You know that a tech accessory has become ubiquitous when people start inventing special custom vacuum cleaner/grabber devices purely to pick up ones that have been dropped.
That’s apparently what has happened in Japan, where a new report claims the East Japan Railways has began developing just such a cleanup device due to the frequency of this problem occurring — and the unsuitability of traditional “grabbers” for retrieving them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5T2RwpRsc0&feature=emb_title
The report claims that, in a three month period, there were 950 cases of dropped earbuds at 78 train stations in the Tokyo area. These dropped earbuds represented a quarter of all dropped item requests for retrieval. East Japan Railways asks that customers not climb onto the tracks to pick up dropped items. Instead, they should ask railway staff to collect them.
While AirPods are not named specifically, they are featured in an accompanying video. This suggests that they are a commonly dropped earbud category. Given the extreme popularity of the AirPods, that wouldn’t be especially surprising.
The new device was developed by East Japan Railways in conjunction with Panasonic. It is reportedly a preferable solution to regular grabbers because these have a tendency of pushing the earbuds further into the surrounding gravel.
As one other “wow, AirPods are popular” wrinkle to the story, this news was initially reported by The Japan Times. However, it proved so popular that the page has been temporarily knocked offline at various times today. A message today read: “Due to unusually high activity, we are temporarily unable to display this page. Please check the page again soon. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
