Crowdfunding to Solve Apple's Biggest Product Problem... Tangled Headphones (opens in new tab)

Not sure how well this will work when someone wraps their old hard drive based iPod (or brand new iPod classic) and wipes some bits on the drive...

What about the quality of the headphones?

For me that's the main problem of Apple headphones: they are utter crap in terms of sound quality.

Another problem I could see: you add weight to the chord which will make the headphones more likely to fall from the ear, that's a big deal if you do sports with it.

If you can secure the patent, sounds like licensing might be the way to go here. Competing on the quality of the headphone is an entirely different (and expensive) problem, crowded with a ton of established companies. And if the headphones you produce aren't of decent quality, my hunch is that people won't buy them b/c sound is going to trump the inconvenience of tangled wires.

These will likely be prohibitively expensive given the cost of materials. Considering that the headphones cost $29 and that each magnet (in bulk) costs $0.90, you're looking at headphones that cost $99.20 to produce in materials alone. After labor, fixed costs, and profit, you're looking at a very expensive pair of headphones with bad sound quality.

This is a cool idea but the price of rare-earth metals might be its undoing.

Looks like it works well if you wrap them right away, but I can envision it being worse than no magnets if you just toss them in your bag.

I'm confused about the Compatibility section. Do these headphones not work in non-Apple devices? If so, why? I wasn't aware that there were proprietary specs for headphones. I use the standard Apple headphones in other devices all of the time without issue. What is different about this product?

Am I the only one that can use the Apple provided slider, slide it to the top, then wrap my headphones neatly and put them into a pocket in my bag and have them come out the same way they went in?

I haven't had issues with tangled headphones for years now...

Until wireless earbuds show up, this is my solution.

This just isn't a big enough issue for me to move away from high quality sound.

ps: it's pretty sweet how this problem belongs to Apple. If headphones are Apple's biggest product problem, it's because their headphones suck, not because the cords get tangled.

I haven't had tangled headphones since I started using a cord-wrapping technique I found on LifeHacker years ago, as shown in this video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IImQNcIyf18>.

I'm not sure that I'd want to buy custom earbuds just for this particular feature. As jsherry suggested, this is something that (IMO) would be better licensed to name-brand headphone manufacturers.

Great idea but I can see this hitting ebay from copycats before these guys even get into production.

Apple's biggest problem, right.