They should focus on electric cars. Replacing tiny batteries in thin phones or thinner headphones is silly to legislate compared to gigantic batteries in big cars. The rest of the car could easily have a 20 year life with no internal combustion engine, but most get scrapped after 6-8 years.
If they want to pretend that they’re saving the planet with legislation, go for the real volume.
User replaceable batteries in earbuds would make them thicker and heavier - exactly what consumers say they don’t want.
Electric Cars have replaceable batteries? No one’s throwing away that much money in precious metals. Recycling companies are spinning up to handle EV batteries as they start to fail, which they haven’t in large numbers yet.
Yeah every EV has a replaceable battery, lol. The actual issue is the amount of shops that do battery replacement is little to none. On top of that, EV battery recycling isn't at the scale it will need to be in 10-15 years. Those issues will solve themself after a while though.
I've been rocking my Sony WH-1000XM3's for going on 5 years now and have had absolutely zero issues with battery life (or anything else for that matter). I wear them several hours a day, every work day for Zoom calls, etc. They've traveled with me and are great for flights.
I'd buy another pair (of the newer model) in a heartbeat.
That is encouraging but the fact remains that there is a point of failure in the battery which has a known lifetime of charge cycles. I'm wouldn't tell you not to buy them I'm just a stickler for that kind of thing I guess.
That's fair. Getting 5+ years of heavy use (thousands of hours) out of a $400 pair of headphones is worth the investment to me. Not worth it to everyone, though.