I still think the price of battery replacements is way too high from apple. It's $150 AUD here which feels far and beyond the cost of the part cost itself.

My phone spends a surprising amount of time on a charger. Most of the day while I'm at home, it's on a charger. I used to keep one at the office on my desk. The car has a charger too, and CarPlay so you might as well plug it in.

I'm not sure if it's a coping mechanism for poor battery life or just convenience.

For long days outdoors, I've also got a booster pack in the car with USB ports and an inverter (120V) that gets some use.

https://a.co/d/3g3F4eC

It can charge my MacBook Aur M2 once or my iPhone 16 Pro Max 3-4x. The iPhone itself can easily last flying and layovers all day.

I'm not sure how many times it would charge our phones. One day I think we did 4 different ones without issue.

When you're standing around at a BMX track, the functionality here actually made a lot of sense. It's not travel friendly in the same sense.

We have named ours "the cube".

Phone dead? Grab the cube. Tires soft? Grab the cube. Left the lights on in the car? You got it, the cube.

So much for their carbon neutrality.

From searched / online numbers, Apple has shipped 150 million AirPods since 2016. The AirPods 3 weigh 5.5g. The gross weight of a basic Tesla model 3 is 1760Kg. I picked a Tesla because it has plastic, metals, magnets, copper, lithium - similar materials.

In the ~10 years Apple has been making AirPods the materials used (by weight) is ~ 470 Tesla cars. So, per year (avg, not really good for this), resources consumed is about 47 Teslas (by weight).

Apple claims 40% of AirPods 3 are from recycled materials, so ~ 290 crashed / discarded Teslas could provide part of these materials - on average 29 per year.

I did the above because it perceptually relates to "real things". Teslas are NOT carbon neutral, very much carbon negative.

The reality / HORROR of waste is far, far worse. Any single plastic bag used to dispose of weekly waste likely weighs more than a pair of AirPods. Any can, made of steel or aluminum, could likely could make a lot of AirPods. The toy or product you bought that had a flap that you could lift up - there was likely a magnet under there. Any disposed single use battery might have zinc, if it was a CR2032 or "watch" battery, lithium (or silver).

Yes, AirPods might be disposable. Do they improve the qualify of life of the humans that purchase them? What is the real cost in perspective - with everything else taken into consideration? If the AirPods are used to listen to music or entertainment, then the positive mental health aspects are likely significant in a positive value direction.

- Your model neglects the charging case with its own battery and microcontroller.

- A Trsla is more likely to be recycled properly than the same amount of earbuds. Itbis also more recycleable because ofnthe high amount of steel and other bulk materials in it.

- The ratio of semiconductor electronics to total weight is extremely different between the two products. And semiconductor manufacturing is extremely resource intensive. All we typically see is squeaky clean neon lit clean rooms, which belie the use of high amounts of aggressive and toxic chemicals that have to be produced somewhere and generate waste that is never talked about.

The car recycling v.s. electronics recycling question is interesting. I once had a very interesting conversation with an electronics recycler on a plane trip - phones could not be recycled like other electronics because of some of the metals content - in particular beryllium copper content (used in spring contacts). He described it as a lot of electronics is ground up and a chemical processes used to extract the valuable elements. With phones the grinding up was the toxic / dangerous prohibited part.

I think the semiconductor numbers are more subtle though. It is sq. mm in the product and yield that are factors. A single power switching element in a Tesla will likely exceed the total silicon sq. mm usage in an AirPod. There is a lot of electronics in a Tesla. Some of the Tesla circuitry is more exotic, Silicon Carbide or GaN. I need to look into how much recovery / reprocessing silicon mfg is using for the reagents. The waste produced isn't as bad as it was in the Silicon Valley heyday where every original mfg site is now a superfund site with very large plumes of toxic waste in the subsoil.

Why would I buy a secondary battery for a single device when I could buy a backup battery that would charge my:

- Phone

- Watch

- Laptop (x2)

- Steam Deck

- Tire inflator

- Etc

/me shakes fist at cloud

For video conferencing only, it's pretty okay. It's that it's terrible for instant messaging and group chats and everything else that it gets used for that makes it an exercise in getting papercut to death.

Meet is a lot friendlier about not having to download a client and just use a web browser, so that's nice for clients. It's not great for messaging and group chats either though.

The problem with Zoom is that a lot of people use it for personal use, but aren't tech savvy enough, so occasionally you'll get PantsPooper69 joining a business meeting until they change it right after joining, if they notice.

Then never tried noise canceling this week while on the plane. I was like ... what happened? Now I am actively looking forward to it.

I also used to hate airpods for their disconnects but they have become more reliable, especially if you tell them to remain connected to the last device you manually connected to.

Meetings / video chats are an anti-pattern for sure. There is so much communication loss because of other factors - someone forgot to mute, someone forgot to mute, plus what not. You want your side of the communication to be pristine, and even if airpods flake out 1/20 times, it is not good. I agree with you on that.

I personally use a Plantronics DECT headset which is ~12 years old and on its third battery, but otherwise an excellent workhorse. If I couldn't get another one of these headsets, I'd probably move to Airpods.

It's harder to get Airpods to sound great because the mic must be located inside the ear.

Even phones and laptops I’m willing to give a pass on, ever since USB-C got “good enough” and the battery life long enough.

If I had one complaint it’d be that they should sell one fat phone with no camera hump (because it has more battery).

Edit: I should have clarified as AirPods Pro are the ones I have experience with; no idea how the original AirPods are. But the Pros are phenomenal.

Also, I think the white is ugly. But kids seem to love it.

Bluetooth honestly feels like a non-deterministic stack sometimes, it even took Apple 4 years to support it on the iPhone, how they have the AirPods working is close to magic.

They control the entire ecosystem and keep the variants and with it, the testing complexity, down as far as possible. That's how Apple stuff works so damn seamlessly.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world has to contend with dozens if not hundreds of Bluetooth chipsets, driver combinations, OS stacks... and each of these has their own quirks, and even if a bug gets fixed in a Bluetooth driver or controller firmware, good luck getting that distributed to users...

Also, they don’t have decent passive noise cancellation, so they’re not appropriate for mowing the lawn, etc.

My Sennheiser ear buds solve all these problems for a much lower price, and their sound quality is much better than the last pair of AirPods I tried.

To each their own, I guess.

An old groundskeepers trick for having music and ear protection is to get those big over ear protectors and put your buds on with that over them, just being mindful of volume of course.

With the big over ear hearing protectors that works much better than either in isolation.

Sadly, you usually have to find third party tests to find out what the passive noise isolation rating is for different brands. Manufacturers are terrible at marketing it.

But you can buy much cheaper headphones with the H1 chip for fast switching between devices by buying one of the Beats headphones. I love my $60 Beats Fiex with the double flange ear tips for traveling.

I don't know what the h1 chip has to do with the fast switching—surely this is a bluetooth protocol detail, yea?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_noise_control

> I don't know what the h1 chip has to do with the fast switching—surely this is a bluetooth protocol detail, yea?

A detail apparently no-one else bothers to deal with. The amount of hardware out there that does bluetooth the worst way possible is horrendous, and I will gladly pay extra to not have those in my life.

But, a sucker is born every minute, and it seems most of them find their way into control of our anti trust laws.

What exactly should be “free”? The hardware? It is very much worth the extra $40 for the Beat Flex to have seamless integration between all five of my devices. Let alone the much better ANC of the AirPods Pro (or the AirPods with ANC).

The ones you have are bulkier on top of that, the AirPods Pro have heart rate monitoring when I exercise.

I don't doubt the Airpods Pro is better. But not "pay an extra $200 better".[1] My ANC is pretty decent. Sound quality's quite good. Adjusts to my hearing frequencies. Etc.

(The A40 has a much better battery life).

[1] Unless you need a hearing aid. Then it's a steal.

The poster himself admits that after a meandering 2000 words...

> I found a lot of reactions to these products to be weirdly optimistic. Either I’m becoming more cynical with age and general tech fatigue, or certain people are easily impressed.

I have a few friends that bought every inexpensive alternative to AirPods, had a poor experience with all of them, finally relented and bought AirPods. Now they won’t use anything else. They spent more money avoiding AirPods than buying them.

Apple did a really good job with the AirPods.