In less than two years, the rechargeable lithium-ion battery found in your AirPods is due to die an untimely death.
Bullshit. I got four years out of each of my pairs and I used them several hours a day. Also replacing the battery when it does wear out is is something like 50 bucks. Sure, you can't do it yourself but Apple will give you a refurbished pair, and they will recycle your old battery.
And they provide free recycling for all their products — you're basically paying for it to be recycled when you buy AirPods and any that go into landfill that's entirely the customer's fault.
No wired headphones I've ever owned lasted even close to that long - the cable eventually fails with several hours per day of swinging around and being packed tightly into your pocket.
That said, I've switched to bone conduction headphones now, and will probably never own another pair of airpods unless they go down the same path.
I’ve got the 3rd gen and it’s lasted at least 3 years now.
It’s really nice to see what this community has to offer on lemmy. I quit Reddit because I refuse to use the Reddit app. I really do like the comments more than Reddit, and I’m a wannabe techno savvy Linux pro but I’m still working on basic motivation. Therapy included.
I’ve got Linux on Debian cause I needed the stability to handle my instability, I’ve read through the Linux command line and fell in love with emacs, and all I do on my pc is write, now. And pay bills, but that’s just Firefox. “Just the internet,” lol. It’s hard to try to contain, so I write.
Hope I don’t get banned for irrelevance. No hate here. Just rambling through.
Surprised the title didn't say, "Apple slammed for ear pods that are designed to die".
Gluing components together so it's not easy/impossible to repair is different to 'designing to die'. In my opinion designed to die suggests the ear pods will die prematurely due to intentional design decisions. Gluing components together just means that when the ear pods die, then they cannot be brought back to life and you have to replace them.
Gen 1 AirPods = Trash batteries that become miserable after 2 years. Good luck making it through a 1 hour call if you use them a lot. These things beg for the landfill by year 3.
Gen 3 AirPods or AirPods Pro’s = surprisingly good battery longevity. Expect these to be solid after 2 years.
That’s because the components inside each little white stick are glued together. Apple could use screws and latches to hold together the components. That way, if something needed to be repaired or replaced, you could easily get inside the device in order to fix it. But Apple doesn’t do this.
So as usual, they purposefully do this. This reminds me of the time with the iPhone battery 'scandal' Apple Batterygate.
I really like their Airpods Pro (1st gen), have them for about 4 years now. However not without problems. I had to replace them 5 times because of crackling sounds, muffled sound and broke-bass sounds. This even happend after my 2 years warranty but luckily (and thankfully) the Apple employees are nice people at times. When it happened (twice) outside my warranty, they told me, if I showed them my receipt - They can and will give me a new pair of Airpods Pros.
They told me ''many do not know but there's a law that forces companies (even Apple) to give a 'decent product' to the customer''.
Not sure if I will get their Airpods Pro 2 (or 3) though after all the hassle.
EDIT: As I'm not sure if this law is also outside my country, here's the official government website with their explanation of it. It is in the Dutch language though: Rijksoverheid deugdelijk product
My aunt gave me a pair despite me being an Android person, I used them simply because they were free, and they died like a year later. I got some JBLs which are excellent thus far.
I invested so much into this stupid ecosystem. Feels silly now after realizing how abusive this company is and the lengths it will go to keep you walled in.
My AirPods are still going strong after getting them in 2018. 🤷♂️ obviously doesn’t discount the stories for those who they didn’t work for. I also had to do a warranty exchange on them after a week from my original pair because they just randomly unpaired and wouldn’t pair to any device any more so that points to some QC issues for sure
Unfortunately that's true for all but the Fairphone ones. I have multiple. All other true wireless and also most with one wire behind the neck are not worth fixing. Non-Apple brands are cheaper though. Philips ones are like 50 €, for example. If they die after years that's less bad.
I have earphones that are 15-20 years old (UE Triple-fi 10s and Yuin PK2s, the first wave of Chi-fi products), 2-3 year (or even 5) lifespan for audio products is insane.
Pre-built PCs are designed to die as well, and so are phones in general (incl. everything without a removable battery actually), as well as electric vehicles, not only cars.
Same with Windows, Mac and any other closed source piece of software but thanks to piracy and hacking its not such a big problem...yet.
Tomorrow will be visible outside during the day, but not so much during the night.