Thank you for sharing. Stories like yours remind us that there is good in the world, and even if it isn’t everywhere, it is still worth cultivating.
I’m a software engineer née scientist, but my spouse is a therapist who specializes in addiction. They (and I!) cherish stories like yours because we had seen up-close the struggle that so many people face.
I haven’t used Android or Windows in any meaningful way for years, so I cannot comment on them.
I can tell you that the hearing accommodations on the AirPod Pro 2/3 headphones brought literal tears to my eyes because of how fabulous it makes music sound for me.
This is a a LOT more work than just adding an equalizer because you have to do multiband real time compression and expansion, in relation to other frequency bands and respecting band-specific sound energy limits.
I know I might sound like I’m gushing, and I kinda’ am. They didn’t have to put in the time or energy to do that or maintain it and they did ... and for that, like I said, I am extraordinarily grateful.
I have worked at multiple companies that vilified open source anything, while building their entire businesses on Linux, Java, Debian, and thousands of other "OSI Approved" software.
It's because, in my experience, the majority of businesses want to take but do not want to feel any obligation to give back or support.
Hearing loss is one of the very few proven and CAUSAL mechanisms behind cognitive degeneration as we age.
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!
Although I try not to think about that too hard because... well it's kind of depressing.
But it's the exact reason that hearing aids are so difficult to design.
For example if you were to naïvely try to just "add back" 50 dB of gain to a 70 dB ambient sound, that hearing aid would be trying to pump 120 dB of sound energy into your ear canal... which would actually cause damage to the surrounding cochlear bands...
But if it doesn't try to add something there, then everything sounds distorted because you have way too much sound energy from the other frequency bands, perhaps ones where you have much higher sensitivity.
Hence the multi band compression and why it's so difficult, and why hearing aid manufacturers focus on speech intelligibility above and beyond everything.
I understand your point and in someway do agree that it is marketing and it is a way of differentiating themselves.
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.
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.
Yes the problem with severe hearing loss is that hearing aids simply cannot compensate for what is no longer there.
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".
My experience is that they serve different purposes.
I have a very nice and expensive set of ReSound hearing aids and they're fabulous at what they do, which is focus on speech and kind of on music if I set them for that.
They're also unobtrusive and easily last 18-20 hours on a charge. I forget I'm wearing them, and nobody notices that I have them.
My AirPods I use primarily for running and listening to music because they just sound unbelievably better, and they're probably fine for a concert although I haven't done that with them. But I think for long-term use every day all day it wouldn't be that comfortable or unobtrusive.
Would love to hear the experience of somebody who's trying it, though!
As a mid-50 year old who discovered two years ago that he has moderate hearing loss (50-55 dB HL), I will be forever grateful to Apple for doing this.
If anybody from the accessibility teams is reading this, please know that it is difficult for me to overstate my gratitude and my appreciation for the amount of work this must've taken.
Music sounds unbelievably better through my AirPod pros, and I didn't even know what I had lost until I heard it again.
I'm willing to bet that a lot of my middle aged compatriots don't even know how much their hearing has degraded… Get your hearing test tested, folks, while you still have it!
I’m a software engineer née scientist, but my spouse is a therapist who specializes in addiction. They (and I!) cherish stories like yours because we had seen up-close the struggle that so many people face.