[hra5th]

I am surprised to see the same user post

> no one is criticizing Apple while being pragmatic [...] it is expensive and complicated for them to do that and have waterproof devices

and

> with the airpods, Apple needs to be roasted endlessly for creating time-bomb trash

I feel like every discussion of airpods and e-waste on HN totally misses the mark. The average lifespan of a pair of airpods (across all users) is probably not very different than the average lifespan of a pair of wired headphones -- people lose/replace stuff all the time, and wired headphones fail because of stress! Just because 1% of eco-conscious power users are now forced to throw away usable headphones doesn't actually make a big difference in terms of total e-waste. Also, it takes ~4000 pairs of airpods being thrown away to match the by-weight e-waste of throwing away a single 70 inch TV. Even if you are just worried about batteries, a single e-bike battery is like 2000 times larger than an airpod battery. If one was trying to minimize e-waste through by improving the reusability, Airpods just seem like totally the wrong target compared to the hundreds of much larger products with slightly worse rates of reuse / recycle

[Ntrails]

Yeah, I definitely only expect my wired earbud headphones to last 2-4 years, which sounds consistent with airpods. Often one of the ears goes in that time because the wire breaks.

Ofc I refuse to believe airpods would last 6months before I dropped/lost/etc them. But that is just me rather than a criticism :D

[philistine]

Your earbud headphones do not have batteries inside them that are at high risk of never getting recycled.