system if I don’t want to go for over-the-ear headphones. Next on the list were the relatively new Powerbeats Pro, which use the same chipset as Apple’s AirPods, are water-resistant, and have earhooks. At 250€ they are 2.5x as expensive as the earphones they should replace, though.

The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to stick with Apple’s H1/W1 chipsets for earphones because of the way pairing works with them compared to other systems. I have some Bose noise-cancelling headphones and Anker SoundBuds Slim+ earphones to compare and on iOS and macOS working with H1/W1 is just sooooo convenient 😅

That, more or less, left me with one option: I think I’m finally going to give Apple’s AirPods a try, but with additional earhooks for 10€ 😉 To test that setup I’ve for now only ordered the hooks and will try them with the EarPods that came with my phone. I’m really curious if this works for me, otherwise I’ll have to keep looking…