And like, I know the pinch mechanism does have some smarts to it: it isn't even really a button, and the thing you think you are pinching is haptic feedback; but that frankly just makes it worse as the only reason why the pinch feature is better than the tap feature is because the tap feature had an unfortunate requirement that you had to have it in your ear to use it (and to the extent to which it would accidentally work when not in your ear was, fwiw, annoying)...

...but then, for some inexplicable reason, they decided that the pinch feature also shouldn't work if the AirPod isn't in your ear, only, due to the dynamic haptic feature, squeezing it suddenly isn't a button anymore and I find myself just squeezing it harder, twisting it around trying to find the button, until the part of my brain that knows how it works turns on and goes "there isn't really a button there" and I go into problem-solving mode to figure out I need to put it in my ear again for it to work.

The tapping interface was (/is, as I still have them) incredibly intuitive on that front: the part of my brain that wanted to interact with it fundamentally got that "you have to put this in your ear in order to tap it", and I don't ever use them wrong. But with the new pinch interface, I've had a pair ever since they came out (and now have a pair of the AirPod 3, which I don't like anywhere near as the old ones) and I continue to routinely attempt to pinch them when they aren't in my head.

What is crazy to me is that I've complained about this to various people and the response that I tend to get--both from people "in the know" as well as end users giving me this exact complaint back--is that a sizable number of customers apparently really really really hate tapping their head: they find the action annoying and the sound it makes in their skull / ear canal unfortunate. The pinch interface is simply sufficiently boring that everyone seems to be willing to do it without squinching. :/