Thanks, Tim. And I am glad to be the first to write a response. I have a $50 Cowin earphone (most popular on Amazon for months) since I like a physical earphone that doubles the noise-cancelling capacity with the huge around ear cushion.

I sometimes feel envious of those with smaller earbuds though, especially when I want to be discrete about listening to something else on my earphone. Also, it's hard to pair compared to AirPods that my brother has. I would have to disconnect it from one device, manually, before I can manually set it up with another device. As someone whose work moves between my iphone and my Mac, the issue has becoming a bit of an annoyance.

But you're right, paying $250 at the time of economic difficulty probably isn't the best idea, especially when, these days, for $250 one could actually get a nice working computer...