Forget expensive sleepbuds, a $30 pillow with holes cut out for your ears might work better

[Leopard10]

The Verge's reviewer spent a year using Anker's A30 sleepbuds, tiny earbuds designed to let side sleepers listen to podcasts or white noise without the bulk of normal earbuds, and after a rocky start with firmware issues found them mostly working. But after a week testing Blissbury's Ear Pillow, a piercing pillow originally designed to relieve pressure on freshly pierced ears, the reviewer said they felt silly for having spent four times as much on sleepbuds that turned out to be inferior to the AirPods Pro they already owned

Piercing pillows work by using cutouts that suspend the ear while sleeping, avoiding pressure on sensitive tissue, and it turns out that same design works just as well for cushioning bulky standard earbuds like AirPods, Galaxy Buds or Pixel Buds without having to buy a specialized second pair of tiny sleep specific buds. The Ear Pillow measures 26 inches by 15 inches, slightly narrower than a US standard pillow, and ships with foam fillers for the ear holes in case it ever gets demoted to a regular guest pillow

The core argument is a simple one, sleepbuds cost over 200 dollars, need charging, can lose their Bluetooth connection and eventually need replacing once the battery degrades, while a pillow like this never needs charging, never loses connection and just physically accommodates whatever earbuds you already own

Forget expensive sleepbuds. Buy this pillow instead | Daily Guardiandailyguardian.ca

[RayOfLight89]

This is such a satisfying dumb-simple solution to a problem tech companies have been selling an expensive specialized gadget for, love it

[Kev5]

Using a piercing pillow for regular earbuds instead of its original purpose is a clever repurposing nobody seems to have talked about before

[BretHart_Mike]

A standard pillowcase sagging slightly because the pillow is narrower actually sounds like a feature here, extra fabric to stuff into the earholes

[NovaPrime90]

Sleepbuds always felt like a classic case of tech solving a problem that a much cheaper physical object already solved better

[Beta]

$30 pillow beating $200 specialized earbuds is exactly the kind of unglamorous but useful recommendation more tech coverage should include

[GreenEcho]

Good reminder that sometimes the actual best gadget solution is not a gadget at all

[Bear]

This feels like the sleep tech equivalent of realizing you didn't need the expensive gadget the whole time

[Dom66]

Never needing to charge or worrying about Bluetooth dropping mid-sleep is honestly underrated compared to how much people focus on audio quality alone

[ShawnMichaels99]

Curious how this actually holds up for back or stomach sleepers rather than just side sleepers, the whole design seems built around one sleep position