Apple is known for its design genius, its attention to detail, and its stubbornness.

It is my opinion that only a constipated mule with sore feet is more obstinate than Apple when it latches onto an idea it believes in. Apple will stand firm against herds of angry stampeding end users if it thinks its philosophy is worth defending.

Need an example? How about the one-button mouse. It was a good idea for a while; it was elegant and easy to understand. It was the epitome of ease, the symbol of simplicity, but the advantage of the one-button mouse became moot with the introduction of Mac OS X and true multitasking. People grew to see the usefulness of the two and three button mouse and complained constantly the one button just wasn’t enough. Still, Apple stuck by that one-button like bubble gum on your shoe on a hot Summer day.

Eventually Apple did concede that three buttons are better than one and started including the former with every Mac. Of course, they had to do it with the customary Apple flare.

This time it’s those silly earbuds that the company introduced to the world with the iPod. Just like the one-button mouse was the picture of proficiency, earbuds became the icon of cool: wear them and everyone knew you had it going on.

However, as many runway models will tell you, there’s a price to pay for cool. For me that price is pain: whenever I wear earbuds for more than 5 minutes my ear hurts. It seems my anti-tragus is too small to effectively keep earbuds in place (and they say size doesn’t matter) and I’ve been putting undo stress on my tragus (the little flap of gristle and skin at the entrance of the ear canal).

If I adjust the buds so that they don’t hurt, they get loose and sound horrible and I have to constantly push them back in, which is also a pain. Forget about dancing around like they do in those iPod commercials, when I start hopping the earbuds start popping and I’m forced to stop the hop and re-plug the buds.

What’s worse is that nearly ever other digital music player maker, in an attempt to equal iPod’s cool, insists on including those stupid earbuds with their players. Shame on them! Have an independent thought, why don’t you!

My question to Apple is this: Couldn’t you have come up with a design that does not cause pain for the earbud-challenged? I guess Sony had already cornered the dinky headset market, and your design had to be radically different, and I get that. I really do, but while we may all be equal in the eyes of the law our ears are only more or less so.

Just like you gave in and start selling three-button mice with your Macs, maybe it’s time for you to think about something new to put in our ears. It doesn’t have to be fancy or hi-tech, just something that works and doesn’t require ears like Dumbo to use.

With the iPhone, you folks in Cupertino had an excellent opportunity to make a clean start ear-phonically speaking, but what did you do? You make more earbuds! Even the fabled Apple Bluetooth headset appears to be little more the a wireless earbud with an Apple logo on it.

Come on Apple! It’s time to give up the buds, Bud. Give the lab geeks an extra case of Red Bull and set them loose, see what they come up with. I bet a real American dollar that whatever they think up, it’ll be less painful than those trauma-inducing earbuds. The millions of us with sore traguses will thank you.

Vern Seward is a writer who currently lives in Orlando, FL. He’s been a Mac fan since Atari Computers folded, but has worked with computers of nearly every type for 20 years.