Apple has added a feature which tries to do this intelligently to some extent but it's not the best at guessing what my needs are.
The majority of the time I do not need max or even half of max battery life from my devices. airpods I only use for an hour or two at a time for example and my phone is usually close to a charger.
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!
But it would be nice to have an option to avoid 100% yes.
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.
I use my AirPods so much all day every day I do wish I could ask it to use that mode permanently.
Airpods are used with iPhones that have 20x the amount of electronics, so should last 20x as long.
People's real concern is the price which is higher than they guess because they think airpods are like regular headphones in longevity.
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.
There are comments on Reddit by Apple store employees who claim there's absolutely no repair policy for Apple pods, That they go straight to the bin.
Podswap has stock of both new "blank" bud cases and batteries.
Crack open buds using some kind of jig. Scoop out the electronics. Solder to new battery. Cram it all back together.
That's how I'd do it.
Bonus points for choice of colors. I'd love clear or forest green or deep purple.
Watching a few air pod tear down videos, I find it weird the battery itself isn't part of the case. Like just use white instead of black. Have the barrel twist lock into place. Makes the battery replaceable. And that extra millimeter of diameter would probably be 50% more mAh.
I know replaceable batteries is un-Apple. But that's what I'd do.
They seem very picky about the condition of the case on what you send in, so I'm not sure they have a stock of new cases.
See: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0520/9856/4273/products/ai...
My puppy gnawed on my pair, so I was excited to get them rehabilitated.
100% agree, you can't unsee things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I
(For anyone in Taiwan or Singapore, check out https://www.dr-pods.com/. Roughly 40USD replacement fee. No affiliation, I'm just a happy customer).
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.
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.
1 https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-sold-nearly-60-million...
e.g. to produce 1 gram of some metal you might need to mine and process 100+ grams of ore
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.
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.
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."
Edit: updated pricing thanks to comment by tanduv
Apple could do swaps much more efficiently due to their physical stores (where you could swap in real-time), and most people would pay a $10 premium over Podswap to have the Apple name behind their purchase.
The only thing that would give me comfort about Podswaps' business model is the fact that Apple undoubtedly would prefer to sell you a new pair rather than fix up your old pair.
Absolutely no complaints.
I'd much rather replace the batteries of my existing ones then buy a new pair but with such a small price difference to get a pair it doesn't seem worth it.
I'm not sure this is true. Apple had an AirPods battery replacement program before COVID-19. I had my wife's done. I wanted to get mine done this past January, but it didn't seem to be an option anymore. Maybe because of the pandemic and the global supply chain problems and such.
"Only current" battery replacement program, maybe. But not first-ever.
OTOH, I guess Apple’s program does replace the batteries, just not in the way I thought they would.
My biggest annoyance with the Airpods Pro is that no one sells custom molds. The right one fits with the small plug, but none of the three sizes that ship with the Airpods seem to be compatible with my left ear, it's extremely loose. In any case it's uncomfortable walking with them out on the streets or driving with my bike simply because I'm always afraid they will randomly fall off and get lost or destroyed.
It must be a thing, since Apple lets you use your devices to find your missing AirPods, and they are even part of the FindMe network.
I've sometimes wondered how many AirPods have been flushed down toilets around the world. Even if only .001% of AirPods meet their demise this way, considering the number of AirPods sold, it must be a pretty good number.
Stop throwing money at Apple.
It doesn't mention what country or countries this is available in, so I'm guessing it's America only?
I spent $15 dollars so I could have 1 in my car, 1 in my laptop bag, 1 next to my computer, and 2 backup for when I lose them or have new location. Haven't lost them yet.
Maybe you really do need wireless and it's worth the effort of charging and replacing batteries. Or maybe you are being sold a veblen good and your brain is exploited by a trillion dollar corporation's marketing department.
(I tend to buy the ~$40 version though)
> We currently accept AirPod Generation 1 & 2. If you would like AirPod Pros, you can join the waitlist here [http://eepurl.com/hqjLSr] and be notified when we offer that service is available.
Apple should be made to pay for it.
If anyone finds an Airpod on the street or in trash/landfills, they should be able to take it to the nearest Apple store or mail it and get 20-40$ back for it.
This should be the law for _all_ and any products, not just electronics. Large corporations have cleverly shifted the responsibility of recycling on the consumer, while they get to reap all the profits and benefits. This was recently well explained in a John Oliver segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fiu9GSOmt8E
It’s not like we haven’t known for decades we were killing the planet…and yet here we all are. Why does the average Joe get off the hook here?
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 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.
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. Quick turnaround that way and I think people want that for a product like this.
Positioning in Miami isn't ideal for turnaround, somewhere more central or a courier hub (Memphis or Louisville) would make more sense.
As repair-turnaround time is no longer an issue, and Airpods are small, they can fedex them to a low-cost country for repair. Miami has tons of connections to S. America, so maybe somewhere there.
Just a Fedex SmallBox holds a couple hundred airpods (they're 0.75inches if they were a rectangle, and smallbox is 200sqin), so they can really take low-cost to an extreme. If China, well, the batteries were going to be shipped from there anyway and that's most of the bulk anyway, but cylinders do pack better.
Here's a video of the whole process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE9aB5aPbMM
Many of these steps are scalable - could pre-tin battery leads, find a better solvent than alcohol to soften adhesive, custom heat protection cap rather than kitchen foil, dip metal cap in ultrasonic solvent bath, etc.
Maybe they have some domestic gigworkers in case they get really busy, but otherwise, save that dollar.
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.