Apple Inc on Wednesday announced that its anticipated AirPods, a pair of wireless headphones, will no longer ship this month as planned.
The AirPods were introduced last month alongside the iPhone 7, which was designed without a standard headphone jack.
“We don’t believe in shipping a product before it’s ready, and we need a little more time before AirPods are ready for our customers,” Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller said.
Apple did not provide a technical reason for the delay nor a new shipping date.
The AirPods delay is the first hardware-related postponement in more than five years from the Cupertino, California-based company. A version of the iPhone 4 in the color white was announced in June 2010, but did not ship to customers until April 2011 because of a production problem. On the software side, Apple delayed the release of iTunes 11 in 2012 by a month to fix bugs.
Reviews of pre-production models of the AirPods suggested the device needed fine-tuning.
“During my testing one of the AirPods had trouble holding a charge, so Apple swapped it out,” Walt Mossberg, of the technology Web site The Verge, wrote last month.
The introduction of the product spurred criticism that the cordless earphones could easily be lost. Comedian Conan O’Brien mocked the device with a spoof of an iPod ad that showed people dancing and the AirPods flying out their ears into a sewage drain.
The device is planned as part of a growing number of accessories that work around Apple’s most important product, the iPhone.
Chief design officer Jony Ive last month referred to the AirPods as the start of a new wireless future for the company.
The US$159 accessory comes with a charging case that doubles as a mechanism to initially pair the headphones to the iPhone. With iCloud, the AirPods can automatically be matched with other Apple devices like computers and watches.
The news about the Airpods delay sent shares of Taipei-based Inventec Corp (英業達), reportedly a sole contract maker for Apple’s wireless ear buds, down 0.8 percent to close at NT$24.85 yesterday in Taipei trading.
Additional reporting by staff writer
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