The Wireless Tax

Is the price right?

OnePlus makes two sets of earbuds - the Bullets V2 and the Bullets Wireless. Both are among the best earbuds I've used in their price range, and I'd wholeheartedly recommend them to anyone looking for a cheap pair of well-designed, gets-the-job-done, decent quality earbuds. This post isn't about them. It's about the realization I've come to over the last few months, that the "wireless tax" - the price differential between the wired and wireless version of an otherwise identical product - companies are charging is still too high.

Let's start off by talking about that tax: Apple charges $160 for their AirPods, which are wireless versions of their $30 EarPods, so their wireless tax is $130. OnePlus' Bullets Wireless are $70, and the Bullets V2 are $20, so OnePlus' wireless tax is $50. Now, it's true that AirPods are different from the Bullets Wireless in that they're truly cable free, and it's also true that both wireless products have a few more features than their wired counterparts, but let's focus on the fact that these companies could have added all of the wireless features into the wired products.

Left-to-right: Bullets Wireless ($70), Bullets V2 ($20), AirPods ($160), and EarPods ($30)

One of the best intangibles that AirPods have is a sensor that detects when the earbud is in your ear. If you take an AirPod out, the music pauses, and it resumes instantly once you put the AirPod back in. On the Bullets Wireless, that's done via snapping the magnetic backs of the two buds together and pulling them apart again (assuming, of course, that you have an iPhone or a OnePlus phone, respectively). But why do these features need to be only available on the wireless versions of these products? Certainly, magnets are possible to fit into wired earbuds. Sensors couldn't be that hard to fit into an EarPod, given that both AirPods and EarPods share the exact same in-ear design.

The same goes, so I'd assume, for the waterproofing and splash (or rain) resistance for both wireless products. Ignoring the waterproofing of the 3.5mm jack, why should the wired versions of a product be any worse for the wear if I was walking home or running in the rain? It's possible that the wired versions are already waterproof, and that OnePlus simply chooses to not advertise their products as such, but in that case that's one less feature to differentiate between wired and wireless earbuds.

And of course, the primary purpose of earbuds is to play music. OnePlus says they incorporated an "Energy Tube" into the earbud to minimize distortion, and from my personal experience, I will say that I've heard layers in music using the Bullets Wireless that I've never heard before. Most AirPod reviews mention that they sound marginally better than EarPods. But again, what's so special about wireless earbuds that OnePlus couldn't have incorporated an "Energy Tube", or that Apple couldn't have made EarPods sound better?

I don't believe that wireless earbuds add any value other than the fact that they're wireless. They're less likely to get in the way, you don't always need to bring your phone with you, the lack of cables means they're more likely to stay in your ear, etc. But there are also drawbacks, like less reliability than a wired connection, the hassle of charging one more device, and not being able to use them in while traveling until you're 10,000 feet in the air (at least, you're not supposed to use them).

On its own, how much do you think you'd pay for that? As a runner, that cable-free convenience is worth a lot. And while I might have complained at the $160 price point of the AirPods, they were sold out for quite a while (though that was likely due to artificially restricted supply). While I may be complaining about the wireless tax, I daily the Bullets Wireless. Greater industry trends are heading toward a world without the 3.5mm port. And while I'm no audiophile, I've never been happier using a pair of headphones/earbuds before. So the $50 premium is fine by me. $130? Probably not as much, but that won't stop others.

There's still something that nags me in the back of my mind, and I think it's the $70/$160 price tag. People are clumsy, and shit happens. I was walking down the street one day fiddling with my Bullets V2, when they fell out of my ear (my arm got caught on the cable) and they fell to the ground just as/where I put my right foot. Crunch. They're gone. Within a week, I had found the time to pick up another set of Bullets (again, for $20), and due to some shipping problems and excellent customer support from OnePlus, I actually ended up with another two pairs of earbuds for $20. People lose things - and the price of a mistake shouldn't be $70 or more. Blame the wireless tax.

Update [07/22/2019]: It’s worth mentioning that the true Apple analog to the Bullets Wireless would be the BeatsX Earphones.

Exploring and Exploiting in Employment

Let's set the scene. I'm from Texas, and for the first time ever, I'm interning for a summer in a brand new location, Chicago. I'm also a foodie, so my goal is to be able to eat as much good food as possible, but I can't do that without first discovering the best places to eat. Of course, once I find the best places to eat, I shouldn't be venturing out to new restaurants, only to have an inferior meal. The challenge is simple, then: how do I know when to explore the area around me for a new restaurant versus exploiting the information I already have?

If we were able to quantify the utility from previous choices, and the expected utility from future choices, and how much a good meal tomorrow is worth in terms of a good meal today, then this would be fairly straightforward, using a variety of explore/exploit frameworks that the field of computer science has developed. We might look into the Gittins Index, which is well suited to just this type of quantitative analysis. But our tastes change, it's hard to quantify just how good a restaurant is, and doing so would be quite a bit of work, so we need a more "gut-feel" solution.

Jeff Bezos, when he started Amazon, said that all he thought about was how much he'd regret not doing it. He termed it a "regret minimization framework," and it's a perfectly valid way that we as humans can solve the explore/exploit problem. Let's simply do whatever we would most regret not doing. We could spin this into a similar (though not quite identical) formulation: do whatever you think will end up turning out the best, a framework which others called the Upper Confidence Bound.

The interesting thing, though, is that there's so much more that you can think of as an explore/exploit problem than just restaurants. I've approached the search for a full-time position much in the same way. With a career, there are certain factors that feed into job satisfaction: location, coworkers, salary and benefits, work/life balance, promotional opportunities, the work itself, etc. An internship is a great way to learn as much as possible about how those factors look, and how much you might personally weigh those factors.

But that's just for one particular job. If the goal is to not just get a job, but to get the right job, you need to explore.

I'm still in college, with another three years to go. That's a fair bit of time. Nevertheless, with my current internship and the two that come afterwards, I have three questions I need to answer:

1. Which industry do I want to work in?

2. Where do I want to be?

3. How much I do weigh one factor over another?

I'm currently enjoying a really amazing internship at Akuna Capital. The salary is amazing, Chicago is great, the work is stimulating… there's nothing that I could complain about, other than the impact that my work has. And if I were to pick one job to do for the rest of my life, I'd probably pick trading at Akuna. It's unlikely that I could find anything that really beats out working with Australians.

But I still want to explore some more. I don't yet know how I feel about data science or consulting - while some of the niceties might not be as ideal, it's unlikely that I find those jobs to be worse across-the-board. Even if I end up deciding to stick with trading, I'll only have had more confidence in my decision.

P.S. I was first exposed to the explore/exploit framework in a book, Algorithms to Live By. The book is one of my all-time favorites, one of the few that I recommend without reservation. It's by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths.