> But headphones don't get worse just by the passage of time.

They didn't when they were just speakers on a strap, but that is a bad mental model for thinking about modern wireless headphones. Remember that a lot of these headphones now have CPUs in them, and they're integrating into a moving spec. The iPhone 6 mentioned here only supported Bluetooth 4, while the iPhone 12 supports Bluetooth 5.0, plus some other addons like LE and A2DP. And that's before we consider any protocols that manufacturers add on top of that, like Airplay.

Even Airpods aren't "fire and forget" devices nowadays. Apple is still shipping firmware updates for Airpods. It's fair to say that long term support for these will be much less costly than an old iPhone, but it's not free.

> Also, why not make it so that they can be used passively? What's the downside?

The simplest answer is probably "Apple customers don't want it". If you really care about using your headphones passively with a wire 20 years from now when the battery is dead and Apple won't service it, you were pretty unlikely to be buying Apple anyways. There are tons of available headphones on the market to serve that set of requirements. And since Apple really values clean lines, removing a jack that they don't think many of their customers will use is a no-brainer for them.

That sums up to:

"Your wired headphones are reliable mechanical-electrical devices. Apple is making a computer that you wear on your head, and it just can't compete in areas like reliability, repairability, and Apple's profitability."

I mean, yeah, sure.

Google Glass also aren’t as reliable as my reading glasses, but here we are.

Yup!

The most honest answer is: we don't know if Apple will still service them then, because they've never made a product like this for comparison. We also don't know whether non-Apple service centers will be able to service them later, which might even be a more important question. (Once your device is out of warranty and AppleCare coverage, Apple's repairs are going to be pretty pricey even if they're still available.) But I don't think saying "well, they only support phones and computers for a few years after they stop making them" is necessarily a guidepost here.

> Also, why not make it so they can be used passively? What's the downside?

My quasi-educated guess is part marketing, and part technology. The marketing part: Apple considers these AirPods Pros that cover your ears, and insist that they have all the AirPods Pro features. The technology part: from what I can tell, these headphones are DSP-ed up the wazoo, more like HomePods than AirPods, so there's a good chance that passive mode will sound like crap.

I know a practical counter-argument is "so what, there are other active noise-cancelling headphones that let you switch them to passive mood and they sound like crap when you do that and everybody's just okay with it," but, that is not Apple.

(For the record, the AirPods Max are not on my shopping list.)

I'm fairly sure the downside is "they'd sound worse". Headphones like this are doing a lot of signal processing -- just hooking up an input directly to the driver is going to sound notably less good.

We can argue that it's a trade-off that you should be free to make for yourself... but it's very in-character for Apple to just take a strong stance on that kind of thing.

With a 20 hour battery life I'm personally okay with it. If it was more like 4-5 hours then the need for a passive mode would be more pressing.

Worse in this case is a complicated comparison. The computational stuff is cool and that will definitely stop working when drivers eventually rot out of support but for general audio quality these won’t be in any way comparable to a cheaper 3+ decade old set of headphones. A huge amount of the extra complexity is making up for using Bluetooth – that has advantages but it means that you have to support a protocol stack, codecs, etc. just to approach the quality that you’d get from wired headphones for $50 in the 1990s. If you really value not needing a cable or the computational features that may be worthwhile to you but it’s important to remember that a lot of the extra cost and reduced reliability and service lifetime is required by non-core functions.

Fair, but if Apple can replace the battery that means that so can anyone else, so yes, I expect you'll be able to replace the battery in 15 years, assuming anyone still makes the battery you need (which would apply to an easily replaceable battery as well).

Re: passive listening, I don't know why they didn't. But I think it is fair to assume there was a real trade-off. Do you really think a smart business like Apple would make their excessively expensive headphones less functional for absolutely no reason?