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AirPods Pro Teardown: Heavier Than Original AirPods, Different Battery, Same Zero Repairability Score
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Well I do have original iPhone in a perfect condition. And replacing a battery was a breeze as compared to iPhone 7Plus. And that is the point. I can still use it and my children are on 5s that they got from me. Its many years of use without need to dispose the electronics.
There are plenty of smaller issues that deserve time - this being one of them, because is just one example of the environmental impacts that technology is having, especially as we move further and further into the non fixable, where product life is tied to consumable items such as batteries.
Who told you to put them in the trash? That’s your own volition. Go give it to Apple for recycling at the least. The talk about this and you want to just trash devices with lithium ion batteries?
And if the Samsung is so great, why didn’t you buy those instead?
Getting annoyed with people claiming how bad Apple is, yet their own behaviors are no better.
For this reason alone, I would never buy an AirPods, however big the new improvements are. Meanwhile bigger headphones like Beats Studio 3, or even the Solo lineups has a big, replaceable battery.
Yes there's some glue here and there, but completely harmless to replace, and high chance of success too. See for yourself
Beats Studio battery
Beats Solo 3 battery
Yes there's some glue here and there, but completely harmless to replace, and high chance of success too. See for yourself
Beats Studio battery
Beats Solo 3 battery
Exactly environmental when it’s convenient. I just wished they’d stopped being all high and mighty about the environment if their other policies such as non repairable are so common.
Replaceable battery - quite the norm until Apple mucked it up and all the other companies followed suit. I have an LG V20 that is four years old which will likely outlast my V40 and iPhone 11 as long as LG continues to stock the V20 replaceable batteries (run around$15). What a bad idea ...
Ethernet port - still industry standard; reliable, fast, and relatively secure compared to wifi
SD cards and card readers - still industry standard, and quite convenient for external storage and portability of digital camera photos and videos
Modular RAM - makes it simple to upgrade memory for laptops, desktops, and servers
But I agree, 8-track tapes are certainly outdated. I'm surprised you didn't bring up floppy disks - that's a standard non-sequitur one finds on this forum when defending Apple's removal of useful ports, jacks, and their overuse of glue and solder for internal parts.
Interesting you say that, because the way I see it, pretty much anything that’s manufactured today isn’t really ‘repairable’ in terms of tech devices. Not to mention, can you name any other company that takes the initiatives to be ‘green friendly’ the way Apple does?
Just got mine and was so excited to try them having always used ~£40 buds from Amazon. The design is nice, the noise cancelling good (very comparable to my beloved QC 20’s) but the audio is awful.
I’m far from an audiophile, too many years ear abuse for that now, but compared to my usual daily drivers the sound feels washed out. No feel to it at all. I’m actually really disappointed as I was hoping I’d finally be able to sleep on my side on a plane with these in.
They’re definitely going back. No way do they perform as £250 buds should.
I’m far from an audiophile, too many years ear abuse for that now, but compared to my usual daily drivers the sound feels washed out. No feel to it at all. I’m actually really disappointed as I was hoping I’d finally be able to sleep on my side on a plane with these in.
They’re definitely going back. No way do they perform as £250 buds should.
Apple constantly professes its green policies and privacy/security concerns for its users. When they don't live up to those ostensible selling points, then yes, they should be singled out. No, it would be silly to have magsafe on AirPods, but it would still be quite useful for laptops.
And only an idiot wouldn't realise that apple don't replace the batteries in AirPods. They swap them for new AirPods completely.
The batteries are not removable without practically destroying the unit.
I would have to say no.
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Replaceable will always increase the size of the equipment, as it now has to have some form of connector/socket and the battery would now be in a container with contacts to mate with the socket.....all increasing size and decreasing reliability.
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The makes some sense in larger, more expensive devices....laptop, watch, phone. However, replacing a battery in something like an AirPod could cost almost as much as the original purchase price. Apple can...and does E-recycle electronics (through an E-recycle company) to reclaim and reuse all of the plastics and metals.
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Are the ones that look a big black growth in peoples ears? I can't imagine for a second that they have replaceable batteries or are repairable in any fashion.
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Oh god, please stop about the Samsung's so called repairability.
It's just a stupid iFixit score that means nothing, people have tried replacing the battery and ended up damaging or completely killing the headphones anyway.
Both are realistically unrepairable.
The Samsung’s use the same battery as the AirPod pro and the Samsung buds have user replaceable battery.
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Well, they don't.
That's how they look after a professional repair technician from iFixit spend over 1 hour working on it.
Imagine actually paying a professional for 1 hour + the parts to get them back in this condition. Any sane person would rather buy a new pair.
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A repairable version would be more complex, less waterproof, and use more materials
So we can have something that is more repairable but also needs more repairing.
Or we can have something nonrepairable that needs less repairing overall.
Hearing Aids smaller than these have replaceable batteries. All they had to do was make it separate pieces that snap together. Allowing easy access & not glueing/soldering it down. But ya know Apple. They don't want you buying a new battery every few years. They want you buying new AirPods every few years.
It's become just another service. Headphone rental is a market I can't afford (or stomach) to get into despite how annoyed I get at my Sennheiser wired earphones.
As good as the product is - this is just ridiculous. In Germany there is a 2-year warranty anyway. And even that is too short for a product lifecycle. Sad about this economic choice. Potentially lots of arguments with Apple in case of failure.
Realistically, I don’t see battery replacement as a feature most AirPod users are going to take advantage of anyways.
I’d settle for replaceable, period, so the whole things don’t have to go into landfill as soon as the batteries hit their max cycles. I wouldn’t mind paying Apple to do battery service at a reasonable price.
Let me guess, you’re using Apple EarPods, right? Apple stopped using PVC in its plastic cables about a decade ago, and now their cabled products wear out and fray super easily— resulting in an unnecessarily premature disposal. Seems like planned obsolescence to me.
By couple, I assume you're not talking about just 2 years? But perhaps several? Even if you only get 2 years of usage out of them, you have spent $10.41 per month. Just to put it into perspective with how much you spend on other things. If you manage to use them for 3 years, that goes down to $6.94 per month. Again, people spend that kind of money on a single trip to starbucks these days, multiple times in a week. Yet you feel hard done by, because you might only get 2 years of use out of a $250 product?
That is not my experience with any of the cables that I own. YMMV.