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> Yet another throw-away product from a self-proclaimed environmentally friendly company. $79 for airpods max battery service [0]. user-replaceable battery cer
by czr 6y ago
> Yet another throw-away product from a self-proclaimed environmentally friendly company.
$79 for airpods max battery service [0]. user-replaceable battery certainly would be nicer. but to describe as "throw-away" seems extreme.
[0] https://support.apple.com/airpods/repair/service#battery https://support.apple.com/airpods/repair/service#battery
- cloogshicer 6y agoI'd bet that Apple will stop servicing them after a few years though, as they do with all their products. And regular AirPods are definitely a throw-away product, since the 'battery service' is really just a full replacement. You'd have to physically destroy them to remove the battery.
- bb123 6y agoA few years? They still repair the iPhone 6, a phone thats 6 years old now. If that gives you another 2 years of use, thats a total of 8 years.
- cloogshicer 6y agoThat's fair if the device we're talking about is a phone. Those will of course become obsolete much sooner. But headphones don't get worse just by the passage of time. I'd love to still use them in 15+ years. Do you think Apple will still service them then? Also, why not make it so that they can be used passively? What's the downside?
- billiam 6y agoStainless and aluminum headphones that weigh a pound are made to last a century, not a couple of years. I have a closet full of incredibly durable, beautiful Apple products that will show up in an archeological dig of our sad epoch but were only supported by Apple for five years max.
- jacquesm 6y agoFrom Apple's point of view you are their ideal customer (not even selling your stuff to the secondary market when you upgrade) and proof that their strategy works.
- duhi88 6y agoSame reason they put the charging port for their mouse on the underside. It's a wireless device, and for some reason, they think that if it supports a wired mode, it won't be as special (or whatever their idiotic reasoning is). And, why use the lightning port?! Aside from the price, choosing to not use USB-C for a charging port killed it for me. I like being able to charge all my devices off one power brick, and I'm not spending $600 on headphones if I need a stupid lightning port for the next 6+ years.
- bfgoodrich 6y agoYou know that it's only lightning on the headset side, right? That it's USB-C on the other side, though you're free to include any adapter cable you'd like.
- horsawlarway 6y agoThis misses the point. EVERY device I carry with me charges via USB-C right now. My laptop, my work laptop, my headphones, my phone, my tablet/e-reader (remarkable). It's insanely liberating to know that I can pretty much always find a charger for everything, and I only ever need to pack a single wall-wart. Flying? One charger. Road trip? One charger. Biking to work? One charger. Better yet - Leave a charger at work, keep a charger at home, don't need to carry 5lbs back and forth every day. Forgot my charger? Every person I hang out with has a usb-c charger floating around somewhere. ---- You know what I really don't want to have to carry around anymore? Fucking cable adapters. You know what no one will have if I forget my charger? Fucking cable adapters. Honestly - I probably wouldn't have bought these headphones yet because I'm quite happy with my current headphones. But I'm very, very close to no longer even considering devices that ship without a USB-C port. And that's a shame, because I otherwise really like the Max, and probably would have slotted it in when my current cans die. Getting over the hump to convert to USB-C initially was fairly expensive, but my job is good and I can splurge. I don't want to go back.
- bfgoodrich 6y agoIf your complaint is carrying a USB to lightning cable -- though you keep jumping to wall warts/chargers and not a 17 gram cable -- yeah, I guess that's a big burden. But your comment seems like it might be contrived to begin with. This headset only really makes sense for iPhone users. That is the target. Those people are already carrying using lightning cables in their life. Pretty much anyone in the Apple ecosystem has to charge a multitude of things with lightning still.
- adamlett 6y agoAlso, why not make it so that they can be used passively? What's the downside? If by passively you mean plugged into a headphone port, the answer is that they can’t because they need power. Their big selling point is supposed to be computational audio. That obviously doesn’t work without the compute part, which in turn requires power.
- huffmsa 6y agoWith $200 billion in the bank, I'm sure Apple could have figured out how to get power to them over a wired connection
- rblatz 6y agoI’m sure the product team at Apple considered that use case, and it didn’t make sense to include it in this version due to time/weight/cost/complexity constraints.
- patja 6y agoKey features like the spatial effects only work with an iPad or mac. So now you have a dependency on Apple keeping that part going for years as well, if you want to keep using them as you would have expected to at launch.
- FabHK 6y ago> Key features like the spatial effects only work with an iPad or mac iPad or iPhone only, apparently. Not with a Mac or Apple TV, or, of course, anything else. (source: article)
- Joeri 6y agoNoise canceling heaphones used passively often sound a lot worse, because they can’t soundshape their way out of a suboptimal earshell and speaker design. Apple probably felt that either they had to compromise too much on the shape, or on the way they sounded passively, so they chose to just not allow for it entirely. I expect other manufacturers to follow suit because it creates more freedom in design.
- ssully 6y agoWas going to say I just had a family member get a battery replaced for their iPhone 6 last month. With that said, I still wish their stuff was more user friendly for self repairs.
- colejohnson66 6y agoThe battery is actually really easy to replace as it and the screen are the most common replacement(s). Remove the screws at the bottom, break the glue down, and unfold. Access to the screen and battery connectors are right there on top of the logic board. It’s so the service techs at the store can do it quicker. Anything else, they just give you a new device and ship the old one back to Apple. Previously (think iPhone 4S and prior), the phone opened from the back. So a screen replacement necessitated deconstructing the entire device. Could it be more accessible? Most likely. They could put in removable batteries (like older phones had), but they’ve chosen not to (presumably for space reasons (internal batteries take up less space)), and it seems the entire industry followed. But just because they’re not easily replaceable, doesn’t mean they’re not easily serviceable. It takes a bit, but an experienced person can do it about 30 minutes or even less. iFixIt’s guides help a lot here.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 8note 6y agoI've still got Sony monitor headphones that I've had for 20 odd years
- ComputerGuru 6y agoIt doesn’t matter how old it is, it matters when it was last sold. The iPhone 6 was last sold in 2017.
- jdxcode 6y agoSeptember 2018 actually
- ComputerGuru 6y agoThanks. That makes all the praise Apple gets for supporting “ancient phones like the iPhone 6” all the more laughable.
- sudosysgen 6y agoI've used and deeply enjoyed 25+ year old headphones. It's a different class of products.
- kd913 6y agoThe iphone 6 has a certificate store from Dec 2018 with no updates in site to the root store. Sites/Apps were already breaking on my parent's iphone 6.
- fastball 6y agoWhat are you talking about? Apple supports devices longer than any other manufacturer. Case in point is iOS 14, which came out a few months ago and still supports the iPhone 6s, which came out in 2015.
- cloogshicer 6y agoCopying my other comment in this thread: That's fair if the device we're talking about is a phone. Those will of course become obsolete much sooner. But headphones don't get worse just by the passage of time. I'd love to still use them in 15+ years. Do you think Apple will still service them then? Also, why not make it so that they can be used passively? What's the downside?
- fastball 6y agoFair, 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?
- ashtonkem 6y ago> 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.
- CharlesW 6y ago> And regular AirPods are definitely a throw-away product… Please don't — they're recyclable[1]. Recyclers wouldn't normally make money from recovering recyclable materials, but Apple pays[2] to make up the difference. [1] https://www.apple.com/shop/trade-in https://www.apple.com/shop/trade-in [2] https://onezero.medium.com/what-really-happens-to-airpods-when-they-die-9ba2fe97b346 https://onezero.medium.com/what-really-happens-to-airpods-wh...
- arvinsim 6y agoRecycling was a lie to sell more plastic, recycling industry veteran says https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24714880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24714880
- lylecheatham 6y agoYeah the plastic isn't recyclable, but e-waste is full of precious metals and structural metals like aluminum that can easily be recycled.
- sudosysgen 6y agoTo be fair, I wouldn't be surprised if there's less things if value in an airpod than it's worth. At the point where recycling in and of itself might be more polluting than mining the 0.02g of precious metals and the gram or two of other metals. The structure in airpods is mostly plastic and glue.
- ValentineC 6y ago> I'd bet that Apple will stop servicing them after a few years though, as they do with all their products. Apple's "few years" is "seven years after Apple stops selling them", for most countries: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624
- neuronic 6y agoSo you're fine throwing perfectly working 600€ headphones into the trash just because 7 years passed? Corporatism at it's finest. It's not ever about the use you get out of the product but how brushed the ego feels when swiping the credit card for Apple. This isn't a phone.
- outworlder 6y agoI am also bashing these headphones here but... How many headphones do you have that are still usable after 7 years?
- what_ever 6y agoWhat's the point of shoving all the aluminum there and making it so heavy if you are not planning to support them long enough? My plastic Bose QC 25 have been fine after 5 years of almost every day usage.
- ProZsolt 6y agoSame here, the only thing hate is the ear cushion. I had to replace it 2 times already
- x3ro 6y agoI own several (wired) headphones which are either approaching or older than 7 years and are in perfect condition. Sure, some had the ear pads or a cable replaced, but just like stereo speakers, there's really not much you can do to really break them.
- 6y ago
- yborg 6y ago$69 to replace the earpads, which is the most consumable part for me on cans. I have a pair of Audio Technica A700s, about $150 new that are now 12 years old; I'm on my 3rd set of earpads. AT gave me a new set free the first time I asked, and it cost me $10 with shipping to get new ones out of warranty. The current ones are 3rd party that are much better than the OEM pads and cost me ~$20.
- redisman 6y agoSame - my Audio Technicas are over 10 years old and when the earpads started to wear, they dug up some new earpads from the archives and it was definitely under $30 total.
- jschwartzi 6y agoSame but with my Sennheiser HD280s. I can still buy brand new earpads and a band pad online.
- spike021 6y agoI'm sure there will be 3rd party knockoff pads. Just look at the "fancy" Apple Watch wristbands with clasps that are IMO way more expensive than they have any business being. A plethora of 3rd party replacements exist, many much cheaper than Apple.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoPretty sure 3rd party will step in here.
- ebg13 6y ago> I have a pair of Audio Technica A700s, about $150 new that are now 12 years old; I'm on my 3rd set of earpads. So you buy a new set of earpads on those every 4 years. But we can also compare with the same-market-segment-as-AirPod-Max (wireless+ANC+mic) Bose QC35, where many people have to replace their earpads _every_ _year_⁰ at $35 a pair (or $20 for third party ones that might last longer but definitely feel worse). So the question I think will be how long the pads last on these. Do you have to replace them every year like with the Bose ones or only every 4 years? ⁰ - QC35 ear pad extreme comfort but lack of durability is basically a meme among owners now.
- bsamuels 6y agothey don't replace the battery when they perform battery service, they just replace the airpod entirely.