I love tools which do one thing exceptionally well.
The photo above is of a pair of 3M Optime 101 headphones which do one thing exceptionally well: noise reduction.
Sure, they aren’t “noise-canceling,” and they don’t play music. They also aren’t stylish or “cool.”
But, probably because 3M designed them specifically for very high noise environments (construction work and the like), they simply work great for reducing all noise—much better, in my opinion, than my old Bose headphones and the new Apple Headphones.
And my principle use? Sitting at my computer at my desk when I want near-complete silence, or sitting with my wife in the living room while she watches TV and I am working on the laptop.
(Caution: they work so well I can’t hear my wife at all, and if she taps me on the shoulder it can cause quite a jolt, so we have a system of blinking the lights on and off when she needs to talk to me.)
And the cost? Less than 23 dollars!
So what’s the point? When buying tools (in this case, an essential writing tool) if you clearly define the one thing that matters, you can get very high quality at very low cost.