Podswap: Keep airpods alive and out of the landfill (opens in new tab)

Ex EV battery engineer here. You’re right that the cycle life of a lithium battery typically doubles per 0.05V (‘tik’) undercharged from 4.15V (and on the other end of the scale as well, less so).

This typically corresponds to around 7-10% capacity per ‘tik’, so to effectively triple your battery cycle count would reduce the runtime by approximately 30%.

Interesting effect here.. the amount of power in each cycle is less because you’re undercharging the battery. And for each consecutive ‘tik’, 0.05V is approximately more power because the discharge curve becomes flatter (voltage != state of charge). It doesn’t scale like you’d think. Seriously diminishing returns!

Apple is the only laptop manufacturer that even gets close to 1000 cycles of great battery life.

That might be what's already happening behind the scenes though. They tell you you're at 10% but that's actually 30% for example

Well the good thing about these kinds of buds is that your rarely discharge them heavily. Because you always put them back in the case. Mine never go below 50% (don't have airpods but cheapie €20 xiaomis that work surprisingly great).

But it would be nice to have an option to avoid 100% yes.

I don't think you could get thousands of cycles, but you might be able to go from <500 to ~1000. Higher quality cells might achieve the same thing though. Apple guarantees 1000 cycles on its laptops, like a sister comment states.

Consider a Tesla that gets ~250 miles of range per full cycle. The battery would reach 1000 cycles after 250k miles of driving, at which point you have a pretty old car. Depending on factors like time, environmental conditions, driving style, a battery replacement might be necessary at some point in the car's life. So the batteries in EVs probably cannot sustain thousands of cycles. The battery capacity is large enough that the overall cycle count is reasonable within the lifespan of the vehicle, and the battery cooling system keeps degradation reasonable given the high demands EV batteries must fulfill.

Apple actually does this both with your iPhone battery and your AirPods but it’s automatic and you can’t ask to switch to that mode. I see it holding my AirPods at 80% overnight quite a bit. They call it “optimised battery charging”.

I use my AirPods so much all day every day I do wish I could ask it to use that mode permanently.

Alas, a product that lasts five hours for 100 cycles gets much better reviews than a product that lasts four hours for 1000 cycles.

Why 80%? Is 100% dangerous?

This was exactly my thought when I saw the headline. The air pods are so small, they're not contributing a large part to plastic waste.

It's the same story with trying to get rid of plastic straws.

In both cases, I don't want to dismiss the problem - it's just that there are bigger fish to fry to make a much large impact to the bottom line of plastic pollution.

Now, after reading through the "Our Story" of Podswap's website, I can see that the real selling point is: "Our batteries keep dying prematurely, and we don't want to fork over the cash for a whole new pair."

Recycling is great - keep it as a value proposition, but it shouldn't be the main marketing push here.

Maybe that calc changes when you look at environmental effects of having to keep manufacturing new chips.

Yeah I think just the shipping for sending airpods back and forth (in a shipping bag) could come close to the waste of just buying a new pair.

Where are the electronics in the battery?

Oops. I misread that graphic. I thought it was examples of "before" air pods.

My puppy gnawed on my pair, so I was excited to get them rehabilitated.

> I agree with you that the airpod batteries (like the batteries in everything else) should have been replaceable in the first place.

100% agree, you can't unsee things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I

It just feels like a disposable $159 product is vastly more wasteful than a disposable <$1 AA battery

I think the problem is volume > individual cost. Apple sold 60 million AirPods in 2019[1]. That number has surely gone up in 2020 and may even be larger in 2021.

1 https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-sold-nearly-60-million...

The airpods are compared to wired ear buds. Once Apple removed the jack port, they effectively created the added waste which was not there before.

They're replacing wired headphones which were only thrown out after physically breaking and didn't put batteries in landfills.

It'd be interesting to know how much mass of stuff needs to be dug/refined/shipped/disposed of to produce four grams of airpod.

e.g. to produce 1 gram of some metal you might need to mine and process 100+ grams of ore

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.

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.

> 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."

Apple isn’t really in the business of undercutting competitors on price

Battery service is "only" 55€ in Europe.

Higher volumes require more current, the circuit probably limits what it pulls from the cell until it has learned about it to avoid damaging it.

That's what this company does, too.

I flushed the right ear of my Airpods pro. I bought a new pair the next day because I use them all day for video calls because they're so convenient.

The Find My network stuff isn’t coming until the fall. Right now they only update their location when connected to your phone, which is basically useless.

I lost my first pair just recently, in four years of having them, after a redeye flight.

Knock on wood it'll be the only time!

For me, it is audiobooks and podcasts from the watch over Bluetooth while running outdoors. It really is a game changer for me.

Thank you!

I recently got an update to my pros that said that they now only charge based on my usage pattern in order to reduce battery wear. I think this means they only charge when they believe I'm about to use them so as not to wear them by constant charging. It was pretty unexpected as it goes against what I believed to be apple's incentive model.

IMO, we draw the line based on effectiveness, not idealized morality. What's going to be easier: a never-ending campaign of trying to educate and motivate millions of different average Joes to properly recycle [some item], or simply legally preventing those items from being created by a few centralized sources (or requiring them to take responsibility in some other way)?

Same thing with with 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis. A lot of people will say "well they shouldn't have taken those loans." Yes, true, but it would have been much easier if they were never allowed to be offered in the first place. Some people are against the "save the people from themselves" mentality, but it really seems to be a lot more effective and there's not a strong argument for allowing practices that are likely to result in average Joes taking deleterious actions.

The average Joe has known for decades and the problem continues. Ergo, we can’t rely on individual action to solve it. We need society-scale solutions. Corporate action is the only tool civilization has for this.

> You can’t just claim that they’ve shifted responsibility without arguing your point.

The point itself is enough. Bottle and car battery deposit schemes show that the system works to significantly reduce littering. Most people take them to the recycling on their own and those who can't be bothered always get picked up by people.

A 10-20€ deposit on phones, a 5€ deposit on small scale stuff like chargers and earphones and a 1€ deposit on batteries would definitely get electronics stuff back into circulation.

Generic electronics recycling is very expensive. I had to recycle an old 55" rear projection TV and it cost $150. Good luck getting the average person to pay that instead of disposing of it (illegally).

It would be more efficient and cheaper for companies to create a recycling process and include that in the purchase price.

> My guess is that you're not getting your own airpods back, but someone else's.

I guess reading the linked site before commenting on it is no longer in fashion.

They clearly state that they send you a new (or refurbished rather) pair before you send in your old pair.