I've made AirPods last longer than any other pair of earbuds I've ever had.
It's the cord. For me, a max of six months of fiddling with the damn thing and it breaks.
I've had real headphones last quite a bit longer— but I buy the ones with replaceable cords. The pair I still have is on its fourth cord and second pair of muffs.
I don't view it as any sort of economic, human, or environmental catastrophe, that they stop holding a charge after... how long again? I've had a pair of Pros since before the pandemic which seem to hold up fine.
So I'm around what, twenty cents a day? It's a rare day I don't wear them for a solid hour.
It undermines the argument to pick the easy, lazy, and really rather bad example that everyone else flocks to for some bizarre reason. It's genuinely hard to come up with a better product category for glued-in batteries than in-ear wireless headphones.
Are you comparing these against Apple’s wired earphones? Because Apple’s cords are almost hilariously bad, and perhaps the best example of a product that’s designed to fail. (In fairness, they’ve improved somewhat over the years, but the bar was on the floor.)
Yeah I don’t get the environmental angle as well. It’s 10g, I’m sure there’s more lithium in a single AAA cell than 50 AirPods. Imagine how much more polluting a single dude in Texas rolling coal would do compared to everyone in Texas using AirPods.
There are services like this where you can exchange your Airpods for ones with replaced batteries! Note that I've never done it and can't vouch for the quality. I just read about it on HN once.
That's an interesting question, and I'd like an honest answer to that.
We've heard the same argument about phones, and my old Galaxy S5 with a user-replaceable battery was a whopping 0.5 mm thicker than an iPhone 13 mini. That's the width of a mechanical pencil lead. They're both water-resistant, too.
I said 0.5 millimeters. 0.5 inches is freaking huge, that's 1.25 cm. None of my smartphones have been that thick, let alone having that much of a difference.
Cable replaceability is why I love IEMs like Shure SE215. Earbuds hardly break, but the cable breaks eventually. Less waste, plus the ability to choose a different cable.
Yup. I have a pair of Shure earbuds bought in 2011. When the cable started acting out, I replaced it with a lightning cable, since I had just got an iPhone. When that one started acting out, I replaced it with a Shure BT cable. Now I get great sound from my crappy work laptop.
It's the cord. For me, a max of six months of fiddling with the damn thing and it breaks.
I've had real headphones last quite a bit longer— but I buy the ones with replaceable cords. The pair I still have is on its fourth cord and second pair of muffs.
I don't view it as any sort of economic, human, or environmental catastrophe, that they stop holding a charge after... how long again? I've had a pair of Pros since before the pandemic which seem to hold up fine.
So I'm around what, twenty cents a day? It's a rare day I don't wear them for a solid hour.
It undermines the argument to pick the easy, lazy, and really rather bad example that everyone else flocks to for some bizarre reason. It's genuinely hard to come up with a better product category for glued-in batteries than in-ear wireless headphones.