New: Apple AirPods — Australian pricing and release date

Gadget — According to Apple it takes courage to remove a 3.5mm headphone jack. It’ll also take a little bit of courage to fork out AU$229 for wireless AirPods.

The AirPods use a new Apple W1 chip with a 5 hour battery life. To charge the AirPods you put them into the included charging case. This case provides a rounded 24 hours of power to the AirPods. In 15 minutes it’ll provide 3 more hours of charge to the AirPods. You still with me?

So, if you’re on a 24 hour flight you’ll need to, every 5 hours, dock the AirPods, wait 15 minutes, then you’ll have another 3 hours of charge. Or you can leave them in there for a bit longer to get a max charge of 5 hours.

Apple’s wireless tweak also means that you can switch between devices pretty easily, basically in the same way you would switch between AirPlay devices.

From Apple:

After a simple one-tap setup, AirPods are automatically on and always connected. Using them is just as easy. They can sense when they’re in your ears and pause when you take them out. And the AirPods experience is just as amazing whether you’re listening to your iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad or Mac.

Talking to your favourite personal assistant is a cinch. Just double-tap either AirPod to activate Siri, without taking your iPhone out of your pocket.

It’ll be interesting to see how well the 1st-generation version works, especially given the cold-turkey, headphone-jackless iPhone 7.

When: Late October 2016

Where: Apple Store [Link]

How much: AU$229