4 ms·

Oh yes exactly - my ex wife could fuck up a cable or some earpods in about 3 months. I lost count of the amount of earpods that went down the toilet.

• pushrax 5y ago
  I use litz wire for headphone cables. For a cable that's constantly on you, there's always some chance something happens unexpectedly. I've broken my share of earpods.
  • hughrr 5y ago
    Litz wire doesn't increase the durability as such, merely reduces skin effect in RF applications. Sennheiser used to sell steel cables for their professional headphones. Now those are durable. I ran over mine with my chair about 50 times a day and the cable was still going after 10 years.
    • pushrax 5y ago
      Steel makes sense for extreme durability - I suppose you could use extremely thin steel wire for in-ears to make it flexible, though it might require a very special alloy to be thin and low resistance? In my experience, litz wire is exceptionally flexible and suitable for getting shoved in a pocket frequently. Each wire can be quite thick due to the flexibility.
• handrous 5y ago
  As far as reliability goes, I do see a lot more frays in Apple cables (though not ones that remain exclusively in my care) than others, but part of the reason is that other cables seem to have a weirdly-high rate of mysterious failures in absence of evident physical damage. They just die after 6-24 months. Maybe they'd fray eventually too, but they crap out before it happens. I don't get it. The only Apple cables I've seen do anything similar are usb(-a/-c)-to-lightning charging cables (and I suspect I just need to rubbing-alcohol the contacts on the lightning-plug ends on those, to solve the problem)