EU has single handedly done more to improve myself my life than my own government with this one law.

i hope this eu law makes it happen elsewhere, if anything for them to take better advantage of the economy of scale.

and if they dont ill be coveting some eu devices.

I don’t believe the EU will make earbuds batteries serviceable. Phones and laptops, sure.

I think that’s an issue of semantics. If someone needs their device to last all day and it doesn’t anymore, then it is effectively bricked. Could one find a workaround to the issue? Oh probably, something as simple as lugging around a battery bank should do the trick, but ultimately users being able to just swap the battery in their device themselves isn’t a big ask. It gives a modicum of ownership back to the person who actually bought the device.

iPhone batteries are covered under warranty if they drop below - I think - 80% of original capacity. Using that as a benchmark, something between that and 50% is going to be frustrating for the average user. Perhaps frustrating enough to replace.

“Brick” caught me off guard too. When thinking about a product that can’t be used while simultaneously charging has a battery that’s nearly shot, though, it struck me as a fair description.

Do you not know that batteries stop being able to charge eventually?

Yes we are and that’s okay we’re not against headphone jacks, it’s just that this post right here is about wireless earbuds

You can get a decent pair of sonys for €150? The conversion rate must be better than I thought!

Can you replace the battery at the Sonys?

I don’t think that would fit on the earbuds.

Not to mention we already had repairable wired headphones that we can’t use now if we get a fairphone.

If you don’t think you need ANC you’ve never experienced good ANC, even the best passive noise isolation won’t quiet down the sound of a full cafeteria or bus.

No wired iems will never be obsolete, but I will just be leaving them at my desk where the downsides over wireless are less.

So you basically said there’s no need for fair wired headphones because cheap 20€ chinese wired ones perfectly serve that market?

Even better that fairphone builds true wireless earbuds with all those fair features, because there is no alternative there already.

The simple point is, no one forces you to use wires. Bluetooth has been a thing for decades.

But basically every (yes some exceptions) company that makes phones forced you to use wireless ones.

And in the case of Fairphone it is just simply hypocritical.

No one’s disputing the utility of wireless. But it’s not harming anyone to have a device with both mini-jack and bluetooth; the way it was for nearly 2 decades without any complaint.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://www.piped.video/watch?v=EAogtqyN22M

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Get a portable dac amp so you can connect your wired headphone over usb-c and upgrading its sound quality at the same time.

I’m the same, those dongles don’t last, and are annoying to use. I picked up one of these cables from aliexpress to use with my iems and it works a treat. There’s better quality cables out there, but for 10 bucks these are solid.

They are now a small fraction cause this trend is already 8 years old.

Don’t wanna be a whiner but wireless in ears never last long enough for me. I’m forced to stop using them after a while because they need to be charged. Even a 2 and a half hour phone call is enough to deplete them. This is a non existing problem with wired ones

Idk what exactly causes this, but I definitely have headphones that never do that. I reckon it’s only on my pricier pairs, so maybe it’s a cable insulation thing?

I don’t know about the fairness of this particular company but by that rationale nothing can ever be fair, just by existing we increase the suffering. Its how the world is.

Think headphones jacks don’t cause suffering at some point in the chain?

Not that I’m disagreeing, just not sure how things would get named under this specific scheme.

Does it assume that it’s generally understood that everything is a little harmful in some way, so as long as you don’t claim otherwise, it’s cool or would everything need to be measured on some sort of average harmfulness scale and then include the rating in the title.

Like “Horrendously harmful Apple” or “Mildly harmful Colgate”

A bit hyperbolic perhaps.

Genuinely not trying to start a fight, actually interested in what you think would be a good way of doing this, as I’ve occasionally pondered it myself and never come up with a good answer.

Incidentally, this is one of the core plotlines to later seasons of “The good place”

if you hate bluetooth. USB C dongle earbuds are quite impressive nowadays like JBL or anker. no pairing

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

Apple’s autumn 2023 iPhone event

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Bluetooth headphones are not modernity, they should of course be an option, but increasingly they are the only game in town. Wired is still king for loads of things, not the least of which is reliability.

You wanna know how many times my wired Sennheiser’s have been unable to put music in my ear holes? Never. They always work. Care to guess how many wireless headphones have been able to provide sound every time I’ve wanted it without delay or failure? None. I’ve owned more than 2 dozen wireless this, that, and the other, headphones & earbuds, and none of them have been even a shadow of the reliability offered by my old wired headphones. Which is to say nothing of the fact that the wired experience usually sounds better (Still don’t think you can get any comfortable phat 600ohm monster cans that don’t have a wire) and has no issues with making sound when you’re in a space that is saturating the 2.4Ghz band (my Costco is usually so full of idiots on Bluetooth that you can’t get a reliable experience for anything from any wireless audio device.)

You seem to think it’s “backwards rhetoric” to want a feature that will never be offered in a wireless setup, and that’s just fucked man. There are a wealth of reasons why wireless does not fully replace wired. It’s why anything that doesn’t have to move generally gets a fixed connection, it’s just more reliable and often more efficient. That’s not backwards, it’s just a priority that you don’t value above others. If landlines or floppy disks offered any advantages over anything else they’d still be around today (and arguably they are in some limited niches,) but the replacements for those technologies have had no downsides against their replacements while wireless tech still has some significant downsides (again, maybe you don’t weight the pros and cons the same, so this may not apply to you) against the technology they are meant to replace, and will likely never see 100% capture of their role as a result.

TL;DR: Stop trying to frame this as some sort of crusade against the future, there are legit cases where wired is just better than wireless.

I like wired headphones it has nothing to do with modernity but the functionality I prefer. I dislike dealing with battery life. Same reason I have a wired keyboard. Also I’ve been in power outages that lasted long enough I wished I had a wall phone to do things like let my family know I hadn’t frozen to death or to call into work to update them so I was less likely to be fired. Me wanting a company to sell wired devices doesn’t affect your ability to buy wireless devices this isn’t a zero sum game, no need to be hostile.

Is it? Closed source means it’s probably listening and recording and selling

Hard disagree that earbuds negate codec importance. I love open-back over-ears, but one of my best pairs of headphones are Moondrop IEMs, and I can hear differences in audio quality more noticeably on them than a lot of speakers. I very often plug them into a Bluetooth receiver for semi-wireless convenience, and I can absolutely hear the difference between LDAC and SBC.

However, yeah definitely agreed that $150 is fair for what’s being offered here. Limited codec support is common (if unfortunate) enough in similarly priced gear without the other benefits these bring, so I’d say it’s fair enough unless the drivers themselves are bad.

In-ear phones have the potential of having the highest fidelity of all headphone types. So, no, being a “codec snob” is completely justified. Though I personally won’t be using BT phones before we get lossless connection as a standard. Wired are cheaper, last longer and have less environmental impact during production and after EOL.

It’s not just about quality (AAC is perfectly fine quality-wise), it’s IMHO more about the extreme latency, and the fact that they have to to drop down to terrible-sounding HSP/HSP when using the microphone, since A2DP is monodirectional. Sucks that they don’t support LE Audio.

Turning your nose up at SBC isn’t being a codec snob; it’s having functioning ears.

And if you’re on Android, AAC is not well implemented compared to on iOS / MacOS. Maybe this has changed in the past couple years but it was immediately noticeable to me when I upgraded from the WH-1000XM3s to the XM4s, I could immediately tell that the audio was worse if they weren’t using LDAC. And these don’t have LDAC.

Unlike with competent compression codecs (mp3 vs AAC vs FLAC), where most people genuinely cannot tell the difference between a well-compressed song vs a lossless one, many people can immediately tell the difference between AptX and AAC or SBC on Android.

There are plenty of true wireless headphones out there that support LDAC or AptX for less than $100. It’s not surprising to me that people in their target audience would think $150 for something that sounds terrible to them isn’t reasonable.

Bluetooth headphones are unusable for videos and games if they only support high latency codecs.

My most expensive earbuds were $75.

At $150, I’d rather buy multiple “lesser” ear buds and not worry about battery lifespan.

I have 2 pairs of hang-on-ear type I use for the gym/exercise, that were $35 each. That’s less than 1/4 the price of these.

Hang on, is THAT why call quality is abysmal with practically every bluetooth device?

I mean even Sony didn’t get it working on my XM4s, I don’t know why people expect it from $150 earbuds.

The high prices at least should be obvious, a product using fairly sourced components will always be more expensive.

Other’s make it cheaper because they don’t care about “fair”. How do you think cheap products become cheap? Think about it for a second.