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U.S. Customs Seized Thousands of Counterfeit AirPods at JFK. Just One Problem: They’re Legitimate OnePlus Buds

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Incredibly grainy and hard to see photos, but they're clearly "OnePlus Buds," not AirPods

CBP provided these terrible photos on their website. They’re clearly not AirPods.

Let’s take a break from our usually serious and dire tech news to look at something downright hilarious. Many tech companies copy Apple. They take Apple’s designs and ideas and create similar products. There are clones of iOS, the Apple Watch, virtually everything Apple has made. Few products have captured such widespread popularity as Apple’s AirPods. The chic truly wireless earbuds just pop into your ears and play music. Simple and easy. People love them and companies love to copy them.

These copies are often not counterfeits. They’re legitimate attempts to create competition. OnePlus is one such competitor. They created their OnePlus Buds to look very similar to Apple’s AirPods. However, turn them around, and you see more depth on the earbud, a slightly different shape, and a dramatically lower price, just $79 for active noise cancellation. Is it as good? No. They’re not designed to form a complete seal, they can’t be as good. But they’re inexpensive and look kind of like AirPods. Enough to capitalize off of the popularity of AirPods.

They are not, however, counterfeits. They were made to compete with Apple, not pretend to be Apple. Though they look similar, the earbud design is different and the case is completely different. The only thing it has in common is the color.

But none of that mattered to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). They saw some white earbuds and assumed they were AirPods. They proudly bragged both on Twitter and their website about their seizure of these counterfeit devices before they could get to Nevada’s version of Canal Street.

AirPods They Are Not

To be a counterfeit, someone would have to try to pass something off as a different company’s product. That’s not what OnePlus was doing. Their packaging says “OnePlus Buds – White.” They have the OnePlus logo. The devices themselves have OnePlus’s branding. Nothing about this says “Apple” besides the fact that they’re truly wireless earbuds in a glossy white color. And white isn’t the only color you can get them in. Unless this huge shipment only contained white OnePlus Buds, you can also get them in an attractive gray color.

OnePlus Buds. They have a similar design to AirPods, but you'd never mistake the two.

Yes, unlike AirPods, they actually come in an attractive color. In fact, I actually think these look better than AirPods, especially in that gray color with red accents.

We can laugh. Even OnePlus is laughing about it, at least publicly. Privately, they’re probably not happy about this disruption to their supply chain. This could be a setback for a major release or at least a store’s retail stock. Furthermore, it was a massive waste of time and effort on behalf of the CBP. They couldn’t even just do a Google search for the products on the box? They couldn’t look at the box and clearly see it’s not trying to be an Apple product? How many people did this go through who are completely out of touch with reality?

https://twitter.com/egyp7/status/1305314699127463936?s=20

All of this coming from New York, a city with a street so famous for its knockoff goods that it treats Canal Street like a tourist attraction.

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