"What I've heard"
Classic
weasel words.
So they spend probably several hundred million dollars (or more) to create this new product, creating custom chips and spending tens of thousands of engineer hours to make something that people would really want to buy, knocking it out of the park performance-wise, but they decide "nah, let's just pack it in the same old casing, feelin lazy here"
Design is the whole product. How it works, behaves, performs. The "lazy design" is just incorrect because you don't like the way the new product looks like the old cheap thing. Note: this is a perfectly valid opinion to hold. I might even share it. The AirPods are probably my favorite piece of technology ever, but I don't really love the way they look. I wouldn't mind a black version, or even another variation of Space Grey. White is low on my list of color choices, but I still love them. Doesn't mean the design was "lazy" because they look similar to other things.
If you don't like that they look like the wired product, just say so. That opinion is valid and does not deserve any criticism. You calling them a lazy design is a lazy criticism of a product that seems to be doing fine in its current state.