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It is such a shame that nowadays even these high priced devices are contributing to the enormous e-waste we are all piling up. It used to be like this: You spe

It is such a shame that nowadays even these high priced devices are contributing to the enormous e-waste we are all piling up. It used to be like this: You spend A LOT of money for really nice headphones and use them (potentially) your lifetime. Or hand it down to your kids as your hearing gets worse. Sound doesn’t change much and the plug has been around for ages. Nowadays it goes like this: You buy your expensive Apple headphones. And even though Apple is probably supporting these longer than your average earbuds, after a while the bluetooth version will be obsolete and eventually the battery will have reached its end or inflate and become a safety risk. But because this was expensive and Apple supported it longer, it will have maybe lasted 10 years and one or two (pricey) battery replacements. This is still much worse than audiophile „analog“ headphones and I feel like this change is not adequately addressed. I would really hope to see more approaches like Shure‘s „Aonic 215 True Wireless“ which is an arguably quite ugly attachment to the drivers that have been around for a long while and just adds the wireless capabilities and bluetooth. It can also be used for any other Shure driver afaik. This way you keep the good old sound producing piece while swapping out the stuff that will degrade over time.

my123 6y ago
Apple's battery replacement fee for AirPods Max is $79. (available at https://support.apple.com/airpods/repair/service https://support.apple.com/airpods/repair/service)
- _vn5r 6y ago
  Do you think they'll still be selling them in 15 years?
  - LeonM 6y ago
    It's 'just' a battery. From an engineering standpoint it's just a component that Apple also doesn't produce themselves. If apple no longer sells the battery, it will be trivial to find a suitable replacement. As long as there is demand, there will be loads of shops able to replace the battery for you. The real question is: will people who buy $500 branded headphones really have their 5+ year old headphones repaired, or will they but the latest-and-greates shiny new thing?
    - ruph123 6y ago
      > If apple no longer sells the battery, it will be trivial to find a suitable replacement. As long as there is demand, there will be loads of shops able to replace the battery for you. Its a niche product. You will bot find replacement batteries for it. Heck it is even hard to find replacement batteries for 10 year old MacBooks. > The real question is: will people who buy $500 branded headphones really have their 5+ year old headphones repaired, or will they but the latest-and-greates shiny new thing? That’s my whole point. These things are not build (and bought) to last anymore but to be consumed. You used to retain some value when buying into expensive headphones.
      - turtlebits 6y ago
        Not sure if you're trying spread FUD, but NewerTech (owned by OWC) batteries are readily available for older Macbooks/Pros. Just checked their site and they have replacements for the 2008 Macbook.
    - r00fus 6y ago
      It's a battery of a popular but specific chemistry in a specific shape. Given this is Apple, those may be popular chemistry/shape, but if not, then in 10-15 years it's not going to be easy to find if Apple doesn't produce them. I'd say Apple keeps the supply chain around for maybe 5-10 years.
      - turtlebits 6y ago
        Apple still does battery service on iPods, as early as the 2009 iPod classic.
  - my123 6y ago
    Apple stops selling parts for old products 7 years after they are discontinued.
    - m463 6y ago
      I'm guessing the aftermarket may help with this.
    - babypuncher 6y ago
      Batteries are pretty simple, you can still get replacements for old iPods.
      - asdff 6y ago
        They were simple back in the days before Apple thought of brilliant ideas like glueing the battery to the laptop topcase. The old iPod is like a crude raspberry PI casemod in comparison, workable for anyone with nimble hands and good eyes.
yomly 6y ago
I bought my cans when I was fresh out of uni and entering the workforce. They were only £125 which in the grand scheme of things isn't that expensive but I wanted at least 5 years but ideally a lot longer out of them. My Bose QC1s barely lasted 15 months (thank god for Amazon's godtier returns policies at the time). Swore off Bose and got some Beyerdynamics. I think I did have some problems actually but I returned those and my current cans are ~6 years old IIRC I like the Bose sports earbuds, seems like no one else has worked out that IEMs are a terrible idea for sports sigh though now I just use bone conduction
- RandomWorker 6y ago
  I’ve had my q15’s 7 years now. They use aaa batteries and I use rechargeable batteries. I used a set of two for 4 years, now on the second set. Replaced the cups for 50usd, but now the head band is going... I hope to replace them.
jp555 6y ago
Um, how many lifetimes have audiophile headphones been available? If there have been people passing headphones down to their kids, I bet that would be a lot smaller group than you are suggesting. A pastoral fantasy.
- bonaldi 6y ago
  My Sony MDR-V6s were purchased by a relative in the 1980s for use with a vinyl deck and are connected to a Mac today, having worked with cassettes, minidiscs, CDs and iPods along the way. With nothing more than replacement earpads they still sound great. Will my children use them? Possibly not. Is it still better than a reasonable anticipated lifespan for AirPods Max? Yes.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    The real question needs to be how long good wireless headphones have ever lasted. Airpods Max don't compete with any of these "um, see?" headphones people are listing. Very few people these days are settling for wired headphones. I know I got the hell out of that tech as soon as I could.
    - AstralStorm 6y ago
      The solution is to sell the transmitter and/or battery separately, with the earphones using a standardized connector, such as MMCX. Earphones stay, receiver may get replaced.
      - babypuncher 6y ago
        That sounds clunky
        Symbiote 6y ago
        "...so let's burn some more of the world."
AshamedCaptain 6y ago
Bluetooth audio profile has gone unchanged for 20 years. I still have non-A2DP headsets (the early 2000s ones you see in movies) that pair perfectly with a modern laptop, and Bluetooth 1.x PDAs (~2003ish) that pairs correctly with a modern BT headset (in HSP profile, so audio quality is crap, but then again it's the best the PDA could do). Battery is the much bigger problem.
- ModernMech 6y ago
  > Bluetooth audio profile has gone unchanged for 20 years. And yet I can't sync my phone with my car, or my headphones with my laptop.
  - babypuncher 6y ago
    This is not by design, something in your chain is not fully compliant with the bluetooth spec.
- ascagnel_ 6y ago
  > Battery is the much bigger problem. It's a big worry on the smaller AirPods, since those are almost 100% battery and glued together (and I'm not sure how you could build a product like that in a way that's both small and has a replaceable battery). For the big cans, you can pay $80USD to get the batteries replaced if the headphones are out of warranty (and, presumably, the warranty will cover the full cost of a battery replacement).
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    AppleCare+ does cover the full cost of battery replacement, but only for 2 years. I don't know what threshold they set for replacement, but IIRC it's 80% of max capacity for their laptops. I don't know how these new headphones perform, but I would doubt that many people would get below 80% in two years (even with increased usage due to COVID). It might still be worth it to get the warranty though, since it covers accidental damage (with a deductible), and the cost for the warranty is the same as the cost for battery replacement ($80).
danieldk 6y ago
Nowadays it goes like this: You buy your expensive Apple headphones. And even though Apple is probably supporting these longer than your average earbuds, after a while the bluetooth version will be obsolete and eventually the battery will have reached its end or inflate and become a safety risk. I agree, they really are consumables. I had two pairs of regular AirPods. All of them barely last through a meeting now. It's not like I have used them intensively, some meetings every week, and for listening to podcasts when I am cycling. Not only can a good wired headphone last you for many years, if you are not an audiophile, you can buy a reasonable Sennheiser for a fraction of the cost of the AirPods Max or even AirPods Pro. The AirPods and AirPods Pro are great if you need something for on the go, but you have to factor in that you have to replace them every two years or so. (I love the Pro's transparency mode for cycling. However, they are unusable for me when walking due to the 'thumping' sound that many others also suffer from.)
- gui_tar_gz 6y ago
  The ‘thumping‘ sound on the Pro model is a reason for a warranty replacement. Apple has acknowledged the mass occurring defect and ships a replacement after contacting the support (you have to send the faulty item back).
- fomine3 6y ago
  Maybe AirPods Max's battery lasts better than AirPods because its space and weight isn't limited like that so Apple can configure looser max/min battery use level to lasts more.
chrisseaton 6y ago
> It used to be like this: You spend A LOT of money for really nice headphones and use them (potentially) your lifetime. Or hand it down to your kids as your hearing gets worse. I think this is a fantasy. How many decades have there been high-quality headphones for this to be a thing that you think is supposedly the traditional way to do it? Did your parents hand you down their headphones? Surely your grandparents didn't hand down theirs? So it maybe happened once? For a few people?
- lm28469 6y ago
  A lifetime is maybe a fantasy but both my shure se215 and dt770 are 6 or 7 years old and I expect them to last a while given they're in perfect working order after daily use for so long. I highly doubt these new headphones with non user replaceable batteries would survive 2 years of daily usage, that would be 2+ full cycles per day for the airpods, seeing how tiny the batteries are I don't think they'd perform very good after even a year
  - why_Mr_Anderson 6y ago
    Are you s(h)ure that you wrote correct model? 215s are in-ears and while excellent sound-wise, their cables break quite easily with frequent use. I'm on my 3rd pair and I'll most likely still buy new ones after the inevitable destruction of the pair I'm currently using.
    - so_this_is_me 6y ago
      Similarly I love my 215's and even though the cable is a bit chunkier than some other brands they don't seem to survive my daily use for more than 1-2 years. That said being able to just buy a new cable and whip the old one off is far nicer than having to buy a whole new pair of headphones.
    - lm28469 6y ago
      > their cables break quite easily with frequent use I replaced them with cheap knockoff cables and they're lasting much longer. I haven't replaced them for years now
NDizzle 6y ago
My Sennheiser HD580s from 1999 are still in use!
cactus2093 6y ago
Something made of 380 grams of material that takes up maybe half of a cubic foot of space, that you use every day for 2-4 years really isn't that big of deal in terms of waste. Single-use plastics like takeout containers and other food packaging, and plastic/foam packaging in shipping boxes seem orders of magnitude worse. And we're not running out of landfill space anyway. The only way forward I see is to make significant cuts to some of this really low-hanging fruit of single-use plastics (which also have other harms like environmental micro-plastics and inherently requiring fossil fuel use), maybe come up with better ways to recycle the aluminum and stainless steel in a product like these headphones, but most of all to move away from fossil fuels in the manufacturing chain and in the operation of landfills. The cat is already out of the bag, people enjoy getting new toys like these and the fact that hundreds of millions of people around the world have the disposable income to afford to buy products like this if they want to is amazing. I don't think talking up the good old days when disposable income was a lot more scarce and consumer goods were relatively much much more expensive is going to make much of a difference.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
Well, it's no surprise that a product with a battery is less resilient than a product without one. But those products don't compete with each other. Also, cheaply available, standardized batteries don't address your e-waste concern either. So your post doesn't seem much different than someone being indignant or even sanctimonious about the wireless preference of others.
- ruph123 6y ago
  > Well, it's no surprise that a product with a battery is less resilient than a product without one. But those products don't compete with each other. But they _are_. By now I have seen many review videos that compare them with the typical audiophile/sound production headphones. E.g. Marques compared them with the Sennheiser HD800S [1]. > Also, cheaply available, standardized batteries don't address your e-waste concern either. So your post doesn't seem much different than someone being indignant or even sanctimonious about the wireless preference of others. Does it not? If I can reuse the housing, the drivers, earpads, headband and just need to replace the battery when its dead, does this not reduce e-waste? Also I do not condemn wireless headphones in general, I said it is a shame that products which could be used for many decades in the past become e-waste rather quickly in today's world. And that I would prefer the approach Shure is taking to reduce waste and only replace the highly degrading components (at least with their monitors). [1]: https://youtu.be/UdfSrJvqY_E?t=609 https://youtu.be/UdfSrJvqY_E?t=609
criddell 6y ago
A lot has changed. For better or worse, a lot of headphones are chosen for how they look, not how they work. How many fashion items do you use for your lifetime and pass them down to your kids? People do that with expensive watches but I'm having a hard time thinking of other fashion items that are durable across generations.
robotresearcher 6y ago
> It used to be like this... It still is. Good quality wired headphones are easily available and more affordable than ever.
CharlesW 6y ago
> It is such a shame that nowadays even these high priced devices are contributing to the enormous e-waste we are all piling up. That's an excellent point. No tech product can be a "BIFL" (Buy It For Life) product, but it'd be nice if all companies were as good as Apple at making their products recyclable, and making recycling easy. [1] https://www.apple.com/environment/ https://www.apple.com/environment/ [2] https://www.apple.com/shop/trade-in https://www.apple.com/shop/trade-in
- Hamuko 6y ago
  The AirPods are notorious for being absolutely shitty to recycle though. They're tiny, held on with glue and have batteries inside that you have to get out in order to recycle the rest of them.
throwaway894345 6y ago
I'm of the impression that Apple implements a recycling program for their devices to address the e-waste concern. Provided their recycling program is credible, this seems like a reasonable solution--better even than analog headphones that will still go bad eventually with the user on the hook for locating a credible electronics recycling program (and more likely, throwing them in the dump).
- snthd 6y ago
  >I'm of the impression that Apple implements a recycling program for their devices to address the e-waste concern. In the PR sense, yes. But it's disingenuous - they recycle (shred) reusable products. 2017 - Apple Forces Recyclers to Shred All iPhones and MacBooks https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphon... 2020 - Apple says it never ‘recycles’ old devices if they can still be used. Its lawsuit against a Canadian recycler suggests otherwise. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-geep-iphone-recycle-shred/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-g...
majormajor 6y ago
> It used to be like this: You spend A LOT of money for really nice headphones and use them (potentially) your lifetime. Or hand it down to your kids as your hearing gets worse. Sound doesn’t change much and the plug has been around for ages. That's a pretty tiny market. It was also "you spend ten dollars at the grocery store for cheap Sony headphones or earbuds and then they break and then you do it again. Sound quality is terrible." They did have fewer batteries, though, at least, in terms of the disposability problem.
xadhominemx 6y ago
The typical person generates many tons of waste per year. A pair of headphones would not even qualify as a drop in the bucket
- babypuncher 6y ago
  It was sillier when people were complaining about the wastefulness of the original AirPods. The real crime there was the fact that you spent $150 on something that only lasts a few years. As far as waste goes, I think two 20 oz soda bottles contribute more to waste than a pair of tiny wireless earbuds, and those only get used for an hour before being discarded.
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    Two large plastic bottles are easily recycled, or even washed and refilled (e.g. in Germany). The earbuds don't even have a replaceable battery. They are deliberately designed to fuck the environment. (Or maximise profit, if you'd like the corporate phrasing.)
    - pseudonamed 6y ago
      We try hard to buy things that are not wrapped in plastic and yet we still throw away at least a 10l bag of unrecyclable thin plastic every two weeks. Even a new pair of AirPods once a year would pale in comparison to all my other environmental waste.
  - megablast 6y ago
    How are you measuring the impact of waste.
    - babypuncher 6y ago
      Looking at it's volume, and whether or not it is biodegradable. People have already pointed out that plastic bottles are recyclable, to which I respond: so are AirPods. They're both made of plastic and other materials that can technically be recycled. The problem is, in both cases, it is cheaper for companies to source new materials than to try and recycle the stuff that ends up in our blue bins. So they all end up in landfills eventually, often overseas in countries willing to take our "recyclables" off our hands in exchange for money. I switched from buying beverages in 2L plastic bottles to buying cans, and I think the positive impact there greatly outweighs the negative impact of tossing my earbuds in a couple of years. The aluminum is infinitely (and easily) recyclable, unlike most plastics. The cardboard the cans come packaged in is renewable and biodegradable.
cossatot 6y ago
The use cases for many people have changed dramatically as well. I think if I was an audiophile, and used headphones primarily to lie on the bed smoking hash and listening to Steely Dan, I would share your concerns. But I use headphones for two things: talking on the phone/listening to music when I walk my dogs or to pick up my kid, and for meetings at work (I'm long-term remote). Having cordless technology is nice for the former, where it replaced cheap wired earbuds that are always tangled in my pocket and never last for more than a year or so. It's critical for the second, so that I am not chained to my desk for the 1-2.5 hour meetings that I have multiple times a week. And I have to talk with my use cases, not just listen. The heirloom-quality audiophile headphones are simply not workable for my use case, and I am sure that I am not alone here. And my father, who I am pretty sure did spend lots of time lying on the bed smoking hash and listening to Steely Dan, did not ever pass his headphones down to me.
UShouldBWorking 6y ago
Apple products are for rich idiots or idiots that want to appear rich, we don't need to worry about their problems. It's like saying revolvers make it too easy to play Russian roulette.
nrvn 6y ago
There actually exist bluetooth adapters for wired headphones. Unfortunately, they haven’t tracked as much hype and attention as wireless headphones. But we all know that irrational customer behavior is the foundation of modern consumerist economy. So, Buy It For Life (and Hand It Down To Your Kids) strategy is elitist in the same way having the basic understanding of thermodynamics is - only a very small amount of people have and appreciate those ideas.
- babypuncher 6y ago
  Walking around with wired headphones plugged into a bluetooth dongle kind of defeats the purpose, no? People buy wireless headphones because they don't want to be encumbered by wires while walking around. An adapter like that is yet another thing I need to put in my bag, and lacks at least some of the convenience that comes with having headphones that just wirelessly connect to my phone natively.
  - daxelrod 6y ago
    Plenty of Bluetooth adapters are designed for a specific headphone model and sit flush against the cup without additional wires. When they're attached, it's easy to forget that they're not built in. See https://thebtunes.com/ https://thebtunes.com/ for example. A huge caveat is that if the headphones have ANC, you now have two sets of batteries and two power switches to worry about, so they're a lot less seamless.
  - astrange 6y ago
    If you have a good pair of wired headphones it's actually quite a nice compromise, because it lets you use them at home without being stuck in your chair. I'm using a Bluetooth headphone amp right now, it's very light and fits in my pocket, which is more than I can say about my laptop.
undefined1 6y ago
the phones are even more of an environmental disaster. planned obsolescence that leads to phones being upgraded every year or two, and barely working after 5 years, is so so wasteful.
gnicholas 6y ago
Fair point, though I'm not sure there are enough people who are wealthy enough to pay $550 for headphones to meaningfully contribute to e-waste. Regular AirPods, which are not repairable AFAIK, are more affordable and widely used. But they are also very small, so even if people replaced them every 2-3 years, the amount of waste would be minuscule compared to their waste from takeout containers, food waste, and other refuse. I suppose you could also factor in the energy spent producing and shipping the units, but it's not as if repairable headphones (all of which are much larger than regular AirPods) don't also incur these costs when they are produced and repaired. So while I agree that it would be great if we could have more repairable things, I'm not sure that this is an especially good example of a product that will meaningfully contribute to e-waste.
babypuncher 6y ago
I'm not sure how to reconcile your two "wants" here. A battery and a current bluetooth chip are required for any pair of headphones to function wirelessly, no matter what. Bluetooth has been pretty good about keeping backwards compatibility, so I wouldn't worry about these becoming unusable when a new version of the BT spec comes out. If you don't actually "want" a pair of wireless headphones, then the AirPods Max aren't targeting you at all. Absolutely nobody should buy these if they don't intend to use them in wireless mode, there are better wired headphones available for less money.
- ruph123 6y ago
  I’m not sure you “want” to understand me. I treat them as __headphones__ and simply stated that it was a shame that (esp. expensive) headphones which used to hold up for a long time are now worthless after a few years. That’s it.
Jiejeing 6y ago
I like the Fiio BTA10, which is a bluetooth (aptX-compatible) add-on for Audio-Technica MSR7 & M50X (two different versions of the add-on). Battery life is not great (a few hours), but it is a small addon which fits nicely into the headphones, and can be easily replaced when it breaks or dies.
- ruph123 6y ago
  Now that sounds very interesting. Thank you for this!
- Fnoord 6y ago
  They appear to have more clever solutions to make a wired device (such as a headphone or TV) wireless (with a myriad of codecs and Bluetooth 5.x).
tmpz22 6y ago
I've had to replace my airpods 2 times in 3 years. Once because they slid out of my pocket (the find my airpods app is useless) and again because the battery and speaker degraded after less then 15 months of use. Have others had similar experiences with the airpods?
- brandall10 6y ago
  If you use your Airpods enough (ie. all day at work, on phone calls, etc) - you can easily wear out the battery in that amount of time. 2-3 charges per day in 15 months gets to about the 1000 charge area where the battery begins to drop quickly. The Pros also had a design defect that led to a crackle. I had both my Pro earpieces replaced a few months back - independently, for that issue. In any case, Airpods are meant to be disposable. Apple does not replace the batteries on them for battery service issues, you just get new ones. The Maxes are different, the battery can be serviced, and it will last considerably longer - at about 5x the life per charge, you will likely exhaust the shelf life of the battery before it dies from usage.
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    The battery life in mine has dropped somewhat, but I use only one at a time since I'm not keen on having them transmitting signal through my brain. (I know there isn't science that says it is bad for you, but AFAIK there hasn't been testing of this type of transmission quite so close to the brain.) One upside of this is that I am charging one AirPod at all times, which basically means I never run out of battery.
tmoravec 6y ago
These are wireless problems, not specific to Apple head/earphones. The attached wireless module like the Shure's one (and there's plenty of others, for example FiiO) do not address the environmental impact at all. Because what breaks is the battery and that's the environmentally unfriendly stuff - the drivers are nothing in comparison.
jimbokun 6y ago
In my experience, it used to be like this: Use the crappy headphones that came bundled with the portable cassette player, which before too long broke or wore out, and buy another crappy pair because that's what you can afford. Or buy a new cassette player or portable CD player to replace what you had. Waste from consumer products didn't start with blue tooth headphones.
heipei 6y ago
For what it's worth, the wireless headphones mentioned by the review as the best previous set (the Bang & Olufsen / Beoplay H9i) do come with a user-removable battery and do allow listening via USB-C as well. Somehow these never get mentioned in mainstream reviews, only Bose and Sony, even though they have superior fit & finish and, according to this review, sound as well.
teekert 6y ago
It used to be like this: Every 2 years I bought new Sennheiser cx300II's (until I somehow got a pair that seemed to lack bass) because the cable broke. Now my 16$ qcy's (BT) are 3 years old and still fine.
theodric 6y ago
While Bluetooth may eventually drop backward compatibility, my daily driver headphones are four c.2007 Dell BH200 A2DP sets. Highly adequate. All are on their second battery, a commodity 500mAh LiPo from eBay. To hell with this overpriced Apple trash.
kristjansson 6y ago
The batteries are going to be a consumable if users continue to demand a wireless experience, which most of them seem to prefer, regardless of whether that’s delivered as a dongle or integrated into the headset. It would be nice if we didn’t demand so many things with batteries in them, but that isn’t IMO an Apple problem, that’s a demand pattern. Encasing them in the product might even keep batteries out of landfill. An old AA or laptop battery is easy to pitch, a $550 headset is much more likely to be repaired by someone in a position to recycle the battery. Bluetooth and the integrated form factor is a risk, but I think that’s not a ten year concern. It would be nice if they had a physical port for the eventuality though.
drzaiusapelord 6y ago
Simple machines vs complex ones I guess. A bicycle could be passed down the generations but not an electric car. Lithium wears down, software stops being updated, parts stop being produced, etc. That's the price you pay for feaures. Clunky wired 1970s headphones don't fit my use case which requires headphones to be compact and wireless. The same way my electric car outperforms a super-serviceable Model T.
2muchcoffeeman 6y ago
Check out the Aiaiai TMA-2 for a modular headphone system. https://aiaiai.audio/headphones/tma-2 https://aiaiai.audio/headphones/tma-2 Or the Print Plus 3D printable headphones. https://www.print.plus/ https://www.print.plus/
paulcole 6y ago
If you’re having kids to hand things down to then the added environmental cost of the headphones you buy is a microscopic rounding error.
Johnny555 6y ago
Or hand it down to your kids as your hearing gets worse Maybe a few people hand down usable audio equipment, but the only stereo equipment I got from my parents was an 8-track tape collection and a console stereo. For you youngsters that don't know what that is, it's a stereo system (usually tuner + turntable + speakers, some of the more modern ones had a cassette player too) built into a piece of furniture the size of a dresser. My parents, being the audio connoisseurs they were, had an 8-track player that sat on top. https://www.google.com/search?q=console+stereo&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=console+stereo&tbm=isch
djrogers 6y ago
> It used to be like this: You spend A LOT of money for really nice headphones and use them (potentially) your lifetime. Or hand it down to your kids as your hearing gets worse. I have never, ever, ever known this to have happened. I’ve never once seen a 20+ year old set of headphones, let alone one that has been handed down through generations. That just silly talk. Not to mention the fact that even if this had happened in a handful of times, the headphones would have outlived multiple cabinet sized sets of audio equipment, and several hundred pounds worth of record, 8 track, tape, and CD players - all of which wound up in a landfill somewhere. So you’ve reused the smallest component of all of that for what?
- ruph123 6y ago
  Look through the other comments for examples.
dkdk8283 6y ago
The pollution coming from China and India can’t even begin to hold a candle to what’s wasted domestically in the USA.
coryfklein 6y ago
> contributing to the enormous e-waste we are all piling up Sincerely asking here, but what do you see are the most significant negative externalities here? We're not exactly running out of landfill space anytime soon, and most landfills in the US are very careful to ensure waste doesn't pollute the surrounding environment. Is it the greenhouse gas emissions? I'm curious how the total emissions on buying a pair of headphones every 2-5 years compares to other everyday activities like shipping my weekly usage of broccoli to the grocery store for me to eat. Is it the concern of labor going to waste? Something else?

my123 6y ago

Apple's battery replacement fee for AirPods Max is $79. (available at https://support.apple.com/airpods/repair/service https://support.apple.com/airpods/repair/service)

_vn5r 6y ago
Do you think they'll still be selling them in 15 years?
- LeonM 6y ago
  It's 'just' a battery. From an engineering standpoint it's just a component that Apple also doesn't produce themselves. If apple no longer sells the battery, it will be trivial to find a suitable replacement. As long as there is demand, there will be loads of shops able to replace the battery for you. The real question is: will people who buy $500 branded headphones really have their 5+ year old headphones repaired, or will they but the latest-and-greates shiny new thing?
  - ruph123 6y ago
    > If apple no longer sells the battery, it will be trivial to find a suitable replacement. As long as there is demand, there will be loads of shops able to replace the battery for you. Its a niche product. You will bot find replacement batteries for it. Heck it is even hard to find replacement batteries for 10 year old MacBooks. > The real question is: will people who buy $500 branded headphones really have their 5+ year old headphones repaired, or will they but the latest-and-greates shiny new thing? That’s my whole point. These things are not build (and bought) to last anymore but to be consumed. You used to retain some value when buying into expensive headphones.
    - turtlebits 6y ago
      Not sure if you're trying spread FUD, but NewerTech (owned by OWC) batteries are readily available for older Macbooks/Pros. Just checked their site and they have replacements for the 2008 Macbook.
  - r00fus 6y ago
    It's a battery of a popular but specific chemistry in a specific shape. Given this is Apple, those may be popular chemistry/shape, but if not, then in 10-15 years it's not going to be easy to find if Apple doesn't produce them. I'd say Apple keeps the supply chain around for maybe 5-10 years.
    - turtlebits 6y ago
      Apple still does battery service on iPods, as early as the 2009 iPod classic.
- my123 6y ago
  Apple stops selling parts for old products 7 years after they are discontinued.
  - m463 6y ago
    I'm guessing the aftermarket may help with this.
  - babypuncher 6y ago
    Batteries are pretty simple, you can still get replacements for old iPods.
    - asdff 6y ago
      They were simple back in the days before Apple thought of brilliant ideas like glueing the battery to the laptop topcase. The old iPod is like a crude raspberry PI casemod in comparison, workable for anyone with nimble hands and good eyes.

yomly 6y ago

I bought my cans when I was fresh out of uni and entering the workforce. They were only £125 which in the grand scheme of things isn't that expensive but I wanted at least 5 years but ideally a lot longer out of them. My Bose QC1s barely lasted 15 months (thank god for Amazon's godtier returns policies at the time). Swore off Bose and got some Beyerdynamics. I think I did have some problems actually but I returned those and my current cans are ~6 years old IIRC I like the Bose sports earbuds, seems like no one else has worked out that IEMs are a terrible idea for sports sigh though now I just use bone conduction

RandomWorker 6y ago
I’ve had my q15’s 7 years now. They use aaa batteries and I use rechargeable batteries. I used a set of two for 4 years, now on the second set. Replaced the cups for 50usd, but now the head band is going... I hope to replace them.

jp555 6y ago

Um, how many lifetimes have audiophile headphones been available? If there have been people passing headphones down to their kids, I bet that would be a lot smaller group than you are suggesting. A pastoral fantasy.

bonaldi 6y ago
My Sony MDR-V6s were purchased by a relative in the 1980s for use with a vinyl deck and are connected to a Mac today, having worked with cassettes, minidiscs, CDs and iPods along the way. With nothing more than replacement earpads they still sound great. Will my children use them? Possibly not. Is it still better than a reasonable anticipated lifespan for AirPods Max? Yes.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  The real question needs to be how long good wireless headphones have ever lasted. Airpods Max don't compete with any of these "um, see?" headphones people are listing. Very few people these days are settling for wired headphones. I know I got the hell out of that tech as soon as I could.
  - AstralStorm 6y ago
    The solution is to sell the transmitter and/or battery separately, with the earphones using a standardized connector, such as MMCX. Earphones stay, receiver may get replaced.
    - babypuncher 6y ago
      That sounds clunky
      - Symbiote 6y ago
        "...so let's burn some more of the world."

AshamedCaptain 6y ago

Bluetooth audio profile has gone unchanged for 20 years. I still have non-A2DP headsets (the early 2000s ones you see in movies) that pair perfectly with a modern laptop, and Bluetooth 1.x PDAs (~2003ish) that pairs correctly with a modern BT headset (in HSP profile, so audio quality is crap, but then again it's the best the PDA could do). Battery is the much bigger problem.

ModernMech 6y ago
> Bluetooth audio profile has gone unchanged for 20 years. And yet I can't sync my phone with my car, or my headphones with my laptop.
- babypuncher 6y ago
  This is not by design, something in your chain is not fully compliant with the bluetooth spec.
ascagnel_ 6y ago
> Battery is the much bigger problem. It's a big worry on the smaller AirPods, since those are almost 100% battery and glued together (and I'm not sure how you could build a product like that in a way that's both small and has a replaceable battery). For the big cans, you can pay $80USD to get the batteries replaced if the headphones are out of warranty (and, presumably, the warranty will cover the full cost of a battery replacement).
- gnicholas 6y ago
  AppleCare+ does cover the full cost of battery replacement, but only for 2 years. I don't know what threshold they set for replacement, but IIRC it's 80% of max capacity for their laptops. I don't know how these new headphones perform, but I would doubt that many people would get below 80% in two years (even with increased usage due to COVID). It might still be worth it to get the warranty though, since it covers accidental damage (with a deductible), and the cost for the warranty is the same as the cost for battery replacement ($80).

danieldk 6y ago

Nowadays it goes like this: You buy your expensive Apple headphones. And even though Apple is probably supporting these longer than your average earbuds, after a while the bluetooth version will be obsolete and eventually the battery will have reached its end or inflate and become a safety risk. I agree, they really are consumables. I had two pairs of regular AirPods. All of them barely last through a meeting now. It's not like I have used them intensively, some meetings every week, and for listening to podcasts when I am cycling. Not only can a good wired headphone last you for many years, if you are not an audiophile, you can buy a reasonable Sennheiser for a fraction of the cost of the AirPods Max or even AirPods Pro. The AirPods and AirPods Pro are great if you need something for on the go, but you have to factor in that you have to replace them every two years or so. (I love the Pro's transparency mode for cycling. However, they are unusable for me when walking due to the 'thumping' sound that many others also suffer from.)

gui_tar_gz 6y ago
The ‘thumping‘ sound on the Pro model is a reason for a warranty replacement. Apple has acknowledged the mass occurring defect and ships a replacement after contacting the support (you have to send the faulty item back).
fomine3 6y ago
Maybe AirPods Max's battery lasts better than AirPods because its space and weight isn't limited like that so Apple can configure looser max/min battery use level to lasts more.

chrisseaton 6y ago

> It used to be like this: You spend A LOT of money for really nice headphones and use them (potentially) your lifetime. Or hand it down to your kids as your hearing gets worse. I think this is a fantasy. How many decades have there been high-quality headphones for this to be a thing that you think is supposedly the traditional way to do it? Did your parents hand you down their headphones? Surely your grandparents didn't hand down theirs? So it maybe happened once? For a few people?

lm28469 6y ago
A lifetime is maybe a fantasy but both my shure se215 and dt770 are 6 or 7 years old and I expect them to last a while given they're in perfect working order after daily use for so long. I highly doubt these new headphones with non user replaceable batteries would survive 2 years of daily usage, that would be 2+ full cycles per day for the airpods, seeing how tiny the batteries are I don't think they'd perform very good after even a year
- why_Mr_Anderson 6y ago
  Are you s(h)ure that you wrote correct model? 215s are in-ears and while excellent sound-wise, their cables break quite easily with frequent use. I'm on my 3rd pair and I'll most likely still buy new ones after the inevitable destruction of the pair I'm currently using.
  - so_this_is_me 6y ago
    Similarly I love my 215's and even though the cable is a bit chunkier than some other brands they don't seem to survive my daily use for more than 1-2 years. That said being able to just buy a new cable and whip the old one off is far nicer than having to buy a whole new pair of headphones.
  - lm28469 6y ago
    > their cables break quite easily with frequent use I replaced them with cheap knockoff cables and they're lasting much longer. I haven't replaced them for years now

NDizzle 6y ago

My Sennheiser HD580s from 1999 are still in use!

cactus2093 6y ago

Something made of 380 grams of material that takes up maybe half of a cubic foot of space, that you use every day for 2-4 years really isn't that big of deal in terms of waste. Single-use plastics like takeout containers and other food packaging, and plastic/foam packaging in shipping boxes seem orders of magnitude worse. And we're not running out of landfill space anyway. The only way forward I see is to make significant cuts to some of this really low-hanging fruit of single-use plastics (which also have other harms like environmental micro-plastics and inherently requiring fossil fuel use), maybe come up with better ways to recycle the aluminum and stainless steel in a product like these headphones, but most of all to move away from fossil fuels in the manufacturing chain and in the operation of landfills. The cat is already out of the bag, people enjoy getting new toys like these and the fact that hundreds of millions of people around the world have the disposable income to afford to buy products like this if they want to is amazing. I don't think talking up the good old days when disposable income was a lot more scarce and consumer goods were relatively much much more expensive is going to make much of a difference.

hombre_fatal 6y ago

Well, it's no surprise that a product with a battery is less resilient than a product without one. But those products don't compete with each other. Also, cheaply available, standardized batteries don't address your e-waste concern either. So your post doesn't seem much different than someone being indignant or even sanctimonious about the wireless preference of others.

ruph123 6y ago
> Well, it's no surprise that a product with a battery is less resilient than a product without one. But those products don't compete with each other. But they _are_. By now I have seen many review videos that compare them with the typical audiophile/sound production headphones. E.g. Marques compared them with the Sennheiser HD800S [1]. > Also, cheaply available, standardized batteries don't address your e-waste concern either. So your post doesn't seem much different than someone being indignant or even sanctimonious about the wireless preference of others. Does it not? If I can reuse the housing, the drivers, earpads, headband and just need to replace the battery when its dead, does this not reduce e-waste? Also I do not condemn wireless headphones in general, I said it is a shame that products which could be used for many decades in the past become e-waste rather quickly in today's world. And that I would prefer the approach Shure is taking to reduce waste and only replace the highly degrading components (at least with their monitors). [1]: https://youtu.be/UdfSrJvqY_E?t=609 https://youtu.be/UdfSrJvqY_E?t=609

criddell 6y ago

A lot has changed. For better or worse, a lot of headphones are chosen for how they look, not how they work. How many fashion items do you use for your lifetime and pass them down to your kids? People do that with expensive watches but I'm having a hard time thinking of other fashion items that are durable across generations.

robotresearcher 6y ago

> It used to be like this... It still is. Good quality wired headphones are easily available and more affordable than ever.

CharlesW 6y ago

> It is such a shame that nowadays even these high priced devices are contributing to the enormous e-waste we are all piling up. That's an excellent point. No tech product can be a "BIFL" (Buy It For Life) product, but it'd be nice if all companies were as good as Apple at making their products recyclable, and making recycling easy. [1] https://www.apple.com/environment/ https://www.apple.com/environment/ [2] https://www.apple.com/shop/trade-in https://www.apple.com/shop/trade-in

Hamuko 6y ago
The AirPods are notorious for being absolutely shitty to recycle though. They're tiny, held on with glue and have batteries inside that you have to get out in order to recycle the rest of them.

throwaway894345 6y ago

I'm of the impression that Apple implements a recycling program for their devices to address the e-waste concern. Provided their recycling program is credible, this seems like a reasonable solution--better even than analog headphones that will still go bad eventually with the user on the hook for locating a credible electronics recycling program (and more likely, throwing them in the dump).

snthd 6y ago
>I'm of the impression that Apple implements a recycling program for their devices to address the e-waste concern. In the PR sense, yes. But it's disingenuous - they recycle (shred) reusable products. 2017 - Apple Forces Recyclers to Shred All iPhones and MacBooks https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphon... 2020 - Apple says it never ‘recycles’ old devices if they can still be used. Its lawsuit against a Canadian recycler suggests otherwise. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-geep-iphone-recycle-shred/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-g...

majormajor 6y ago

> It used to be like this: You spend A LOT of money for really nice headphones and use them (potentially) your lifetime. Or hand it down to your kids as your hearing gets worse. Sound doesn’t change much and the plug has been around for ages. That's a pretty tiny market. It was also "you spend ten dollars at the grocery store for cheap Sony headphones or earbuds and then they break and then you do it again. Sound quality is terrible." They did have fewer batteries, though, at least, in terms of the disposability problem.

xadhominemx 6y ago

The typical person generates many tons of waste per year. A pair of headphones would not even qualify as a drop in the bucket

babypuncher 6y ago
It was sillier when people were complaining about the wastefulness of the original AirPods. The real crime there was the fact that you spent $150 on something that only lasts a few years. As far as waste goes, I think two 20 oz soda bottles contribute more to waste than a pair of tiny wireless earbuds, and those only get used for an hour before being discarded.
- Symbiote 6y ago
  Two large plastic bottles are easily recycled, or even washed and refilled (e.g. in Germany). The earbuds don't even have a replaceable battery. They are deliberately designed to fuck the environment. (Or maximise profit, if you'd like the corporate phrasing.)
  - pseudonamed 6y ago
    We try hard to buy things that are not wrapped in plastic and yet we still throw away at least a 10l bag of unrecyclable thin plastic every two weeks. Even a new pair of AirPods once a year would pale in comparison to all my other environmental waste.
- megablast 6y ago
  How are you measuring the impact of waste.
  - babypuncher 6y ago
    Looking at it's volume, and whether or not it is biodegradable. People have already pointed out that plastic bottles are recyclable, to which I respond: so are AirPods. They're both made of plastic and other materials that can technically be recycled. The problem is, in both cases, it is cheaper for companies to source new materials than to try and recycle the stuff that ends up in our blue bins. So they all end up in landfills eventually, often overseas in countries willing to take our "recyclables" off our hands in exchange for money. I switched from buying beverages in 2L plastic bottles to buying cans, and I think the positive impact there greatly outweighs the negative impact of tossing my earbuds in a couple of years. The aluminum is infinitely (and easily) recyclable, unlike most plastics. The cardboard the cans come packaged in is renewable and biodegradable.

cossatot 6y ago

The use cases for many people have changed dramatically as well. I think if I was an audiophile, and used headphones primarily to lie on the bed smoking hash and listening to Steely Dan, I would share your concerns. But I use headphones for two things: talking on the phone/listening to music when I walk my dogs or to pick up my kid, and for meetings at work (I'm long-term remote). Having cordless technology is nice for the former, where it replaced cheap wired earbuds that are always tangled in my pocket and never last for more than a year or so. It's critical for the second, so that I am not chained to my desk for the 1-2.5 hour meetings that I have multiple times a week. And I have to talk with my use cases, not just listen. The heirloom-quality audiophile headphones are simply not workable for my use case, and I am sure that I am not alone here. And my father, who I am pretty sure did spend lots of time lying on the bed smoking hash and listening to Steely Dan, did not ever pass his headphones down to me.

UShouldBWorking 6y ago

Apple products are for rich idiots or idiots that want to appear rich, we don't need to worry about their problems. It's like saying revolvers make it too easy to play Russian roulette.

nrvn 6y ago

There actually exist bluetooth adapters for wired headphones. Unfortunately, they haven’t tracked as much hype and attention as wireless headphones. But we all know that irrational customer behavior is the foundation of modern consumerist economy. So, Buy It For Life (and Hand It Down To Your Kids) strategy is elitist in the same way having the basic understanding of thermodynamics is - only a very small amount of people have and appreciate those ideas.

babypuncher 6y ago
Walking around with wired headphones plugged into a bluetooth dongle kind of defeats the purpose, no? People buy wireless headphones because they don't want to be encumbered by wires while walking around. An adapter like that is yet another thing I need to put in my bag, and lacks at least some of the convenience that comes with having headphones that just wirelessly connect to my phone natively.
- daxelrod 6y ago
  Plenty of Bluetooth adapters are designed for a specific headphone model and sit flush against the cup without additional wires. When they're attached, it's easy to forget that they're not built in. See https://thebtunes.com/ https://thebtunes.com/ for example. A huge caveat is that if the headphones have ANC, you now have two sets of batteries and two power switches to worry about, so they're a lot less seamless.
- astrange 6y ago
  If you have a good pair of wired headphones it's actually quite a nice compromise, because it lets you use them at home without being stuck in your chair. I'm using a Bluetooth headphone amp right now, it's very light and fits in my pocket, which is more than I can say about my laptop.

undefined1 6y ago

the phones are even more of an environmental disaster. planned obsolescence that leads to phones being upgraded every year or two, and barely working after 5 years, is so so wasteful.

gnicholas 6y ago

Fair point, though I'm not sure there are enough people who are wealthy enough to pay $550 for headphones to meaningfully contribute to e-waste. Regular AirPods, which are not repairable AFAIK, are more affordable and widely used. But they are also very small, so even if people replaced them every 2-3 years, the amount of waste would be minuscule compared to their waste from takeout containers, food waste, and other refuse. I suppose you could also factor in the energy spent producing and shipping the units, but it's not as if repairable headphones (all of which are much larger than regular AirPods) don't also incur these costs when they are produced and repaired. So while I agree that it would be great if we could have more repairable things, I'm not sure that this is an especially good example of a product that will meaningfully contribute to e-waste.

babypuncher 6y ago

I'm not sure how to reconcile your two "wants" here. A battery and a current bluetooth chip are required for any pair of headphones to function wirelessly, no matter what. Bluetooth has been pretty good about keeping backwards compatibility, so I wouldn't worry about these becoming unusable when a new version of the BT spec comes out. If you don't actually "want" a pair of wireless headphones, then the AirPods Max aren't targeting you at all. Absolutely nobody should buy these if they don't intend to use them in wireless mode, there are better wired headphones available for less money.

ruph123 6y ago
I’m not sure you “want” to understand me. I treat them as __headphones__ and simply stated that it was a shame that (esp. expensive) headphones which used to hold up for a long time are now worthless after a few years. That’s it.

Jiejeing 6y ago

I like the Fiio BTA10, which is a bluetooth (aptX-compatible) add-on for Audio-Technica MSR7 & M50X (two different versions of the add-on). Battery life is not great (a few hours), but it is a small addon which fits nicely into the headphones, and can be easily replaced when it breaks or dies.

ruph123 6y ago
Now that sounds very interesting. Thank you for this!
Fnoord 6y ago
They appear to have more clever solutions to make a wired device (such as a headphone or TV) wireless (with a myriad of codecs and Bluetooth 5.x).

tmpz22 6y ago

I've had to replace my airpods 2 times in 3 years. Once because they slid out of my pocket (the find my airpods app is useless) and again because the battery and speaker degraded after less then 15 months of use. Have others had similar experiences with the airpods?

brandall10 6y ago
If you use your Airpods enough (ie. all day at work, on phone calls, etc) - you can easily wear out the battery in that amount of time. 2-3 charges per day in 15 months gets to about the 1000 charge area where the battery begins to drop quickly. The Pros also had a design defect that led to a crackle. I had both my Pro earpieces replaced a few months back - independently, for that issue. In any case, Airpods are meant to be disposable. Apple does not replace the batteries on them for battery service issues, you just get new ones. The Maxes are different, the battery can be serviced, and it will last considerably longer - at about 5x the life per charge, you will likely exhaust the shelf life of the battery before it dies from usage.
- gnicholas 6y ago
  The battery life in mine has dropped somewhat, but I use only one at a time since I'm not keen on having them transmitting signal through my brain. (I know there isn't science that says it is bad for you, but AFAIK there hasn't been testing of this type of transmission quite so close to the brain.) One upside of this is that I am charging one AirPod at all times, which basically means I never run out of battery.

tmoravec 6y ago

These are wireless problems, not specific to Apple head/earphones. The attached wireless module like the Shure's one (and there's plenty of others, for example FiiO) do not address the environmental impact at all. Because what breaks is the battery and that's the environmentally unfriendly stuff - the drivers are nothing in comparison.

jimbokun 6y ago

In my experience, it used to be like this: Use the crappy headphones that came bundled with the portable cassette player, which before too long broke or wore out, and buy another crappy pair because that's what you can afford. Or buy a new cassette player or portable CD player to replace what you had. Waste from consumer products didn't start with blue tooth headphones.

heipei 6y ago

For what it's worth, the wireless headphones mentioned by the review as the best previous set (the Bang & Olufsen / Beoplay H9i) do come with a user-removable battery and do allow listening via USB-C as well. Somehow these never get mentioned in mainstream reviews, only Bose and Sony, even though they have superior fit & finish and, according to this review, sound as well.

teekert 6y ago

It used to be like this: Every 2 years I bought new Sennheiser cx300II's (until I somehow got a pair that seemed to lack bass) because the cable broke. Now my 16$ qcy's (BT) are 3 years old and still fine.

theodric 6y ago

While Bluetooth may eventually drop backward compatibility, my daily driver headphones are four c.2007 Dell BH200 A2DP sets. Highly adequate. All are on their second battery, a commodity 500mAh LiPo from eBay. To hell with this overpriced Apple trash.

kristjansson 6y ago

The batteries are going to be a consumable if users continue to demand a wireless experience, which most of them seem to prefer, regardless of whether that’s delivered as a dongle or integrated into the headset. It would be nice if we didn’t demand so many things with batteries in them, but that isn’t IMO an Apple problem, that’s a demand pattern. Encasing them in the product might even keep batteries out of landfill. An old AA or laptop battery is easy to pitch, a $550 headset is much more likely to be repaired by someone in a position to recycle the battery. Bluetooth and the integrated form factor is a risk, but I think that’s not a ten year concern. It would be nice if they had a physical port for the eventuality though.

drzaiusapelord 6y ago

Simple machines vs complex ones I guess. A bicycle could be passed down the generations but not an electric car. Lithium wears down, software stops being updated, parts stop being produced, etc. That's the price you pay for feaures. Clunky wired 1970s headphones don't fit my use case which requires headphones to be compact and wireless. The same way my electric car outperforms a super-serviceable Model T.

2muchcoffeeman 6y ago

Check out the Aiaiai TMA-2 for a modular headphone system. https://aiaiai.audio/headphones/tma-2 https://aiaiai.audio/headphones/tma-2 Or the Print Plus 3D printable headphones. https://www.print.plus/ https://www.print.plus/

paulcole 6y ago

If you’re having kids to hand things down to then the added environmental cost of the headphones you buy is a microscopic rounding error.

Johnny555 6y ago

Or hand it down to your kids as your hearing gets worse Maybe a few people hand down usable audio equipment, but the only stereo equipment I got from my parents was an 8-track tape collection and a console stereo. For you youngsters that don't know what that is, it's a stereo system (usually tuner + turntable + speakers, some of the more modern ones had a cassette player too) built into a piece of furniture the size of a dresser. My parents, being the audio connoisseurs they were, had an 8-track player that sat on top. https://www.google.com/search?q=console+stereo&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=console+stereo&tbm=isch

djrogers 6y ago

> It used to be like this: You spend A LOT of money for really nice headphones and use them (potentially) your lifetime. Or hand it down to your kids as your hearing gets worse. I have never, ever, ever known this to have happened. I’ve never once seen a 20+ year old set of headphones, let alone one that has been handed down through generations. That just silly talk. Not to mention the fact that even if this had happened in a handful of times, the headphones would have outlived multiple cabinet sized sets of audio equipment, and several hundred pounds worth of record, 8 track, tape, and CD players - all of which wound up in a landfill somewhere. So you’ve reused the smallest component of all of that for what?

ruph123 6y ago
Look through the other comments for examples.

dkdk8283 6y ago

The pollution coming from China and India can’t even begin to hold a candle to what’s wasted domestically in the USA.

coryfklein 6y ago

> contributing to the enormous e-waste we are all piling up Sincerely asking here, but what do you see are the most significant negative externalities here? We're not exactly running out of landfill space anytime soon, and most landfills in the US are very careful to ensure waste doesn't pollute the surrounding environment. Is it the greenhouse gas emissions? I'm curious how the total emissions on buying a pair of headphones every 2-5 years compares to other everyday activities like shipping my weekly usage of broccoli to the grocery store for me to eat. Is it the concern of labor going to waste? Something else?