[czr]

> Yet another throw-away product from a self-proclaimed environmentally friendly company.

$79 for airpods max battery service [0]. user-replaceable battery certainly would be nicer. but to describe as "throw-away" seems extreme.

[0] https://support.apple.com/airpods/repair/service#battery

[yborg]

$69 to replace the earpads, which is the most consumable part for me on cans.

I have a pair of Audio Technica A700s, about $150 new that are now 12 years old; I'm on my 3rd set of earpads. AT gave me a new set free the first time I asked, and it cost me $10 with shipping to get new ones out of warranty. The current ones are 3rd party that are much better than the OEM pads and cost me ~$20.

[redisman]

Same - my Audio Technicas are over 10 years old and when the earpads started to wear, they dug up some new earpads from the archives and it was definitely under $30 total.

[jschwartzi]

Same but with my Sennheiser HD280s. I can still buy brand new earpads and a band pad online.

[spike021]

I'm sure there will be 3rd party knockoff pads. Just look at the "fancy" Apple Watch wristbands with clasps that are IMO way more expensive than they have any business being. A plethora of 3rd party replacements exist, many much cheaper than Apple.

[ebg13]

> I have a pair of Audio Technica A700s, about $150 new that are now 12 years old; I'm on my 3rd set of earpads.

So you buy a new set of earpads on those every 4 years. But we can also compare with the same-market-segment-as-AirPod-Max (wireless+ANC+mic) Bose QC35, where many people have to replace their earpads _every_ _year_⁰ at $35 a pair (or $20 for third party ones that might last longer but definitely feel worse). So the question I think will be how long the pads last on these. Do you have to replace them every year like with the Bose ones or only every 4 years?

⁰ - QC35 ear pad extreme comfort but lack of durability is basically a meme among owners now.

[gaebn]

Could you share the link to these 3rd party earpads please? Maybe they have earpads for my K702's as well, I couldn't find anything with good reviews on Amazon.

[yborg]

https://www.amazon.com/Brainwavz-Hybrid-Memory-Earpads-Headp...

Price went up I see, but I've had them for 2+ years now, no complaints. The velour is comfy.

[JKCalhoun]

Pretty sure 3rd party will step in here.

[cloogshicer]

I'd bet that Apple will stop servicing them after a few years though, as they do with all their products.

And regular AirPods are definitely a throw-away product, since the 'battery service' is really just a full replacement. You'd have to physically destroy them to remove the battery.

[ValentineC]

> I'd bet that Apple will stop servicing them after a few years though, as they do with all their products.

Apple's "few years" is "seven years after Apple stops selling them", for most countries: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624

[neuronic]

So you're fine throwing perfectly working 600€ headphones into the trash just because 7 years passed? Corporatism at it's finest. It's not ever about the use you get out of the product but how brushed the ego feels when swiping the credit card for Apple.

This isn't a phone.

[outworlder]

I am also bashing these headphones here but...

How many headphones do you have that are still usable after 7 years?

[x3ro]

I own several (wired) headphones which are either approaching or older than 7 years and are in perfect condition. Sure, some had the ear pads or a cable replaced, but just like stereo speakers, there's really not much you can do to really break them.

[scpedicini]

I'm still rocking the same pair of Sony mdr-v6 studio headphones that I bought nearly 20 years ago. The rubberized foam on the cups has completely worn away but if anything it actually makes them even more comfortable.

[what_ever]

What's the point of shoving all the aluminum there and making it so heavy if you are not planning to support them long enough? My plastic Bose QC 25 have been fine after 5 years of almost every day usage.

[ProZsolt]

Same here, the only thing hate is the ear cushion. I had to replace it 2 times already

[bb123]

A few years? They still repair the iPhone 6, a phone thats 6 years old now. If that gives you another 2 years of use, thats a total of 8 years.

[cloogshicer]

That's fair if the device we're talking about is a phone. Those will of course become obsolete much sooner. But headphones don't get worse just by the passage of time. I'd love to still use them in 15+ years. Do you think Apple will still service them then?

Also, why not make it so that they can be used passively? What's the downside?

[duhi88]

Same reason they put the charging port for their mouse on the underside. It's a wireless device, and for some reason, they think that if it supports a wired mode, it won't be as special (or whatever their idiotic reasoning is).

And, why use the lightning port?! Aside from the price, choosing to not use USB-C for a charging port killed it for me. I like being able to charge all my devices off one power brick, and I'm not spending $600 on headphones if I need a stupid lightning port for the next 6+ years.

[bfgoodrich]

You know that it's only lightning on the headset side, right? That it's USB-C on the other side, though you're free to include any adapter cable you'd like.

[horsawlarway]

This misses the point. EVERY device I carry with me charges via USB-C right now.

My laptop, my work laptop, my headphones, my phone, my tablet/e-reader (remarkable).

It's insanely liberating to know that I can pretty much always find a charger for everything, and I only ever need to pack a single wall-wart.

Flying? One charger. Road trip? One charger. Biking to work? One charger.

Better yet - Leave a charger at work, keep a charger at home, don't need to carry 5lbs back and forth every day.

Forgot my charger? Every person I hang out with has a usb-c charger floating around somewhere.

----

You know what I really don't want to have to carry around anymore? Fucking cable adapters. You know what no one will have if I forget my charger? Fucking cable adapters.

Honestly - I probably wouldn't have bought these headphones yet because I'm quite happy with my current headphones.

But I'm very, very close to no longer even considering devices that ship without a USB-C port. And that's a shame, because I otherwise really like the Max, and probably would have slotted it in when my current cans die.

Getting over the hump to convert to USB-C initially was fairly expensive, but my job is good and I can splurge. I don't want to go back.

[robotresearcher]

A Lightning to USB-C cable is included in the box, not USB-A.

[snypher]

They may have a usb-c charger they want to use eg for a laptop. By making it lightning on the headset side they just reinvented a corded headset.

[Joeri]

Noise canceling heaphones used passively often sound a lot worse, because they can’t soundshape their way out of a suboptimal earshell and speaker design. Apple probably felt that either they had to compromise too much on the shape, or on the way they sounded passively, so they chose to just not allow for it entirely. I expect other manufacturers to follow suit because it creates more freedom in design.

[adamlett]

Also, why not make it so that they can be used passively? What's the downside?

If by passively you mean plugged into a headphone port, the answer is that they can’t because they need power. Their big selling point is supposed to be computational audio. That obviously doesn’t work without the compute part, which in turn requires power.

[huffmsa]

With $200 billion in the bank, I'm sure Apple could have figured out how to get power to them over a wired connection

[rblatz]

I’m sure the product team at Apple considered that use case, and it didn’t make sense to include it in this version due to time/weight/cost/complexity constraints.

[patja]

Key features like the spatial effects only work with an iPad or mac. So now you have a dependency on Apple keeping that part going for years as well, if you want to keep using them as you would have expected to at launch.

[FabHK]

> Key features like the spatial effects only work with an iPad or mac

iPad or iPhone only, apparently. Not with a Mac or Apple TV, or, of course, anything else.

(source: article)

[billiam]

Stainless and aluminum headphones that weigh a pound are made to last a century, not a couple of years. I have a closet full of incredibly durable, beautiful Apple products that will show up in an archeological dig of our sad epoch but were only supported by Apple for five years max.

[jacquesm]

From Apple's point of view you are their ideal customer (not even selling your stuff to the secondary market when you upgrade) and proof that their strategy works.

[ComputerGuru]

It doesn’t matter how old it is, it matters when it was last sold. The iPhone 6 was last sold in 2017.

[jdxcode]

September 2018 actually

[ComputerGuru]

Thanks. That makes all the praise Apple gets for supporting “ancient phones like the iPhone 6” all the more laughable.

[sudosysgen]

I've used and deeply enjoyed 25+ year old headphones. It's a different class of products.

[ssully]

Was going to say I just had a family member get a battery replaced for their iPhone 6 last month. With that said, I still wish their stuff was more user friendly for self repairs.

[colejohnson66]

The battery is actually really easy to replace as it and the screen are the most common replacement(s). Remove the screws at the bottom, break the glue down, and unfold. Access to the screen and battery connectors are right there on top of the logic board. It’s so the service techs at the store can do it quicker. Anything else, they just give you a new device and ship the old one back to Apple.

Previously (think iPhone 4S and prior), the phone opened from the back. So a screen replacement necessitated deconstructing the entire device.

Could it be more accessible? Most likely. They could put in removable batteries (like older phones had), but they’ve chosen not to (presumably for space reasons (internal batteries take up less space)), and it seems the entire industry followed. But just because they’re not easily replaceable, doesn’t mean they’re not easily serviceable. It takes a bit, but an experienced person can do it about 30 minutes or even less. iFixIt’s guides help a lot here.

[kd913]

The iphone 6 has a certificate store from Dec 2018 with no updates in site to the root store.

Sites/Apps were already breaking on my parent's iphone 6.

[8note]

I've still got Sony monitor headphones that I've had for 20 odd years

[fastball]

What are you talking about?

Apple supports devices longer than any other manufacturer. Case in point is iOS 14, which came out a few months ago and still supports the iPhone 6s, which came out in 2015.

[Shared404]

> Case in point is iOS 14, which came out a few months ago and still supports the iPhone 6s, which came out in 2015.

When did five years become a massive time for support in general? For phones it is, but there are plenty of things with longer than 5 year support.

[ska]

> but there are plenty of things with longer than 5 year support.

Not really in consumer electronics.

[Shared404]

Windows supports devices for way longer than 5 years.

I don't like MS, but what they do right, they do right.

[ska]

Yes windows is a bit of a stand out here, too.

[fastball]

Devices with CPUs? Which would those be?

[kps]

> … still supports the iPhone 6s, which came out in 2015.

And was sold until September 2018. Two years' support for a newly purchased phone shouldn't be considered particularly impressive.

[Spooky23]

Sort of. They still ship (or shipped until recently) iPhone 6 in some geographies.

Apple is very aggressive about transitioning stuff when a decision is made. In 1999, your new, pre-iMac laserwriter became a legacy product when iMac was released. MagSafe 1 laptops were orphaned for power adapters pretty quickly. Many HP and Lenovo devices utilize common power supplies that have been around for 10-15 years.

Other products, like AirPods are engineered with planned obsolescence. It's not a dig on Apple, it's part of their process and part of why they are so good at what they do -- Apple builds for a specific customer persona, which may or may not be you. Similarly, the need for commercial customers to have a common power supply is something that makes HP or Lenovo a good choice.

In the more open market, interfaces live a long time. My dad uses an Epson FX-80 dot matrix printer (which was purchased used when I was like 6 years old in the 80s) to print invoices, on a newish computer he found that still supports parallel interface.

[cloogshicer]

Copying my other comment in this thread:

That's fair if the device we're talking about is a phone. Those will of course become obsolete much sooner. But headphones don't get worse just by the passage of time. I'd love to still use them in 15+ years. Do you think Apple will still service them then?

Also, why not make it so that they can be used passively? What's the downside?

[ashtonkem]

> But headphones don't get worse just by the passage of time.

They didn't when they were just speakers on a strap, but that is a bad mental model for thinking about modern wireless headphones. Remember that a lot of these headphones now have CPUs in them, and they're integrating into a moving spec. The iPhone 6 mentioned here only supported Bluetooth 4, while the iPhone 12 supports Bluetooth 5.0, plus some other addons like LE and A2DP. And that's before we consider any protocols that manufacturers add on top of that, like Airplay.

Even Airpods aren't "fire and forget" devices nowadays. Apple is still shipping firmware updates for Airpods. It's fair to say that long term support for these will be much less costly than an old iPhone, but it's not free.

> Also, why not make it so that they can be used passively? What's the downside?

The simplest answer is probably "Apple customers don't want it". If you really care about using your headphones passively with a wire 20 years from now when the battery is dead and Apple won't service it, you were pretty unlikely to be buying Apple anyways. There are tons of available headphones on the market to serve that set of requirements. And since Apple really values clean lines, removing a jack that they don't think many of their customers will use is a no-brainer for them.

[dsr_]

That sums up to:

"Your wired headphones are reliable mechanical-electrical devices. Apple is making a computer that you wear on your head, and it just can't compete in areas like reliability, repairability, and Apple's profitability."

[fastball]

I mean, yeah, sure.

Google Glass also aren’t as reliable as my reading glasses, but here we are.

[ashtonkem]

Yup!

[chipotle_coyote]

The most honest answer is: we don't know if Apple will still service them then, because they've never made a product like this for comparison. We also don't know whether non-Apple service centers will be able to service them later, which might even be a more important question. (Once your device is out of warranty and AppleCare coverage, Apple's repairs are going to be pretty pricey even if they're still available.) But I don't think saying "well, they only support phones and computers for a few years after they stop making them" is necessarily a guidepost here.

> Also, why not make it so they can be used passively? What's the downside?

My quasi-educated guess is part marketing, and part technology. The marketing part: Apple considers these AirPods Pros that cover your ears, and insist that they have all the AirPods Pro features. The technology part: from what I can tell, these headphones are DSP-ed up the wazoo, more like HomePods than AirPods, so there's a good chance that passive mode will sound like crap.

I know a practical counter-argument is "so what, there are other active noise-cancelling headphones that let you switch them to passive mood and they sound like crap when you do that and everybody's just okay with it," but, that is not Apple.

(For the record, the AirPods Max are not on my shopping list.)

[kemayo]

I'm fairly sure the downside is "they'd sound worse". Headphones like this are doing a lot of signal processing -- just hooking up an input directly to the driver is going to sound notably less good.

We can argue that it's a trade-off that you should be free to make for yourself... but it's very in-character for Apple to just take a strong stance on that kind of thing.

With a 20 hour battery life I'm personally okay with it. If it was more like 4-5 hours then the need for a passive mode would be more pressing.

[acdha]

Worse in this case is a complicated comparison. The computational stuff is cool and that will definitely stop working when drivers eventually rot out of support but for general audio quality these won’t be in any way comparable to a cheaper 3+ decade old set of headphones. A huge amount of the extra complexity is making up for using Bluetooth – that has advantages but it means that you have to support a protocol stack, codecs, etc. just to approach the quality that you’d get from wired headphones for $50 in the 1990s. If you really value not needing a cable or the computational features that may be worthwhile to you but it’s important to remember that a lot of the extra cost and reduced reliability and service lifetime is required by non-core functions.

[fastball]

Fair, but if Apple can replace the battery that means that so can anyone else, so yes, I expect you'll be able to replace the battery in 15 years, assuming anyone still makes the battery you need (which would apply to an easily replaceable battery as well).

Re: passive listening, I don't know why they didn't. But I think it is fair to assume there was a real trade-off. Do you really think a smart business like Apple would make their excessively expensive headphones less functional for absolutely no reason?

[CharlesW]

> And regular AirPods are definitely a throw-away product…

Please don't — they're recyclable[1]. Recyclers wouldn't normally make money from recovering recyclable materials, but Apple pays[2] to make up the difference.

[1] https://www.apple.com/shop/trade-in

[2] https://onezero.medium.com/what-really-happens-to-airpods-wh...

[arvinsim]

Recycling was a lie to sell more plastic, recycling industry veteran says

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24714880

[lylecheatham]

Yeah the plastic isn't recyclable, but e-waste is full of precious metals and structural metals like aluminum that can easily be recycled.

[sudosysgen]

To be fair, I wouldn't be surprised if there's less things if value in an airpod than it's worth. At the point where recycling in and of itself might be more polluting than mining the 0.02g of precious metals and the gram or two of other metals. The structure in airpods is mostly plastic and glue.

[bsamuels]

they don't replace the battery when they perform battery service, they just replace the airpod entirely.