Podswap: Keep airpods alive and out of the landfill(thepodswap.com) |
Podswap: Keep airpods alive and out of the landfill(thepodswap.com) |
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.
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
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.
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."
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.
Not only is this annoying, it also adds tons of unnecessary full discharge cycles.
The new wireless charging cases are also bad - they seem to stay warm even when no longer charging, which probably degrades the batteries as well.
All high-capacity batteries need a management chip.
I believe these (cutoff voltage, CC->CV switch, cutoff current point) are commonly referred to as (0%, 80%, 100%) levels respectively, if safety margins and psychological tweaks are not considered.
Which leads to an assumption that it is this Constant Voltage region that is often said to be damaging to cells, though I don’t know exactly why.
1. Every new product designed should have a cost associated to it for proper disposal. Thus total cost of ownership is a "green cost" which is not just acquisition but also proper disposal.
2. Another option is to put burden of mandatory proper recycling back on the original manufacturer of the product using the same supply-chain that is used for sales. Thus consumers should be able to drop electronics at retail store -> supplier -> manufacturer, eventually leading to proper disposal.
3. Incentives from government and/or from culture for manufacturers whose products support R2R (Right to Repair). Thus encouraging reuse and refurb market.
4. Certify for and incentivize towards extending Total life of equipment. e.g. low-durability electronics carry a low-durability tax.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruCsYGL3QlY&ab_channel=Lesli...
Obviously it takes more than 4g of raw materials to produce AirPods. But it takes extra material to make pretty much everything. So comparison-wise, it's still a tiny, tiny amount next to your TV or even laptop.
A huge chunk of judicial history is about just this issue. It’s a lot more effective to just throw all accused in jail without a trial: you’re likely to get all the accused (effective) but you’re also likely to round up as many innocent people (immoral).
Society came together and decided that the morality of locking up an innocent person was so obscene that the prosecution would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone was guilty.
It’s ok for everyone to come together and admit we have a tragedy of commons that needs collective action, but I think this incredible willingness to hand-wave individual responsibility is really concerning these days.
I'm on my second pair of airpods since launch. (Left pod on the previous pair stopped connecting).
As for wired headphones, no pair lasts over 2 years in my use. The cord always gets tangled and broken and off to the bin they go. No matter how thick, thin or even swappable the cord is, I still manage to break them.
It's wireless or silence for me =)
The plastic straw thing is not to make an impact on the environment, it was chosen to make an impact on everyone's life.
Yes, we could do something bigger, but people won't notice because they can't see the effect in their day to day life.
Ban plastic straws though and EVERYONE notices and talks about it constantly everywhere. And if even one person starts using less plastic because of that, it was a success.
If you're "making an impact on everyone's life" in the form of making their lives more annoying and inconvenient, those people are going to resent you and the cause for which you inconvenienced them.
I can buy not relying on the first order impacts of banning plastic straws for the coat-benefit analysis, but relying on second-order effects doesn’t mean you get to toss out cost-benefit altogether.
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.
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.
So, somewhat close at least?
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...
Blame your municipality.
When I lived in the southwest, the city required the trash companies to pick up or recycle EVERYTHING for free. From old paint to batteries to giant tube TVs to washing machines. Everything, or they didn't get the trash hauling contract.
This was to make it as easy as possible for people to dispose of things properly, rather than dump them in the desert.
If your city doesn't make this happen, it's a failure of the city to negotiate the contract properly and allowing the trash companies to shift the expense onto the homeowners.
Furthermore, single stream recycling in America, on average, is a complete failure. The portion of stuff that is actually recycled is very low as much is contaminated with non-recyclable materials. I'd either expect such a trash/recycling service (as you describe) to be quite expensive or actually recycle very little of relative to what could be recycled.
If the manufacture's & end consumers of goods were forced to confront the cost of disposal at the time of purchase it would create a large incentive for companies to make products with less waste and products that are easier to recycle. The goal isn't to just to recycle everything that currently can be recycled but to make everything easy to recycle.
The public has an interest in a clean desert, since the desert surrounding the city was the primary source of recreation for the people living there.
It is also essentially a regressive tax since the wealthy consume/dispose of more goods
Trash fees were based on the assessed value of your home, so the wealthy paid more in trash fees than the poor.
Also most areas don't have a single exclusive trash service (monopoly).
As noted in the original comment, there were multiple trash companies in this city. All had to adhere to the same rules.
single stream recycling in America, on average, is a complete failure
It wasn't single stream. There were four bins. One each for garbage, glass, metals, and plastics.
I'd either expect such a trash/recycling service (as you describe) to be quite expensive or actually recycle very little of relative to what could be recycled.
I rented my house, so I couldn't tell you if it was expensive, or not. But as I stated above, the price was based on the value of the home. I doubt anyone ever changed their mind about buying a house because the cost of trash disposal in City A was $10/month more than in City B.
If the manufacture's & end consumers of goods were forced to confront the cost of disposal at the time of purchase it would create a large incentive for companies to make products with less waste and products that are easier to recycle.
I agree. But that's not the reality today. We may get there 50 years from now, but people don't want to live surrounded by 50 years of garbage in order to fulfill a social theory.
The goal isn't to just to recycle everything that currently can be recycled but to make everything easy to recycle.
Which was exactly what this did: Make it easy for people to recycle everything that could be recycled.
A totally fair point (one that I also happen to agree with) but not in the spirit of OP’s comment, which suggests some sort of moral trickery by the likes of Apple.
The real complexity is in a clean, sorted and segregated stream to recycle large quantity’s at once, and I don’t see that given the fractured state of current collections.
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.
In the spirit of advancing curiosity, it was interesting to just see, is it possible to reduce environmentalism to something like "joy * time / embodied energy"? Bitcoin is mined because a bitcoin is worth more than the electricity used to mine it, so if your joy * time is "making money quickly" - which it is for a lot of people! - it seems really attractive to mine bitcoin but it isn't environmentally friendly.
If you are upset that they are too expensive, don't buy them. The price isn't going to waste; it has an enormous profit margin over the BoM. (a lot, perhaps most, of the true cost is fixed overhead, so buying more airpods makes them more efficient!)
I’m curious what you based this on?
Did you fall victim to ultracrepidarianism / the fallacy of transferable expertise [1]?
” The millions of tons of plastic swirling around the world’s oceans have garnered a lot of media attention recently. But plastic pollution arguably poses a bigger threat to the plants and animals – including humans – who are based on land.
Very little of the plastic we discard every day is recycled or incinerated in waste-to-energy facilities. Much of it ends up in landfills, where it may take up to 1,000 years to decompose, leaching potentially toxic substances into the soil and water.
Researchers in Germany are warning that the impact of microplastics in soils, sediments and freshwater could have a long-term negative effect on such ecosystems. They say terrestrial microplastic pollution is much higher than marine microplastic pollution – estimated at four to 23 times higher, depending on the environment.” [2]
[1] https://twitter.com/bjorn/status/953778121764831232
[2] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/plastic-planet-h...
You do realize the waste is created by global north capitalists (and consumed by global north capitalists and the working class), right? So why mention that it is expensive for global south countries ('developing countries'), as if it's ok that the burden of our waste is on them?
In other words the global south countries have to deal with their own waste, as well as being used as trash dump by the global north capitalists. And if they are creating a lot of waste, it's because they buy planned obsolescent black box products from global north companies (companies who 'kicked away the ladder' in the first place [1] [2]).
[1] https://anthempress.com/kicking-away-the-ladder-pb
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/6/rich-countries-d...
Wait, that's totally not what I wanted to say.
I mention it is expensive for companies there - companies operating there (including multinational), and companies shipping there. So they just don't do it, period. That they can get away with it is the very reason waste goes there, instead of staying in the West.
Of course I'm not blaming the developing countries: I'm blaming the companies of "global north capitalism" for exploiting the communities that can't afford to reject a deal that's ultimately bad from them. The problem is that the waste can be exported like this in the first place.
They're designed to be disposable tech.
My trash can almost never has electronic waste in it? It seems really odd that you're seemingly claiming that it's common for people to regularly throw away ewaste to such a degree that airpods are a rounding error.
There's more to airpods than plastic after all.
You’re just saying, “if it’s small it’s okay” again. It’s not that reductive. I agree that plastic is bad. I also think throwing away AirPods is bad, for a different reason than plastic is bad, but really, are they the same reason? It’s so much more interesting when it’s not as reductive as “small things are okay to throw away” or whatever like, really simplistic thought is going on here.
Most of that is software support. Some of it is that they make few models, and sell at a premium, so there is a robust secondary market in used devices. They continue to make and sell batteries for old models, and there are plenty of counterfeits available if you want to risk it.
Apple recently (late last year) replaced the battery on my Mom's iPhone 6, which will turn seven this year. I saw an estimate that half of all iPhones 4 are still in use, mostly in developing nations. That was two years ago, but, still.
As for laptops, same basic principle applies, except I have to give a shoutout to the Thinkpad T series for sheer longevity. You have to want a Thinkpad T, but if you do, they're excellent and durable computers.
But with that one (sterling) exception, Macbooks last about twice as long as anyone else's computers. You can easily confirm this yourself by checking eBay. The butterfly keyboard era may have put an end to that, though, which is a damn shame, but we can hope the return of the scissor keyboard will bring it back.
As for the AirPods. What are we talking about on this page again?
Massive citation needed. Especially if you're going to talk about software support here since MacOS kills software support for old hardware long before Windows or Linux does.
The comment of "check eBay" isn't very compelling. Check it for what? What's your hypothesis and methodology here? Especially since you're claiming it's objectively longer lasting?
I'm not sure if you've spent much time watching Louis Rossman's youtube channel, but it is full of examples of Apple telling customers a device needs to be replaced when simple repairs are possible. [1][2][3]
Apple worked with US Customs and Border Patrol to seize replacement batteries for laptops that apple will no longer service. [4]
Rossman has a lot of videos so I did not find original sources for the following, but he has also called Apple support about replacing a charging port on a phone. Apple support told him the charging port was soldered to the motherboard and the phone needed to be replaced. But that charging port on that device is attached via a cable and is not soldered to the board. It can be replaced for a few dollars in five minutes.
Rossman also says that apple prevents third party chip manufacturers from selling to repair shops. So Rossman could repair certain macbooks with a $6 chip from (I believe) Intersil, but Apple (being an 800lb gorilla) has asked Intersil not to sell those chips to anyone else. So apple won't replace that chip on your motherboard but they also won't let anyone else do it.
It's great that apple will replace batteries, but I seem to recall there was significant consumer (or government?) pressure to offer those replacements. And I would be curious if they do that worldwide or only where legally required.
But watching Rossman's youtube channel, it is clear that repair is about much more than batteries. It's good that their products are long lasting, but at some point they will all eventually break. Millions of apple products must break each year. Apple could help extend the lives of those products, saving customers money and cutting down on waste. Instead, they seem eager to blame every problem on water damage and quote $1200 for repairs which could be done for a few dollars. (the first three video links make that clear)
I don't see the point in defending Apple here. I am sure other companies are bad too, but Apple is the industry leader and their failure to embrace repair sets expectations across the board. If it was consumer pressure that led to their battery replacement program, we may be able to apply similar pressures for right to repair. But only if we're willing to acknowledge the problems with their behavior and push back against them.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2_SZ4tfLns
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1A9y4S60kg
Everything you've objected to here falls under right to repair, which I support. I understand why Apple would want to exert control over the parts which go into their devices, because flaky secondary-market parts which fail will be blamed on Apple, not the fly-by-night chop shop which put them in; but I don't find it compelling and think the entire industry should be forced to allow it.
This is what a reply looks like, by the way. What you did wasn't so much a reply as using my post as a launch-point for your own rant.
In particular, not a word of what you said went to refute or even address the quoted part of my post. There's no if by the way: Apple has been replacing batteries since they popped out of devices, at no point has that service not been available, ever. Instead of looking this up, you used your own mental ambiguity to say a bunch of things which implied they're worse than they are. That's lazy.
However, we are never going to live in a world of repaired devices. Feature development and performance increases happen too quickly.
Most people buy new phones every two years and upgrade not because the device isn't working or its become unusuable.
The better path, the one that Apple is pursuing, is improving the reclaim-ability of materials in devices.
I'd rather trade my old laptop in and buy a new one that has been made from the reclaimed materials of my old laptop, than have my older, slower, less capable one repaired.
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.
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.
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.
However, your argument about reducing environmental waste is flawed. AirPod, in total, weigh less and use far less plastic than your design.
Given the scale of production, the raw material to final product path will be short and relatively low impact. Your process involves much more packaging, transport and middle-man costs.
Feature set wise, your design is also significantly less.
I'm very supportive of people making product that is better suited to them, but the idea of this approach being somehow less wasteful is completely ridiculous.
> I'm blaming the companies of "global north capitalism" for exploiting the communities that can't afford to reject a deal that's ultimately bad from them.
Got it, thanks for clarifying what you meant.
> The problem is that the waste can be exported like this in the first place.
Yes, I 100% agree with you.
>> waste-management companies in developing countries
That threw me off because in my experience often a service like this is taken care of by governments/local municipalities. So now I understand that you are talking about corporate entities managing waste.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27804441
My understanding from that video is that there's a network of companies involved - some on the export side, and some on the import side. Some of the latter are purely local operations - like the people operating the dump in that documentary.
In cases like that video, I find it hard to blame the locals: it's not like they have a more reasonable alternative to make money. But that's not always the case when it comes to waste management. For example, Poland is infamous for having illegal toxic waste dumps. Some local companies offer importing and properly disposing of the waste, but in reality they just bury it in the ground. For these people I wish long jail sentences, because we do have alternatives in this country; our economy does not necessitate for people to create environmental disasters (which then cost the taxpayer much more when discovered, as government then has to clean it up).
This is not a binary thing. Devices are repaired all the time. For example cracked screens are one thing that people still repair. We already live in a world with repaired devices. The question is whether or not we should allow big companies that profit from new device sales to lie to customers and interfere with third party repair.
> Most people buy new phones every two years
I would suspect that "most people" do not. I did that when I was 24 and obsessed with having the latest tech. Now my phone is 5 years old and fine. Most people in the USA for example do not earn enough money to buy a new phone every two years. Those folks would love to be able to repair things and use them a bit longer.
> The better path, the one that Apple is pursuing, is improving the reclaim-ability of materials in devices.
This is not an either/or choice. Remember the phrase is "reduce, reuse, recycle". Recycling is fine, but re-using uses less resources and so should be a component of a real sustainability program.
My vision is not that one person designs open source headphones. My vision is that the primary suppliers of consumer products make their products open source. That would be a very different world, but I argue that it would be one with significantly less material waste.
In such a world, headphones would be both well designed and infinitely repairable.
By the way I have a new design that is more attractive. https://twitter.com/TLAlexander/status/1403968653406597122
I hounded Dell for months and got them to replace I guess 2 or 3 dozens of Optiplex DL270 motherboards and it felt good: forcing them to take the cost for their shoddy work.
I do wish there was a little more of treating your users like adults though. If I have enough battery to make an urgent call, but it puts me under the 20% recommended, I want to make that call at the cost of long term battery life.
My products treat users like adults, I wish it was a more common consideration.
I just replaced that phone, and yes with another one because I happen to like that model a lot, and my old one did 1500+ cycles with respectable battery capacity remaining. I replaced it due to a cracked screen, not battery trouble.
My general experience has been to avoid fully charging the battery and leaving the device on the charger, plus avoiding high demand use under 15 to 20 percent adds very considerably to longer term battery health.
This has played out across a number of devices, lenovo laptop, various phones.
After, say a few hundred cycles, it's very important to avoid taking the battery below 5 percent or even to zero. When that happens, the battery capacity is reduced every time, and it's by a significant amount.
http://learningrc.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Lipo-Discha...
Battery capacity is guessed by the Voltage output at the current draw when measured.
Laptops usually throttle components, reducing current draw, when they fall below certain percentages. This prolongs the battery so that last 10% really does last longer.
This article goes into some nitty gritty details if you're curious.
http://learningrc.com/lipo-battery/
Determining actually battery capacity and runtime are educated guesses because all the factors impacting them are constantly changing.
I’m not sure many reviews are checking 0-60 times at 20% battery for example.
My EV has a hilarious “miles remaining” number that INSTANTLY changes when the HVAC is on, doesn’t matter if it’s only slightly on or not, I instantly “lose” 8 or 9%. It’s pretty loose. As to what I actually get? Doesn’t really matter, never even compared to rating, mfgs know we use these cars for city travel.
The small percentage of EVs you see on long haul highway, owners already know to carefully plan their trips.
This is double true for Tesla where there are superchargers nearly everywhere. With access superchargers, road trips are roughly as complex as driving a diesel with a 5-8 gallon tank.
Also the tesla UI is very good at managing the trip so it is trivial to offload the "how do I get there including charging" task to the UI.
The times I had an issue with an HP business laptop I called them and either a technician came to my office and replaced the part (a screen in that case) or they sent a spare after confirming I was capable to change it myself.
This is orthogonal to the question of whether or not the practice is environmentally friendly. Most people have been buying gasoline for 50 years but that’s also causing environmental problems. All of these manufactured devices take a lot of resources to create. Often “unusability” means the operating system has outgrown the hardware, but we can easily imagine Apple allowing third party operating systems on their unsupported phone and tablet devices. This would extend the life of the hardware, significantly reduced waste, and lower people’s cost of living. But even when Apple devices can be fixed for free the company will quote exorbitant repair prices and suggest the customer replace the device. (See links below which I also shared in another comment)
From this we can see that Apple is not making the effort to keep old devices functional and they will mislead customers about it to sell them a new device. This leads to hardware waste and higher costs for consumers.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2_SZ4tfLns [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1A9y4S60kg [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7RXJP4mxCc
If AirPods are making people lose sleep because they aren’t environmentally friendly, then let me introduce you to PuffBars or any of those disposable nicotine vapes that aren’t rechargeable or refillable and often lose all battery life before juice. Or simply the entire lithium lifecycle is incredibly wasteful regardless of the product it is in.
I want to point out EVs aren’t going to last significantly longer than a MacBook will and contain much more lithium that needs to be dealt with.
I get that it’s fun or hip to be anti-Apple, and I’ll agree that they could be better from an environmental standpoint, but they are doing a lot better than most and there are a lot more environmental travesties occurring than the small batteries in AirPods.
I do criticize other problems with our consumption online and in my published writing. I am not making this critique because it is "fun or hip to be anti-apple". I believe the consumption patterns of people in the USA (like myself!) are literally unsustainable and we must change our outlook on engineering, production, and consumption to be more ecological or we will keep on destroying the natural world until there is nothing left.
I also want to do the environmentally friendly stuff in a way that is economically beneficial for people. So when Apple quotes $1200 for a repair that could cost a person $50, I worry about what this 2+ Trillion dollar company is doing to the average person, and how this mindset among corporate executives towards consumer gouging affects our world at large.
Their behavior is actually hurting people. They could improve without even making engineering changes to their designs. Let us not go around online forums making excuses for people who abuse consumers for profit while also generating unnecessary e-waste.
You can read my past writing on consumption here:
Apple’s products have a lifespan and support cycle longer than their competition. Linux is the only software I know of with longer support, but even still it can be hard to get by on old hardware because of the unnecessary bulk of essential websites.
I understand critiquing Apple and it would be nice if I didn’t have such rosy glasses towards them, but I think they have better values and are better for the end consumer more than any company close in size.
Apple charges $200 for a battery replacement on a MacBook Pro for labor on a $50 part. That’s less gouging than an auto repair shop. I know I’m not citing sources, but claiming a 2400% margin on repair is disingenuous.
What meaningful changes can Apple make without engineering changes?
Im not trying to make excuses for Apple execs, I just don’t understand all the hatred towards Apple when companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google are much worse for the end-user and how they influence our consumption.
