The long stem may have been a necessary but suboptimal engineering tradeoff to get the first version out the door. A lot of design tweaks have gone into making AirPods less likely to fall out.
The first-gen Airpods fit my ears perfectly, and were secure. When I lost them and upgraded to the 2nd gen, I was initially upset - aside from the body being fatter (and so less comfortable in my ears) they were very insecure - I couldn't even walk around without them loosening and dislodging.
I was on the point of returning them when I saw the advice online to 'twist' them into a different position. I now use them with the stalks horizontal, and they're secure. Still a touch less comfortable than the v1s, but easily tolerable.
The longer stem used to have a better chance at contacting your face for some staying power. The shorter stems don't.
Form vs. function
They looked sleeker and more balanced with the longer stem and in the ear more like jewelry.
I don't want to feel like I'm wearing one of those customer support head mics. I'm ok with shorter stem, and never had a problem.
Or different SKUs. Just saying.
Not that hard for the most profitable trillion dollar company on the planet.
I still have a touch bar MacBook and the keyboard is unusable now.
Consider the most basic usage of the touch bar, displaying function keys. The tactile feedback of a physical function row enables most people to touch-type the function keys from home row. For IDEs, NLE/DAW workflows, UNIX terminal setups and cross-platform software, the touch bar had nothing to offer but downsides. And even in apps that supported it, there was no unified mnemonic standard that enabled you to use the touch bar strip without looking away from the monitor and losing sight of your content. Apps that copied the content into the touch bar were even more hilariously cornered into bad UX, displaying a postage stamp-sized status for whatever you're working on.
The common defense of the touch bar says it needed hardware reworks and greenfield HID architectures to succeed. But I think Apple realized it was a totally flawed concept, and iterated on it internally to the point that they realized it was a sunken cost fallacy.
Same thought as well. It doesn't have to be much bigger, but even 10% longer would be much more useful from mic placement and battery perspective.
I find the “true wireless” form factor finnicky and comically easy to lose and easy to drop. I don’t really see much utility in it either aside from the cool technology flex. If they’d put the modern audio quality and noise cancelling on the BeatsX (and the more neutral AirPods response curve) I’d be first in line.