Like most of you, I suspect, I’ve wound up with an awful lot of white Apple earphones over the last seven years. There have been subtle changes to the earbud shape, and the iPhone introduced the wonderful clicker (click for play/pause, double-click for next track, triple-click for previous track), but one thing has remained a constant: the cords get terribly tangled when bunched up in a pocket or pouch.
A follow-up article regarding cord management for the Apple earbuds can be found on the Ten Reasons Why blog:
The point of this post is whether your headphones are rubbery or plasticky should be irrelevant to the effectiveness of keeping them untangled, because you should be following the One True Way Of Headphone Wrapping. Wrapi-do in Japanese, I believe. Also affectionately known as The Devil Horn Method. All snark aside (momentarily at least), this little hack really has kept my buds tangle-free for years now.