Different earphones for different people and different ears. Some people don’t want or like the feel of a noise canceling ear bud. They require a seal in your ear canal.

IMHO, the primary selling point for Apple / Beats headphones are the little ecosystem integration things that go beyond vanilla BT headphones. And unfortunately, Apple has not opened that stuff up to 3rd parties. So if you want the additional hands free functionality, automatic device handoff, automatic pairing, etc, you need H1 or H2 chip headphones from Apple / Beats.

I physically can’t wear in-ear headphones or headphones that require a seal. Noise cancellation only really works if you have a solid seal either in-ear or over ear. I also hate the isolated feel of noise cancellation, I leave it turned off when I wear any over ear headsets (AirPods max, Sony XM4). I absolutely adore my AirPods 3 and I will upgrade to the 4s assuming they remain accessible to me.

Because most people don’t care about it. My family wants the AirPods and buys the cheapest one as the basic AirPods is usually on sale.

Yes, and that was actually what I wanted from them. They’re open enough where I can hear through them at work without having to turn on a transparency mode. They’re just my work dirty buds so I don’t really care how they sound, just that they work (and they actually work better on Android than native iOS in my experience) and they take calls. Plus they’re not built like cheap crap.

I have a set of gen 2s and one is dead so I borrowed a set of gen 1s collecting dust from a relative. No noise cancel, can’t change volume…I don’t know how they sold at all