28 ms·

I am pro refurbishing/reusing and having less waste but its hard to care about tiny airpods being tossed. Maybe they test the message and it resonated better t

by bruceb 5y ago

I am pro refurbishing/reusing and having less waste but its hard to care about tiny airpods being tossed. Maybe they test the message and it resonated better than "Airpods should last longer than your last relationship" or "1 trick that Apple hates" etc.

samatman 5y ago
It's just the Discourse in action. For whatever reason, AirPods, of all things, have become a go-to example of environmental waste and throwaway culture. It's bizarre to me. I'm fairly confident that for minutes of pleasure / embodied energy, AirPods score higher than almost anything else I own, certainly among things with a battery and chip. They also last multiples of the time I would get out of wired earphones, which always die in a few months from work-hardening the copper wires until they break. My model is this: some people just hate Apple. It's an identity thing, phones are very personal and bring out tribal instincts (blue vs. green speech bubbles!), and AirPods are a visible signifier of "team Apple". So some people just, don't like 'em ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The reasons are downstream of that. I also think that, since the only consumables are the battery and speaker membranes, it's great that someone wants to replace the batteries when they go bad. Membranes as well! Making consumer goods last longer is virtuous.
- slg 5y ago
  You can't just blame this on "the Discourse" or Apple haters. I have owned countless devices with batteries over my life. None has made me as acutely aware of its battery degrading as Airpods. Eventually I couldn't even make it through a full workout or work call on a single charge. They basically became worthless through nothing but normal usage. There was no visible physical damage. I treated them exactly how I was supposed to treat them according to Apple and still only got 2-3 years out of them. That is frustrating. It also is unlike many other Apple products as lots of people are perfectly satisfied with their 5+ year old Macbooks and iPhones.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    The same degradation happens to my clothing, food, and wired headphones.
    - slg 5y ago
      I am guessing your are just trolling by throwing food into that list, but I have had clothes and wired headphones last for over a decade with proper care. There is no way to properly care for Airpods that would extend the life of their batteries past a few years.
  - crazygringo 5y ago
    I don't own anything powered by li-ion where the battery lasts more than 2-3 years. Both my MacBook and iPhones I've had the battery swapped after not being able to hold a charge for more than ~25% of original after 2-3 years. I'm still satisfied, but I absolutely had to get the battery swapped. Twice in one case. AirPods are no worse in this regard. After all, why would they be -- li-ion chemistry is the same.
    - salamandersauce 5y ago
      Seriously? Nothing? I have a Game Boy SP with it's original battery. Still has a few hours runtime. Not as good as new but it's still usable. My Vita still holds a few hours too and it's almost 10 years old at this point. I've heard of people's airpods not holding any charge after a year or two. Mine still work but they are very degraded and can't handle a 1 hour phone call anymore.
    - slg 5y ago
      >Both my MacBook and iPhones I've had the battery swapped after not being able to hold a charge for more than ~25% of original after 2-3 years. I have never experienced this with the laptops or phones I have owned. I am still rocking an iPhone X that is almost 4 years old and I just checked the battery health and it shows max capacity at 86%. That matches with my expectations as the degradation is barely noticeable and I still have no problem making it through an average day on a single charge. Are you by chance leaving these devices charging for extended periods of time? That appears to be one of the primary problems with Airpods. The design choice of making the carrying case a charging case means that the individual Airpods spend almost all of their life at 100% charge. That degrades the battery quicker than normal usage. If you treat your laptop as a desktop and have it plugged in 24/7, you are doing a lot of unnecessary harm to your battery which might explain what you are experiencing.
- an_opabinia 5y ago
  > last multiples of the time I would get out of wired earphones, which always die in a few months from work-hardening the copper wires until they break Hmm... > It's just the Discourse in action... I'm fairly confident that for minutes of pleasure / embodied energy, AirPods score higher than almost anything else I own, certainly among things with a battery and chip It's interesting to reduce environmentalism to "joy per unit size * time." To its credit, if you do the accounting right, a lot of environmentally really bad things, like gasoline and meat, have very poor joy per (size time), while being a tourist in a conserved rainforest has very high joy per size time. But it's still flawed. Like Bitcoin has high joy per unit size and time, it turns cheaper electricity into more money you can spend on jetskis. No intellectually honest person claims that is environmentally friendly. You've chosen a framework that's idiosyncratically very friendly to electronics and things nerds are into, that I'm not sure would even make sense to people in almost any time prior to 1970. They by and large lived without the joys of electronics and did nothing to address the environmental disaster they're dying too soon to experience. Surely you see the same thing happening now, and right to repair is just one of many fronts of forward-thinking people trying to right those wrongs. I'm not advocating for "end to end emissions" as the framework either, because what you're saying people hate on Apple for is almost always true about Tesla. People complaining about electric cars having higher emissions are both wrong and saying that stuff in bad faith. But to go on social media and complain about the "Discourse" you are participating in is definitely intellectually dishonest. AirPods are shitty in their own unique way, and I'm not sure if any intellectual is seriously advocating, in their raw quoted form as opposed to a headline, that the way that they are shitty is exclusively your reductive perspective on "environmentally friendly."
  - samatman 5y ago
    You misread me, my case was joy * time / embodied energy. How else should we justify the use of energy except through such means? Subjectively I mean, I wouldn't suggest actually quantifying it. I don't burn energy in the winter because I like to spend money, I do it because there's an interior temperature below which I'm miserable. Once I've achieved that homeostasis, the only think left to me is to do it with as little energy as possible. > AirPods are shitty in their own unique way That's just like, your opinion, man. Speaking of intellectual dishonesty, I will never reply to you again.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  This seems way too conveniently dismissive of the environmental issue. Apple is the 800 lb gorilla that sets industry expectations. They have been gluing batteries and making repair difficult across their product line for a decade. This leads to higher consumer costs and manufactured goods filling landfills prematurely. As one of the most visible companies in the world making repair difficult, the criticism is well-deserved. The airpods are perhaps the height of unrepairable apple tech. Sure any valid criticism of Apple is going to invite a pile-on from the apple haters but it does not follow that the original criticism is invalid.
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    > This leads to higher consumer costs and manufactured goods filling landfills prematurely. Citation needed. Apple claims, and I'm fine with taking it with a grain of salt, that because batteries aren't replaceable like old Nokia phones, they can make the battery larger, possibly reducing consumer costs and how often batteries are changed. It's not just Apple, either. Consumers seem to not care.
    - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
      It seems obvious to me that this is true at least with laptops. And whatever costs are saved by a 5% larger battery must surely be offset by the higher costs of replacement when the battery ultimately dies? I don't know it's so clear to me that this is true that I've not felt the need to research it. By all means if you have sources to the contrary I'd be happy to read them. To me, we could save significant environmental waste if everything we manufactured was made to be repaired. I designed several pairs of 3D printed headphones [1] which are now the only headphones I wear, and the idea that I can replace any part if it breaks seems significant to me. [1] https://github.com/tlalexander/reboot-headphones https://github.com/tlalexander/reboot-headphones
      - wyre 5y ago
        It takes a long time for modern batteries to get to a point of unusability and replacement. Yes, Apple and others want consumers to purchase the new product and that is often the case because of the fast advancement of technology. This is worse with android phones because the support cycle is much shorter. I often drop my phone and it’s great not having to worry about my phone’s battery falling out making me lose my data. I’m glad there is a small section of the market with brands like Fairphone and Lenovo still offering replaceable batteries because it is very important to some consumers, but most people dont care or think about it at all.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
crazygringo 5y ago
Seriously, I never understand the "environmental waste" argument as applied to AirPods. The pair of buds weighs a third of a single disposable AA battery. There's less plastic than in an average Chinese takeout container. If you want to complain that they're expensive to replace then go ahead. But as soon as anyone brings up the environment, give me a break. We're not talking about a 65" television that weight 55 pounds, c'mon. Each bud is four grams of mass. If people threw out twenty pairs of AirPods a day, then sure let's worry about the environmental issue. But when they replace one pair every two to three years? I don't think so.
- bluescrn 5y ago
  It just feels like a disposable $159 product is vastly more wasteful than a disposable <$1 AA battery
  - Others 5y ago
    1. The parent comment is referring to waste in the environmental sense. Nature does not care how expensive the trash was--just the volume/composition 2. It's a big stretch to call AirPods "disposable" I (and many others) keep them for years. In the long run everything is rubbish; an expensive electronic device that lasts for years and years is not "disposable"
    - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
      > Nature does not care how expensive the trash was No, but the price is often a stand-in for how much energy/carbon it took to make the product, which is what I always assumed was the case here. I'd love to be wrong...
      - hndamien 5y ago
        The price is usually more indicative of how much value it creates for the buyer, with a lower bound being how much it costs the producer to produce.
      - 5y ago

by bruceb 5y ago

samatman 5y ago

It's just the Discourse in action. For whatever reason, AirPods, of all things, have become a go-to example of environmental waste and throwaway culture. It's bizarre to me. I'm fairly confident that for minutes of pleasure / embodied energy, AirPods score higher than almost anything else I own, certainly among things with a battery and chip. They also last multiples of the time I would get out of wired earphones, which always die in a few months from work-hardening the copper wires until they break. My model is this: some people just hate Apple. It's an identity thing, phones are very personal and bring out tribal instincts (blue vs. green speech bubbles!), and AirPods are a visible signifier of "team Apple". So some people just, don't like 'em ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The reasons are downstream of that. I also think that, since the only consumables are the battery and speaker membranes, it's great that someone wants to replace the batteries when they go bad. Membranes as well! Making consumer goods last longer is virtuous.

slg 5y ago
You can't just blame this on "the Discourse" or Apple haters. I have owned countless devices with batteries over my life. None has made me as acutely aware of its battery degrading as Airpods. Eventually I couldn't even make it through a full workout or work call on a single charge. They basically became worthless through nothing but normal usage. There was no visible physical damage. I treated them exactly how I was supposed to treat them according to Apple and still only got 2-3 years out of them. That is frustrating. It also is unlike many other Apple products as lots of people are perfectly satisfied with their 5+ year old Macbooks and iPhones.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  The same degradation happens to my clothing, food, and wired headphones.
  - slg 5y ago
    I am guessing your are just trolling by throwing food into that list, but I have had clothes and wired headphones last for over a decade with proper care. There is no way to properly care for Airpods that would extend the life of their batteries past a few years.
- crazygringo 5y ago
  I don't own anything powered by li-ion where the battery lasts more than 2-3 years. Both my MacBook and iPhones I've had the battery swapped after not being able to hold a charge for more than ~25% of original after 2-3 years. I'm still satisfied, but I absolutely had to get the battery swapped. Twice in one case. AirPods are no worse in this regard. After all, why would they be -- li-ion chemistry is the same.
  - salamandersauce 5y ago
    Seriously? Nothing? I have a Game Boy SP with it's original battery. Still has a few hours runtime. Not as good as new but it's still usable. My Vita still holds a few hours too and it's almost 10 years old at this point. I've heard of people's airpods not holding any charge after a year or two. Mine still work but they are very degraded and can't handle a 1 hour phone call anymore.
  - slg 5y ago
    >Both my MacBook and iPhones I've had the battery swapped after not being able to hold a charge for more than ~25% of original after 2-3 years. I have never experienced this with the laptops or phones I have owned. I am still rocking an iPhone X that is almost 4 years old and I just checked the battery health and it shows max capacity at 86%. That matches with my expectations as the degradation is barely noticeable and I still have no problem making it through an average day on a single charge. Are you by chance leaving these devices charging for extended periods of time? That appears to be one of the primary problems with Airpods. The design choice of making the carrying case a charging case means that the individual Airpods spend almost all of their life at 100% charge. That degrades the battery quicker than normal usage. If you treat your laptop as a desktop and have it plugged in 24/7, you are doing a lot of unnecessary harm to your battery which might explain what you are experiencing.
an_opabinia 5y ago
> last multiples of the time I would get out of wired earphones, which always die in a few months from work-hardening the copper wires until they break Hmm... > It's just the Discourse in action... I'm fairly confident that for minutes of pleasure / embodied energy, AirPods score higher than almost anything else I own, certainly among things with a battery and chip It's interesting to reduce environmentalism to "joy per unit size * time." To its credit, if you do the accounting right, a lot of environmentally really bad things, like gasoline and meat, have very poor joy per (size time), while being a tourist in a conserved rainforest has very high joy per size time. But it's still flawed. Like Bitcoin has high joy per unit size and time, it turns cheaper electricity into more money you can spend on jetskis. No intellectually honest person claims that is environmentally friendly. You've chosen a framework that's idiosyncratically very friendly to electronics and things nerds are into, that I'm not sure would even make sense to people in almost any time prior to 1970. They by and large lived without the joys of electronics and did nothing to address the environmental disaster they're dying too soon to experience. Surely you see the same thing happening now, and right to repair is just one of many fronts of forward-thinking people trying to right those wrongs. I'm not advocating for "end to end emissions" as the framework either, because what you're saying people hate on Apple for is almost always true about Tesla. People complaining about electric cars having higher emissions are both wrong and saying that stuff in bad faith. But to go on social media and complain about the "Discourse" you are participating in is definitely intellectually dishonest. AirPods are shitty in their own unique way, and I'm not sure if any intellectual is seriously advocating, in their raw quoted form as opposed to a headline, that the way that they are shitty is exclusively your reductive perspective on "environmentally friendly."
- samatman 5y ago
  You misread me, my case was joy * time / embodied energy. How else should we justify the use of energy except through such means? Subjectively I mean, I wouldn't suggest actually quantifying it. I don't burn energy in the winter because I like to spend money, I do it because there's an interior temperature below which I'm miserable. Once I've achieved that homeostasis, the only think left to me is to do it with as little energy as possible. > AirPods are shitty in their own unique way That's just like, your opinion, man. Speaking of intellectual dishonesty, I will never reply to you again.
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
This seems way too conveniently dismissive of the environmental issue. Apple is the 800 lb gorilla that sets industry expectations. They have been gluing batteries and making repair difficult across their product line for a decade. This leads to higher consumer costs and manufactured goods filling landfills prematurely. As one of the most visible companies in the world making repair difficult, the criticism is well-deserved. The airpods are perhaps the height of unrepairable apple tech. Sure any valid criticism of Apple is going to invite a pile-on from the apple haters but it does not follow that the original criticism is invalid.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  > This leads to higher consumer costs and manufactured goods filling landfills prematurely. Citation needed. Apple claims, and I'm fine with taking it with a grain of salt, that because batteries aren't replaceable like old Nokia phones, they can make the battery larger, possibly reducing consumer costs and how often batteries are changed. It's not just Apple, either. Consumers seem to not care.
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    It seems obvious to me that this is true at least with laptops. And whatever costs are saved by a 5% larger battery must surely be offset by the higher costs of replacement when the battery ultimately dies? I don't know it's so clear to me that this is true that I've not felt the need to research it. By all means if you have sources to the contrary I'd be happy to read them. To me, we could save significant environmental waste if everything we manufactured was made to be repaired. I designed several pairs of 3D printed headphones [1] which are now the only headphones I wear, and the idea that I can replace any part if it breaks seems significant to me. [1] https://github.com/tlalexander/reboot-headphones https://github.com/tlalexander/reboot-headphones
    - wyre 5y ago
      It takes a long time for modern batteries to get to a point of unusability and replacement. Yes, Apple and others want consumers to purchase the new product and that is often the case because of the fast advancement of technology. This is worse with android phones because the support cycle is much shorter. I often drop my phone and it’s great not having to worry about my phone’s battery falling out making me lose my data. I’m glad there is a small section of the market with brands like Fairphone and Lenovo still offering replaceable batteries because it is very important to some consumers, but most people dont care or think about it at all.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

crazygringo 5y ago

Seriously, I never understand the "environmental waste" argument as applied to AirPods. The pair of buds weighs a third of a single disposable AA battery. There's less plastic than in an average Chinese takeout container. If you want to complain that they're expensive to replace then go ahead. But as soon as anyone brings up the environment, give me a break. We're not talking about a 65" television that weight 55 pounds, c'mon. Each bud is four grams of mass. If people threw out twenty pairs of AirPods a day, then sure let's worry about the environmental issue. But when they replace one pair every two to three years? I don't think so.

bluescrn 5y ago
It just feels like a disposable $159 product is vastly more wasteful than a disposable <$1 AA battery
- Others 5y ago
  1. The parent comment is referring to waste in the environmental sense. Nature does not care how expensive the trash was--just the volume/composition 2. It's a big stretch to call AirPods "disposable" I (and many others) keep them for years. In the long run everything is rubbish; an expensive electronic device that lasts for years and years is not "disposable"
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    > Nature does not care how expensive the trash was No, but the price is often a stand-in for how much energy/carbon it took to make the product, which is what I always assumed was the case here. I'd love to be wrong...
    - hndamien 5y ago
      The price is usually more indicative of how much value it creates for the buyer, with a lower bound being how much it costs the producer to produce.
    - 5y ago