[squarefoot]

When the internal non replaceable battery dies the product dies; that's also one reason to prefer wired over wireless. I wrote product instead of headphones because the principle is applicable to every product whose battery can't be replaced by design. All those discarded single use vapes are a good example of that, and... surprise! All of them actually contain rechargeable cells but no recharging circuitry and port, the reason being that rechargeable Lithium cells are much cheaper than primary non rechargeable ones because of economies of scale. Just another example of greed being so damn efficient at producing e-waste.

[4k93n2]

it will be interesting to see what the consensus is 50 years from now when people have more hindsight on this. how long will a wireless headset last until the battery no longer holds a charge, and if its only something like 10 years then that means someone is having to buy 4 or 5 headsets over the course of their whole life instead of 1 or 2 cheaper wired headsets

theres also the issue of whether the wireless protocols that are in use now will still be supported in 50 years. removing the headphone jack from phones was mostly just a money grab to force people to buy wireless headsets so i wouldnt be surprised to see other tactics in the future where support is dropped for older versions of bluetooth, or whatever gives them a slight uptick in sales