Testing, reporting and writing by Jessica Fierro. Additional reporting and writing by Corinne Reichert. I'm trying out a new pair of earbuds, and it's not going well.
They're dupes, $11 replicas of the Apple AirPods Pro 2 that cost me $250. I was hoping to be surprised by how good they were for the price of a sandwich, but it turns out they're hardly usable. These no-name earbuds, which look almost identical to Apple's version, don't have the features that were listed when I bought them through the discount online marketplace Temu.
And after I finally connect them to my iPhone, they sound muffled. The song Us by Gracie Abrams and Taylor Swift plays, and the singers sound like they're underwater, or on another planet. I miss my AirPods.
At a staggeringly cheap price like $11, dupes like the earbuds are compelling, low-risk buys. We all love a bargain, right? That's especially true when big sales come around. Bargain shopping is big business, and online discount outlets like Temu and competitors Shein, Wish and AliExpress offer much cheaper alternatives to thousands of products, from clothing and skin care to kitchen appliances and tech, like the earbuds I tried.
But not all bargains turn out to be truly good deals. Reddit is full of cautionary tales of people stunned by the poor quality of dupes, even when they're aware they're buying a knockoff. The " Temu Fail " tag has 104.
9 million posts on TikTok, with people sharing videos about the duds they bought on the online marketp.