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iFixit Shares AirPods 4 and USB-C AirPods Max Teardown Video
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Fair points! I bought a gorgeous leather case for my 15 Pro from a company called Ryan London. The thing that kind of kills me is that I won't be able to reuse it on a subsequent iPhone because they tweak the bloody dimensions every single version now. :/
Apple colluding with Big Case to spite us all!!1!
Consumers want the smallest earbuds possible. Not likely possible to make something with that level of engineering and compact to be easily repairable.
Silicone doesn't break down into microplastics and isn't plastic. There are good alternatives. I myself got a nomad leather case for mine, but it also has plastic in the whole frame so not much better for reducing microplastics.
Two different things. Both are "woke" issues (if that's what you want to call it), but one is animal welfare and the other is environmental welfare.
Exactly. They want to reduce plastic waste, and improve animal welfare? Don't change the sizes, thickness, and button and camera arrangements *every* year. It's also stopped making sense commercially: one reason I don't upgrade my phone is because I have 7 cases for it, and don't want to have to buy new ones. I do upgrade my Apple Watch every year because the armbands still fit.
But that's still a huge improvement over having to throw your earbuds away after a few years.
I think they at least deserve a 2 for the fact that you can replace the case without replacing the buds, or vice versa, but I get what iFixit is saying.
If we screw up the environment then the animals (including us) won’t matter… 🔥🔥🔥
Sustainability is critical, and now, not starting at some point in the future…but the leather issue is, I agree, absurd. Do advocates for this position suppose we’ll kill fewer cows, or eat less meat, because of this? Cowhide leather is an mere byproduct, and when properly tanned, is a responsible use of material that would be wasted otherwise.
Personally, I would rate the pollution from the petrochemical industrial production of plastics to be far worse than animal husbandry and leather production (a byproduct of the meat industry).
I agree that this must be solely about perception. Consider all of the other environmental costs of the various components in any electronic tech, from rare earth minerals, to plastics, to the many processes involved in finishing, human labor in stressed conditions (or worse); leather is at least renewable! And it can be produced with non-toxic non-chrome, non-polluting processes (the end stage leather tanning). The same cannot be said for rare earth minerals or noble metals or petroleum-based synthetics and plastics.
But the perception is that leather is ‘bad’ while I guess…plastics are ’not so bad?’ I disagree. But I just won’t be buying any Apple synthetic covers, cases, etc. The lack of repairability and disposable nature of our tech IS a real problem. But until we have legislation mandating a change in resource usage, nothing will improve. And the likelihood of legislation is so small as to be in the realm of the fantastic.
Some people (like me) hoped that Apple would have made some internal changes to improve the reliability including stronger/thicker and more wear-resistant wiring to prevent connection/audio failures.
Instead, I am resorting to never folding my AirPods Max. (my third pair after 2 previous failures, both of which I folded multiple times a day)
It amazes me, that people have managed to brand being ecologically and environmentally concerned for the future of our SPECIES and planet as something negative and ‘woke.’
To which I say to those who ‘feel’ this way…’whatever.’ It’s your children and grand-children who will suffer (and possibly die) for your choices and unconcern (and I do not mean YOU, specifically, but rather those who have embraced the attitude that corporations, billionaires, and their PR lobbyists and so-called ‘think tanks’ must be correct, and concerned people are just ’chicken littles exclaiming about falling skies’). The catastrophic and cascading changes will affect the rest of the human race, and all other life on the planet, both land and sea, as well.
I’ll be dead (well, hopefully) by the time the coming crisis entirely of our own making reaches the earliest of disaster-stage scenarios in around 40 years.
The climate has already shifted in North America by 1.5 time zones of habitability. The Department of the Interior has not released updated habitation zone maps in over 15 years. That’s because of the massive changes they already show. In another 15 years, it will have progressed much further. And the changes are unpredictable other than ‘it will be different from what you have always known for your region.’
As much as I do find ifixit’s teardowns to be self-serving, I do enjoy reading them and the fact that they publicize just how unsustainable most tech products are — and that will hopefully bring this more into the public consciousness that maybe these products could be manufactured and designed in a different way.
I wish that they would go further and also include materials used as assessed for sustainability and environmental pollution (plastics and rare earth minerals). People do need to become aware of these realities. Plastics don’t need to be made from petroleum. We can make bioplastics. Yes, they are more expensive — because no one uses them. The costs would decrease massively and quickly if major manufacturers were to change their designs to incorporate bioplastics sourced from renewable plants(!) instead of petrochem sources. Turning away from petrochem sources would have the added benefit of reducing our dependence upon foreign sources for petroleum.
Where?
This is the first article I've seen that discusses lossless audio with the Vision Pro. Evidently it is delivered via Wifi 2.5 or 5 Ghz. Would love to know more.
Here is a screenshot from the Vision Pro tech specs page. I’m confident that I read somewhere that it’s multichannel Bluetooth that enables the feature, but I can’t find that reference anywhere. It’s also ALAC based. I was thinking it was a scrambled bitstream. I can confirm the latency is super low (used iPad synths on vp with no noticeable delay, compared to about 100ms on lightning APP2)
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Because Apple actually does not care about the green agenda. If they truly did they would make products that could be upgradeable and thus last longer. In the 3 R's that were drilled in when I was a kid, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, recycle is the last option. Reduce and reuse. Now imagine if you could actually upgrade your computers and other Apple products, they would stick around much much longer and people would reduce how much they are actually buying. Of course that does not keep the bank account topped up as much as Apple and other companies would like. But who am I to judge, Apple had mother nature impressed as they padded themselves on the back for how green they are... and I am sure they are not buying any carbon credits right?
WOW. So the AirPods Max won’t support Lossless(!) until the next revision, whenever that will happen! Apple really is unbelievable. Personally, I don’t like the design (or the case) of the AirPods Max, and I don’t think they have the best sound anyway, but if they had actual Lossless wireless functionality, they’d be worth further consideration.
My take is that there is no reason for them to include Wifi in Airpods other than to deliver lossless audio to the Vision Pro. 8 months in and it is still a mystery.
Did anyone else find this to be a very clumsy teardown
Well-known electronics repair website iFixit today shared an AirPods 4 teardown video that offers a look inside Apple's latest wireless earbuds. Specifically, these are the entry-level AirPods 4 without active noise cancellation (ANC).
Unsurprisingly, iFixit said AirPods remain a "nightmare to take apart," with the earbuds earning a lowest-possible 0/10 score on iFixit's reparability scale.
The teardown does not reveal any major internal differences between the AirPods 3 and AirPods 4.
The charging case for the AirPods 4 without ANC is equipped with a 345 mAh battery. This is the same size battery as in the AirPods 3 charging case.
iFixit also opened up the revised AirPods Max, which launched alongside the AirPods 4 last month. Aside from a USB-C port instead of a Lightning port, the headphones have no major internal differences compared to the original AirPods Max.
Article Link: iFixit Shares AirPods 4 and USB-C AirPods Max Teardown Video
