Fairbuds are Fairphone’s proof that we really could make better tiny gadgets
arstechnica.com
But of course we all know that the big manufacturers don't do this not because they can't but because they don't want to. Planned obsolescence is still very much the name of the game, despite all the bullshit they spout about sustainability.
What I don't get is how no company seems to have worked out a legitimately good service and maintenance model for tech products. Fairphone hasn't invented the wheel here. They're going to make money on maintenance, parts and repair.
I would think there would be lowered costs involved in not having to push out a new product every 6 months and market it to customers who just bought something less than a year ago.
The business models of the current tech giants are very much based on planned obsolescence. Selling you a gadget for $ 1000 every two years will always be more profitable than selling you one very five years and doing service in the meantime.
Are you aware that the current version of iOS is supported by the phones Apple released in 2018? And they're still releasing security updates for the prior version, with support for 2017's iPhone 8?
and thats fine until you need replacement for a cracked screen or a bad battery and you find out its almost as expensive as a brand new phone. it good that they are doing it but software is just 50% of the problem.
This is before you even get into the ewaste and limited precious metals
Even for unrepairable, at fault replacement(you stepped on it) apple will normally sell you a reconditioned perfect replacement for 50% the cost.
Reliable repair and ultrafast swap and restore are one off the reasons I stick with apple.
In no case is it ever “ almost the price of a new one”.
ill repost this for good measure:
thats the price of another equivalent, or a decent brand new android.
A battery replacement from Apple itself for an iPhone 8 is $69. You can get third-party replacements for less. They actually offer battery replacements going back to the 5s (released in 2013) and screen repairs going back to the iPhone 6.
A decade of first-party hardware support for the most likely to fail components in a phone is pretty hard to square with allegations of "planned obsolescence."
Perhaps the easier argument is that they try to create a sense of urgency to sell people what they don’t need.
Hmm, I wonder what the latest iPhone would look like if Apple were on a once every two years release schedule instead of annual. I can see arguments for the same, better, and worse.
I've always been Android, but the easy counter is just "why do people feel the need to replace their working phone every year."
Car companies have a new model every year and even among those who could afford to, very few people feel the need to have an annual car upgrade cycle. Products aren't (/shouldn't be) fashion.
Apple's got a weird cult thing going, partly because the first few generations were legitimately large upgrades. I'd be curious about the stats of how many non-influencers actually upgrade annually.
Ahh, but that's the trick, because by saying "non-influncers", you'd be cutting out the peoples who fancy themselves influencers, or act like influencers, which is apparently everyone now.
Do they? Yes, they certainly advertise what's new but they're not primarily targeting customers with last year's phone. I recall seeing previously that the average time to keep an iPhone is three years. On Apple's iPhone 15 product page, I found two spots where it called out direct comparisons to previous iPhones: "A17 Pro GPU is up to 70% faster than the GPU in iPhone 12 Pro" and "iPhone 15 Pro has up to 6 more hours video playback than iPhone 12 Pro." They're targeting upgrades to the newest flagship at people with the flagship from three years ago. Of course due to the long support for iPhones, that three year iPhone will inevitably end up in the hands of another user, where it will continue to live on, so there's nothing at all wasteful about upgrading. It's not even wasteful to upgrade every single year because those year-old phones are still used. It's only when the phone is irreparably broken or hopelessly, legitimately obsolete (due to still rapidly-improving technology) that it's then recycled (and Apple has developed special robots to make extracting the rare earth metals viable at large scale).
I think it would look exactly the same as it does today except that it would include two years' of innovations and changes rather than one, but would also mean that if you needed a new phone before its release, your only option would be an increasingly dated model. Customer: Hi, I'd like the latest flagship. Store: Here's the best technology that was available 20 months ago.
I also think it's worth noting that Apple pretty much single-handedly slowed the release schedule for phones. Prior to the iPhone, Nokia was releasing roughly a dozen barely-differentiated models per year, spread throughout the year.
I think it's entirely possible that they chose to compare to a 3 year old phone not because they are only targeting those upgrades to people with 3 years old phones, but because it sounds a lot more impressive that way instead of just the smaller incremental improvements over last years model.
It should also be noted that Apple admitted at one point to purposefully slowing down older iPhones too, which very clearly was done to get people to upgrade. If that's not planned obsolescence I don't know what is.
You talk about them as if they are some benevolent entity, when that's just very much not the case.
could also be that they are marketing over 3 year old flagship owners because that's a likely demographic to upgrade phones, that isn't as locked-in foolproof as their serial buyers, which require no marketing, nor as hopeless as people with mid-ranges or low-end phones. basically, that their marketing buck goes further with this demo.
It is the literal exact opposite of planned obsolescence. Apple introduced a new feature, still present in all of their phones, to extend the useful life of old phones. Batteries degrade with time and use and, after a certain extent, are not able to maintain the sufficient and stable current levels for a phone to operate, particularly during moments of peak power draw. If this happens (and this applies to every Android phone as well), the phone will just shut itself down. Specifically it will shut down right in the middle of you trying to actually do something, since that’s what’s going to cause a spike in power demand. Apple added additional power management to iOS to dynamically throttle power use only when and to the extent needed. On a phone with a perfectly healthy battery, it’s not in use at all. On a phone that’s had years of hard use, it might still only barely be noticeable with some high-demand tasks running slightly slower or the screen slightly dimming. The worse health the battery is in, the lower its current charge level, and the greater the temporary spike in usage, the greater the throttling. Recharge it or resume less intense use and the throttling stops.
So after release (unplanned), they gave new life to what were otherwise obsolete batteries so you could wait longer to upgrade.
most people will probably need to pay someone to do it for them too.
and it aint close to being that "cheap" in my country.
There's no "too." This is the (US) price to have Apple themselves replace your battery for you with a new OEM battery, inclusive of the battery and labor. It basically represents the highest available cost.
you can pretty much get another one for the price they want here (cracked screen):
Well Say whatever about apple but my grandma is running an iPhone 5 for years, replaced the battery from a third party repair shop last year and it keep working absolutely perfectly. There was absolutely no issue finding someone to replace it and it costs 40€.
But yeah, if we had bought her a shity android third grade phone, support would be long gone and the thing barely working. Would have bought one or two other phone in the meantime.
Apple go out of their way to make it difficult for 3rd parties repair shops to get parts and same goes for "official" repair partners who are also gimped in what they're allowed to repair.
I imagine this isn't want you meant when you said say whatever you will about Apple.
It's not so much that I'm praising apple but that I'm criticizing android manufacturers. You can make it as much repairable as you want, if you stop updating after 2 year it's as good as dead.
I know we could have bought her a pixel, but they got their own issue. And not so much repairable.
Samsung back in these time, it was 2 year update too and Im not sure even today they keep updating their low end phone for much longer than that. Wouldn't buy a s23 for a grandma that only makes call and some internet search. 😀
Other than a lack of security updates, what does it matter if the OS isn't updated such that it is unusable?
Apple is on it's best way to kill all 3rd party repair shops. Luis Rossman has many videos about it. Basically you don't get any schematics, Apple makes it illegal for you to buy replacement parts and they make it more difficult to repair anything.
Well, at least for batteries we seem to be going in a good direction
That's fine for the iPhone 5 before they got as greedy as they are in modern times. Latest generation iPhones have parts locked to the motherboard of the phone, making it alot harder for 3rd party technicians to make repairs without bricking the phone. I forget the name of the YouTuber I think it's Louis Hoffman, he goes into alot more detail on this.
But you are right in a sense, if you never break your phone, it'll last until the battery does. If you get it repaired at a 3rd party shop that's not apple certified (a really expensive certification to get, not just for upfront cash but they restrict what you're allowed to work on to keep the certification) you risk walking away with a very expensive paper weight
Apple got in trouble for lowering CPU speed with a software update. They said it's to help old batteries but it made the experience noticable worse so it appeared like they tried to make getting a new phone more appealing by gimping old ones.
Updating proprietary software need not be in the user's best interests.
Checking in on a five year old XS MAXXX here. Runs like the day I got it.
The costs (overhead) are too high. They make more by simply manufacturing and selling.
Otherwise they'd be doing it.
I'm wondering about that. I've worked with several manufacturers, and their most profitable segment is parts. If you ever want to get the highest annual bonus, work for the parts devision.
Manufacturers of what? Selling and replacing car parts is a much different proposition than trying to replace semiconductors inside an earbud.
If the thing you're selling costs $100,000, a separate parts stream makes sense, because the skilled labor that goes into replacing parts in a used device is worth the cost, compared to throwing it all away and starting with the new thing.
If the thing costs $100 and skilled worker time is at $50/hour, there's just not much room for repairs to be cost effective, and repairs then become more of a reflection of one's internal values around reducing waste or tinkering for fun than an economically feasible activity.
Anything that's repairable is by component (main board, sound card, battery, camera, case, etc.). It was nice when we could swap batteries in cellphones. I have a Samsung S24 Ultra that came with a promise of 7 years of updates but the battery will degrade well before that and will cost $200-300 to pay a repair shop to replace because of the need of specialized tools. With my old Samsung Note 1, I could get a new battery for $20.
Why do you think they all opposed right to repair?
And specifically, right to open repair? They’ll happily send you a $600 TPM-locked biometric sensor, because they would control the market and ROI, but won’t let you buy a $90 alternative from someone else.
What? Why would the battery replacement cost $200-300? That seems a bit out there; authorised Apple resellers here replaces iPhone batteries for $80, that's work and battery. That's digestible at least, but still unreasonable in my opinion. I'd prefer to return to the days of feature phones where you could slip off the back and just slot in a new battery you picked up at the local electric parts store for $15-30.
But not for overall profit
Yes, for total corporate contribution margin.
The service and maintenance model is largely "replace it".
Everyone looks to a desktop computer where you swap out a stick of ram or whatever. But the real key is to look at laptops. Yes, a LOT of vendors solder the god damned ram in place and so forth which is bullshit. But repairs are generally less "okay, let me re-solder this one connection" since that connection is a via that is embedded in a circuitboard. So it becomes "let's replace that board". And yes, efforts can be made to split up the board more but you lose latency savings and increase the complexity of the boards because you now need to add connection points and so forth.
And then you look at earbuds where... do you even have room for connectors like that? Near as I can tell, Fairbuds let you replace a few pieces of plastic, the rubber earplugs, the in-bud battery, and the charger (possibly just the battery?). That is definitely a step in the right direction but it also becomes a question of how much that even matters. In particular, I am wary of the value-add of the internal batteries since charging a lithium battery is largely "solved" and these have an external controller (the case) that can preserve the battery.
While I think we can do better in some spaces, the reality is that a lot of modern tech is fundamentally un-repairable. Not because of evil conspiracies but just because it is a lot easier to print a PCB and slot in some components than it is to connect vacuum tube diodes. And when so many of those components are fairly complex chips and the damage is less "oh, the metal prong on this chip broke" and more "oh, the via shorted out"?
Stuff like the fairbuds just seem... real stupid to me. Fairphone level "replace and repair" is kind of borderline but I think is generally good. And while I have series issues with how Framework does it and the resulting e-waste, I love the ethos of their laptops.
But We need to pick and choose our battles to be ones that make sense. Will Smith's Tested's Adam Savage just uploaded a video where he gushed about how easy it was to repair a kitchenaid mixer and that is an AWESOME video. That is the kind of repairs that people can meaningfully make. Using an x-ray machine to detect a possible short in a chip and hoping that was the only short... is not.
And in those cases? We need strong warranties AND strong e-waste recycling programs and incentives. Electronics are increasingly disposable for good and bad reasons. The junk drawer full of old phones and swelling batteries is bad.
Li-ion batteries wear out with normal use, or even sitting on a shelf fully charged. I suspect the battery is the primary reason most devices with onboard charging become unusable over time, and ensuring that it is user-replaceable will greatly increase average service life.
The wear and tear is greatly exaggerated (more specifically, it is based on older tech and before we had chargers that cycled correctly) and the technology (bluetooth has made leaps and bounds the past few years) is likely to be outdated long before the battery fails.
It is one of those things that I want on principle but very much question the value of. And considering that this is a zero sum game where the time and cost of the replaceable battery comes from somewhere else (in the case of cost: the consumer's pocket because holy crap these are expensive...).
My Sony linkbuds S only last two hours now. It's a product from 2022. When did they solve batteries? Because it wasn't in 2022
The product in question is not outdated because they rolled out updates for the new features, like Bluetooth LE audio
Honestly? it sounds like you bought a stinker then. Because I have some (I forget if they are anker or jabra) earbuds that are MAYBE a few minutes off of what they were when I got them before the pandemic (so 2019/2020).
It depends on how many hours a day you use them, not comparable between people
Could you please elaborate on these improvements to Lithium battery chemistry that have alleviated the problem with battery wear?
To my understanding, the underlying chemistry/material science has not made significant advancements.
But all the stuff we used to have to do to avoid damaging said batteries (e.g. Never fully charging it, discharging it a bit periodically, etc) is now more or less automated by controllers. Which goes a long way to reduce the impact of "wear" and stretch out the lifespan of a battery.
That's the thing about capitalism, it doesn't have to be a conspiracy to be evil. Capitalism will optimize for the cheapest option to acquire the most profit, and generally the cheapest option is also the one that's the worst for the workers/environment/consumers.
In capitalistic societies like the USA, for-profit companies are mandated to serve the interest of their shareholders, which is usually to make as much money as they can. If there was some kind of incentive to do the right thing, that makes the "right thing" more profitable than the rest, maybe companies would do the right thing. Maybe make companies pay for the amount of ewaste (or any kind of waste) they generate?
Is this a fundamental piece of tech as it exist now, or is this just kind of the way that tech has manifested after 50 years of development inside of a profit driven system which incentivizes unrepairable and disposable products over things which can be sustained for a long time?
I'd also like to posit that we've experienced a relatively rapid growth in the last 50 years, and that possibly has also affected design. In a rapidly changing market, you'd be a fool not to design everything as disposable, since next year's thing is going to be so different and so much better that it's kind of ridiculous to expect as much backwards compatibility or to expect repairability since people won't be sticking with stuff for as long. Now, whether or not that growth is actually slowing down intrinsically, or if that growth is just slowing down as a result of the current structure of the market, who can really say.
But largely I would posit that, don't mistake the fundamental nature of a thing as being the same as said thing in relation to a much larger and broader system. We could frame infotainment systems and the increasing digitization of cars as an inevitability, but in a radically different context, like southeasy asia or africa, we might see cars that are prized for their ease of maintenance and utility value, fuel efficiency being a lower concern, and luxuries like infotainment being much, much lower.
It is obviously both.
But you cannot have earbuds without microchips. Those things are often smaller than a single vacuum based transistor. Same with cell phones. Brick Phones weren't giant (just) because people wanted things to be bigger. They were giant and worthless for anyone other than Zach Morris because technology did not allow otherwise. And that is why basically every year (up until maybe a decade ago?) it was "And this is smaller and lighter because who wants a giant ass phone".
But... there are trade offs to that. When all the meaningful logic in a device is on a single board/chip, it can be REALLY small and you get a lot of inherent shock protection (nothing to get dislodged when it hits the concrete). But that also means that diagnoses increasingly involve x-ray machines and repairs are largely "replace the chip".
And, like I said, that is why the fairbuds are still full of glue for the actual internals and they don't sell the actual chips. ifixit commented on this on how it is likely for waterproofing reasons but... that still means you can't actually "repair" anything but surface damage and swapping out a battery (And while I am not convinced that is a meaningful value add, I still like it). That is the fundamental limit to when you aren't even dealing with chips with the spider leg prongs and are instead dealing with significant amounts of logic in the substrate of the board itself.
So if you want something that "values repairability"? You aren't getting earbuds. You probably aren't even getting headphones that (sane) people can just pop in their bag and go. You are looking at the bigass cans targeted at people who have Thoughts on psychoacoustics. Or, to put it in computing terms, you aren't buying a cellphone. You are buying a desktop. (... also, good luck fixing your motherboard. Because even if you identify the short and bypass it... do you really want to put an 800 dollar GPU in there?).
Which gets back to understanding what does and does not make sense to focus on "repairability".
Fairphone isn't super profitable. They just scrape by with not too much growth. The big companies probably simply understand that it's just cheaper and more profitable to manufacture tons of e-waste and get consumers to buy a new one every year. Hopefully fairphone will be more competitive as new repairability and recycling regulations come into force.
It's like they completely forgot that car dealerships make most of their money on maintenance and repair of vehicles that were sold.
Long term service is where the real money is.
When tech gets better so fast there is no point. we just haven't adjust to the era of more mhz every year and so now buying to last is useful as you won't get an upgrade from new.
This article seems to omit the most important fact about headphones - how do they sound?
I love repairability and all, but it hardly matters if I don't want to use them in the first place because they traded off too much quality for repairability.
I get what you're saying, kind of...
But also, most modern earbuds usually sound quite good. Quality in general has become such a bizarre moving target, but here's my take: We've become so used to constant improvement at the expense of satisfaction. I can barely notice the difference between 1080p and 4k. In my mind they're both "good quality" and therefore I'm satisfied. Same goes for audio quality. I've used a few pairs of earbuds and they have sounded "good."
As a culture, we need to stop with throwing away of perfectly good devices, because it's extremely harmful to the planet's occupants.
1080p and 4k isn't really a fair comparison for great earbuds and shit earbuds in my opinion. The comparison there is like 4k and 480p. There is a massive difference between the 2. I have had $30 earbuds that you couldn't listen to a podcast on, and I currently have $250+ Bose earbuds that are fucking amazing for just about everything.
Unless of course you're saying that these earbuds are in fact "1080p" quality. In which case, fair point. I have yet to see someone who's actually used these and commented on the sound quality though. What I've seen from fairphone products is they are consumer friendly at the expense of quality.
My wife had some Logitech headphones that for some godforsaken reason were operating in some voice only ultra low bitrate by default. I mean, they weren't fantastic even after I fixed that, but the quality was unbelievably low, like somebody making a phone call from the moon, and how she'd put up with it for nearly a year I'd no idea. I only found out after I noticed her swapping between a wired set for general use and wireless for Discord.
Some Bluetooth controllers can't handle the bandwidth required for sound input and output at the same time unless it's at very low quality, and if Windows suspects such a device is in use, it defaults to the low quality mode as users are more likely to be able to tolerate it than tolerate their headphones not working at all. It's overly cautious, though, and uses the low quality mode far more than it has to.
That's one nice thing I found about Linux, it's pretty easy to change the codec. Just fiddle a bit until it sounds good without static or delays. This is especially important when using multiple Bluetooth devices simultaneously since the Bluetooth chip can only handle so much data.
Maybe Windows has the option, IDK, poke around a bit and see what's available. I couldn't find the option on my work Mac, so I ended up just using wired headphones on my work computer.
It's super quick to swap it on Windows once you know the problem exists and know where to look. You just click the audio icon in the system tray and change the output device in the dropdown from the headset version of the device to the headphones one, and it enables all the higher-bandwidth modes. I'm not sure there's user-accessible control over which specific codec gets used, though.
That's basically what you get on Linux, but there's a third option for a low energy codec.
On macOS, I wanted to use the "headset" mode to hopefully cut down just enough on bandwidth to get rid of choppy playback, but I didn't see an option for it. I have had quality change quite a bit based on the app I'm using (I guess it sometimes gets interpreted as a headset?), so I know it can do it, I just don't know how to control it.
I've got the Soundcore Liberty Pro 2 and the Soundpeats H1. Neither of them come close to my HD598. What are the modem earbuds that sound good?
Truthear Nova IG
Yo that has a cable.
They were very smart to include it.
Yes but that makes it irrelevant to this comment thread. I'll just wear my Sennheiser if I'm not worried about a cable.
I don't think the writer has them on hand - this is a news article not a review.
Codec support is a bit of a bummer. Otherwise I would have bought them.
Isn't the codec for headphones just meant to handle the communication between the headphones and device while the device can handle transcoding from the input codec to the output codec?
Or do you mean the quality of the codecs supported puts an upper limit on sound quality?
Some more recent bluetooth codecs (such as LDAC or aptX) are better ahead in audio compression, which given bluetooth's limited bandwidth (and given than higher bandwidth usage means also more battery consumption), is something to keep in mind at all stages. In general, bluetooth audio quality is quite a mess of codec negotiations that happen mostly transparently to the user when an earphone connects. When a call is placed and the headset needs to also send audio besides receiving it, further codec changes are negotiated on the spot, prioritizing latency vs quality. Here's a quick (kinda) guide to the most common bluetooth codecs any given audio device might use: https://www.whathifi.com/advice/what-are-the-best-bluetooth-codecs-aptx-aac-ldac-and-more-explained
I’m also confused here. I’d have thought that any format decoding would happen on the phone.
Bluetooth does use compression to get higher quality sound out of the relatively low bandwidth (vs what a wire carrying an analog signal can handle, which is continuous in both time and amplitude domains, so effectively infinite sample rate and bit depth, though it's limited by what the DAC can put out as well as what the recording ADC (and/or mixing software) picked up in the first place).
There's a set of codecs in the Bluetooth standard and devices don't have to support every codec in that list (iirc some are proprietary and need to be licensed, plus more support requires more circuitry or firmware if it's decoded by a programmable decoder). I'm guessing that's what they are talking about but asked in case they did mean they thought not seeing mp3 and flac on the list meant they can't listen to songs encoded in those format.
Edit: closed a bracket
Nice lesson, thanks.
Yup, I fiddled with the Bluetooth codecs a bit when I had issues with my headphones, and I got them to sound way better even with other devices using Bluetooth and taking up bandwidth on the chip. This was on Linux, so I'm not sure what options Windows and macOS have for this (I gave up looking on my Mac and now just use wired headphones at work).
Biggest complaints I've seen aren't with sound quality, it's with the noise cancelling being bad and the shape of the ear cups (the latter could have just been the shape of that user's ears were the problem).
Mind you, these were reviews from Fairbud XLs released about a year ago. Things could have improved or gotten worse in that time, in any way. I can't tell you for sure.
That said, I don't think it makes sense to correlate focusing on repairability and quality of the product going down. I actually went out and found the reviews I'm referencing simply because the concept is absurd and I needed to know for sure.
Always keep in mind what you say online, Poe's law is forever in effect.
Nah I wasn't being sarcastic.
As I understand it, in engineering these types of mobile space constrained devices you essentially have a "budget" of space. Every hardware feature you include generally eats into this budget and if you want things to be user accessible or repairable it eats into this budget majorly.
That budget has to come from somewhere, so you can pay it with things like reducing the size of your battery or reducing the size of your drivers which in turn represents a reduction in sound quality.
I am not a huge sound nerd, but I own a pair of these buds and had to take them out at a busy railway station because it was weirdly quiet and couldn't hear the trains. I think the noise-cancelling is great.
I also own an XL pair, and I have two complaints:
I have a big head, and it puts some pressure on the thing as clamps on my head, I've broken two of the little plastic parts between the pads and the top arch so far. It was from material exhaustion, they snapped. Silver lining was it was super easy to swap out, literally 20 seconds with only a screwdriver and a single screw, and I got their customer support to send me a replacement part in a week both times.
I hear odd noises when I try to use it when plugged in and charging. I suspect it might have to do with Windows, but still. It's barely usable, but the charge lasts long enough to make me not care.
Lol sound is not the selling point for any of those pods. Portability is the name of the game
They're not gonna sound as good as real, over ear headphones. But there's still a pretty wide sound quality spectrum for ear buds.
They're almost all small. You're a bit off center too.
They're headphones. They sound ok at best.
What a lame answer. Are you this lame in real life? There's OBVIOUSLY a HUGE spectrum of quality for iems, WHAT are you talking about? It's a valid question on the ops part. You wanted to be snobby but it's just a bad take that reveals how judgdy and smug and completely out of touch you are. Nobody thinks of you as cool, you don't have friends IRL, I hope your dog dies. I hate the internet fuck you you're the straw that broke the camels back. Would be a pretty cool place if people like you weren't in it. I quit
Is— is this a Lemmy copypasta?
LOL
Personally I don't really give a fuck about headphones quality unless it's particularly shitty, because if I want quality I'm using one of my headsets (preferably one that doesn't use Bluetooth), but ok.
Also what the fuck is judgy about my personal preferences ? I'm not going to think less of someone because of their choice of audio hardware lmao. And personal preferences are personal. Yes I am a bit anal about the sound quality of my headsets but that is strictly a me problem.
It is probably the completely unnecessary condescending tone of your comment.
Yeah that comment was too concise, which often comes off as condescending according to my friends. Also I used the wrong term because I meant earbuds specifically.
Which is not to say that earbuds all sound bad, it's just that imo, when you're starting to look at (especially Bluetooth) earbuds that sound on par with a good pair of, say 150€ over ear cabled headphones geared for sound quality, imo it's too expensive for something that I'm not gonna use extensively (because I'd much rather use over ear headphones for prolonged use, if only for comfort)
Perhaps we have different definitions of those words. Imo, a headset is over-hear (or on-ear) headphones + mic, like you'd see in a call center. Sometimes they only have a speaker on one side, and they're tuned for speech, not music or general listening.
Headphones, on the other hand, are any kind of speakers you wear on your head. They're usually on ear or over ear since in-ear is typically further distinguished by the term earbuds.
Headphones are usually the better sounding of the three. My Bluetooth headphones (Sony over-ear cans) sound way better than any earbuds I've used, and my wired headphones (AKG cans) are a bit better than that.
I'm not a native English speaker so, yeah, I used the wrong term because I forgot that the word "earbuds" exists. But what I meant is simply that sound quality is not the selling point for earbuds.
If I go for earbuds I want them to have good battery life and be comfortable because I have weirdly shaped ear canals, and I'm only going for "decent" sound because the ones that actually sound on par with a good pair of over ear headphones are like twice the price, at best. Also, yeah, wired is usually my go to for quality. My favorite so far on that front are my ATH M50X but they are not super comfortable for extended use because of my big ass ears so I'm still looking for the holy grail in that price range.
I'd rather they just give me a headphone jack tbh
I'm right there with ya. I know many people prefer wireless earbuds, but I like ripping cables out of my ears at random. Makes me feel alive.
Yes! I had totally forgotten about the instant pang of shock and anger I would feel when that happened.
Am I the only one that can't stand the few hundred millisecond delay of Bluetooth audio?
Not at all! It drives me nuts. I've tried watching movies with Bluetooth headphones on, so as not to bug my wife at night, and it just feels off. Almost like watching old subtitled movies. I checked it out and my headphones have a ~250ms response time. My car's system literally has a nearly two second delay and I can't take it.
holy shit is that what that is??? it's fucking awful i thought that video playback was somehow really intensive on my phone is fucky weird ways that were random and annoying.
It seems to be worse with multiple devices in use. I tried going Bluetooth only on my work laptop, and it just couldn't handle my keyboard, mouse, and headphones (headphones would be laggy and sometimes skip/get static).
So for my work computer, I use wired headphones and Bluetooth everything else (I like typing with my keyboard on my lap sometimes).
This. I hate to charge my headphones everyday
Love my pixel buds. I take them on airplanes, I clean the house with them, I take phone calls with them, and not once have I swung my hand and yanked my phone out of my hand causing it to crash to the ground. Not once have I had a damaged cable that forces one bud to cut in and out. They work great.
Charging is not a big deal. I honestly use them hours at a time throughout the day and since the case charges them, when I stop using them for a bit they are topped up. I probably legit throw them on the wireless charge pad once or twice a week, and never out of necessity where they're "dead".
I think it should always be an option to have the jack but I personally prefer wireless.
My sony ones survive more than a week.
that isn't the typical experience though, and letting your batteries drain completely is bad for them. also if you don't have some sort of routine, a lot of people (myself included) end up forgetting to charge them and end up with no working headphones until they can charge them again, which is pretty annoying.
Idk bro I have a cheap ~40 dollar pair of Chinese wirless earbuds called tozo nc9 (t12s were also a good option iirc) and you'd be surprised how good of a product you can get for cheap these days.
Several hour charge hold, over 48 hours of listening time with the case, noise canceling, better sound quality than most of the bass boosted budget junk put out by American companies.
I mean wired headphones are great too, but at this point it's become at least reasonable to get a pair of wireless.
I have mpows that cost 60$ and pixel bud pros that cost a lot more. If I didn't know the price of either I'd say the mpows were within 40$ of the pixel buds pro in terms of quality. The ANC works well. They last longer. But their mic is not great and they don't have the fluffy quality of life stuff the pixels have.
Yes, I get it. I would still use wired headphones, but I got bluetooth ones as a gift. And to add to your critisism, batteries die and you have to replace them around every 10 years.
I haven't had wired headphones last me more than a year. One bad snag on a cable any they're done. 10 years is a long time.
Well i didn't mean the headphones, I meant the batteries.
My Momentum 4s have 60 hours of battery life...
I use my AirPods daily for 5-6 hours and still only have to charge for 20 minutes once a week. It’s really not that big of an issue
I have come to love my bluetooth earbuds... but darn when im in the car i just wanna plug my phone in some times.
Mine just auto connects and I'm playing with Bluetooth
Yea, a portion of my problem is the bad implementation of Bluetooth in my 2013 Subaru Impreza.
It just wouldn't support Bluetooth reconnects.
But in the end, if a friend is in the car nothing is quicker and easier than just plugging them in.
My vehicle is from 2000 and I installed an after market Sony in it in 2010. Been using it ever since. But this was back when the system wasn't so uniquely integrated into vehicles. It's not really even an option in many these days.
Yea, mine has a swappable front end, but just downs seem worth it.
Ended up getting a Bluetooth adapter from Ali which works well.
fuck wireless headphones! I don't want to remember charging another god damn thing to start with.
This the type of business the EU has to develop. An entire ecosystem from phones, earbuds to computers and software. It's how you create a conscious and a model.
Unfortunately most people don't care. And since they don't care, they don't buy. These earbuds cost 150€ because they can't afford to buy huge amounts like Apple. I wish they could lobby the EU to subsidise these kinds of devices.
And standards. EU please enforce standards and interoperability, and open APIs.
I love what fairphone and some other companies are doing.
Still some of their earphones got a 1/10 reparability on ifixit, so I’d really check how reparaible these ones are.
Those were the first earbuds they offered, which were just OEM-ones where they main point of attention was on getting the workers a living wage (which is fair enough, they are called “fairphone”, not “repairablephone”), just like the Fairphone 1 where they apparently wanted to collect some experience in the space first.
I have them because I bought my fairphone 4 like one week before they had a free pair with every purchase on offer and wrote to their support, who graciously gave me a voucher as well. I don’t use them a lot, because I do have pretty good over-ear headphones, but they do come in handy on occasion, as they fit into my handbag, which means I am more likely to actually have them with me.
Yeah apparently the newer ones got a 10/10 on ifixit so it’s way better and it’s what I would probably buy if I was on the market.
I wish all their stuff wasn't EU only.
It's hard for a small manufacturer to start selling in overseas markets. It would take a certain volume for them to have the capital to set up shop in the US.
They’re not, they sell the phones in the US through here https://murena.com/america/shop/smartphones/brand-new/murena-fairphone-4/
I completely agree. This is annoying.
Do you know how many products are US-only?
a friendly reminder that there are also people outside of the US or Europe
Like Canada! /s
Name just fifty (50).
Search for KZ IEM it's a chifi has this kind of feature also probably cheaper than fairphone version.
You should ask your carrier why. Why they don't offer it. EU and US are two different market where people don't buy phones in the same way.
They cut the cost by not selling it to the carriers which will sell it to the customer.
In my European country, the market is dynamic. The fairphone 5 is available in multiple store. People have cheap mobile plan without contract. Another type of market.
I think you can get them imported but the costs go up significantly. Also they wouldnt be certified by your electronic bodies
I'm doing just fine with my bio body...
You can, I had an English vendor ship me my FP4 and it works just fine stateside. It does have its quirks being locked to GSM networks and the 5G bands not being universally aligned between the continents.
I still use the free wired earbuds I get on flights. You can also go to walmart and get unpackaged bags of them for like $1. I just lose wireless ones too easily
I mean, yes that’s an option. They are terrible for anything other than hearing things like they are in a tin can, but an option.
I’d suggest at least a slight upgrade if you prefer wired, and there’s nothing wrong with preferring wired. But I honestly can’t stand them. I get the wire caught on clothes, can’t leave my phone charging and pace the room, have to deal with it if I’m running, etc. It’s just more comfortable to use wireless.
Some solutions:
I have both wired and wireless headphones and love them both. For wireless, I use my bone conduction headphones most of the time so I can talk to others briefly, hear what's going on around me, etc. But when I really want a good listening experience, I use my wired headphones. They're fantastic for music, playing games (e.g. on my Steam Deck around the house), movies, etc.
But sometimes the crappy ear buds are just the ticket. I leave a pair in my work bag in case I'm stuck at the airport on a business trip or something and forgot one of my other pairs.
Nothing's fair with FP when they can't give the option of a jack. So much for caring about the environment
Meh.
Overpriced.
I can buy 3 or 4 pairs of BT5 earphones for the price of these.
My most expensive pair currently was $75.
I've never had batteries go bad in them - they get broken well before that happens. Though I have a noise canceling headset from 2006 that still works. Battery lasts long enough.
I'd rather break a pair of $30 earphones, and have multiple spares than a single pair of $150.
And they all sound about the same given the source and environment.
their entire premise is making sure that people on the supply chain of their devices are compensated adequately (hence the "Fair" in the name), which is why their products are more expensive than you're used to.
Nooooo! You can pry my cheap tat produced by child labour from my cold dead hands!
While I’m not blaming you, what you’re saying is really the problem in our society.
I blame his mother. There, I said it.
But their mother's mother is to blame for their mother!
I totally get it, why buy one expensive thing once, when you can buy cheap stuff that will cost more in the long run? 5 times 30 surely is cheaper than 1 times 150.
From my experience, there is just stuff where you don’t want to cheap out on. Don’t get me wrong, there is no need to buy „premium“ stuff when good stuff is about the same quality but cheaper, but buying cheap stuff, just because it is a little less than the good stuff usually never pays off for me
Sadly in my experience the boots theory is no longer accurate as the $50 pair of boots fall apart as quickly as the $10 pair, especially when talking about electronics. There may be longer lasting devices out there but the price is so beyond my price range that it may as well not exist.
Updated for 2024, the boots theory would read something more like a $50 pair of boots lasts for one year and is mostly comfortable to wear, the $10 pair lasts for one year but is uncomfortable to wear, and the $2000 pair of boots is comfortable and will last many years but anyone who buys them will toss them after one year anyway when "the fashion" changes.
My batteries are already on their last legs in the Sony tws, but I'll be replacing them with new ones.
If your $30 earphones break before their batteries do, maybe consider buying something that does not break in a year of use?
When I shopped for wireless earbuds, I spent a half hour comparing the top brands (most expensive), so I ended up asking the clerk what he used (saw one in his ear). The ones he recommended were $20 and they're great, sound decent, and last all day.
Sometimes cheap is just as good.
In my experience 30 bucks is a terrible price range for in-ears or headphones, mostly Chinese garbage that fails after a few months, maybe a year or two tops, even with just light usage. My current ones were at around 100 bucks and already outlived my previous cheap ones by quite a bit. That being said, FairPhone is kinda well known for being overpriced in regards to cost vs quality too, at least with their phones.