Should You Ditch Your AirPods?

Daniel Gordon-Potts

Poorly Designed

TECH that probably won’t last you long. Are your AirPods just a damaging trend?

I can’t lie, ever since I first saw people wearing AirPods, I wanted a pair for myself. They were sleek, white, wireless, and always seemed alluring and mysterious. I also often wondered whether or not the lack of wire was down to witchcraft or something - after all, how could sound travel wirelessly between a phone and two tiny earbuds that were so small? Was there risk of some kind of radiation poisoning? Nevertheless, I was enchanted by them. Perhaps these very mysteries were the reason why, or perhaps it was their tiny snappy shiny curved case with their green light?

Now of course, there are tons of them. It is the trendiest thing to have a pair… and not just Airpods. You can get Samsung ones, Google ones, Sony ones, and, I think, even Microsoft ones - circular ones that are act as touchpads in your ears (you can apparently use these to edit your PowerPoints or something).

Everyone wants a slice of the wireless earbud pie, including, of course, those obscure ‘brands’ you find on Amazon for £20. It also seems that everyone is actu- ally getting a slice of the pie - the issue is, it might not be the nicest tasting pie. Despite experts estimating it to reach 1 billion sales a year by 2030, the wireless earphone market has one key problem...

Wireless earbuds usually can’t be repaired - they are pieces of tech just waiting to be made obsolete.

The main problem with wireless earbuds is their abysmal repairability rating. Consumer repair manual iFixit gives Apple’s Airpod Pros a 0/10 for repairability. In contrast, Samsung’s Galaxy Buds 2 are rated a 5 - still not great, despite being better than any of Apple’s wireless earbud offerings.

The poor repairability of wireless earbuds is partly due to their size - packing all that wireless technology into two tiny earbuds and a charging case automatically makes things harder to disassemble when something breaks and needs fixing. However, size is not the only issue - glue, it seems, is more the problem.

Airpods, and most other wireless earbuds, have a dirty little secret - in Airpods, it’s actually green I think, with rather clashes with the white look Apple are going for, but I guess it’s all snuggly inside and never to be seen. That thing is glue - or ‘adhesive’ - the stuff that packs all the technology inside the gorgeous pearly plastic casing of the earbuds and their flippy charging case.

Turns out, Apple (and again, most wireless earbud making companies) use a lot of adhesive to stick their tiny little earbuds together. So much of it, in fact, that it makes them impossible to even get into in the first place, without having to physically chop the plastic apart with a knife.

The issue is not just repairability, it’s durability...and material sourcing too.

There are other problems with wireless earbuds - notably, their all-too-short life. Running on lithium iron battery power - which, like all batteries, gradually loses charge over time (no matter how much you charge it up), these things only have a few years’ lifespan before losing all charge completely. This is not particularly sustainable. Also, there are the heaps of ethical and environmental issues surrounding lithium iron sourcing - including child labour and incredibly unsafe working conditions, plus all the issues surrounding mining of finite resources.

Trying to replace the battery in wireless earbuds is also generally quite difficult as