With completely wireless earbuds, the rule is: when the battery fails, they have to be disposed of. Not so with the Fairbuds, that allow you to replace batteries in just a few seconds. Combined with a repairable design, the earbuds should therefore have an extremely long lifetime.
Replaceable batteries are coming to the EU in general, at least for portable devices, via the EU Batteries Regulation, which is in force already and requires all portable batteries to be easily removable and replaceable by the end user from 2027
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.
The comments on this post are entirelly missing the point. Jesus christ lemmy. Yes, we know you like 3.5 mm jacks. That is not the point. The point is that FairPhone launched earphones with ANC with replaceable batteries. This is good!
Good IEM-s don't really need ANC. If the silicone tip doesn't isolate enough you can use foam tips that basically function like hearing protection earplugs.
No battery is even better than replaceable battery.
Wired IEM-s never get obsolete. At worst you'll need to replace the silicone tips from time to time, or the cable and today even 20€ Chinese IEM-s have replaceable cables. With good care wired IEM-s can last decades.
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.
I can't be bothered with the inconvenience of wires. Bluetooth quality is good enough for what I need it for, and the convenience of simply putting them on gives me sound is hard to beat.
I have a pair of noise-canceling Bluetooth headphones (not buds) from 2008 that still work. Battery life isn't what it was, but whatever - they work fine for how I use them (as one pair of several). I could replace the battery if I felt like it, just not worth the effort.
But I get that some people prefer the wired for their use-case.
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.
Still critical of lack of audio jack but praises FairPhone for including list of all components and board view of where each part is located and a complete schematic. In comparison to other phones manufacturers that's night and day of repair-ability.
I have yet to use a USB-C to 3.5mm dongle for my phone that hasn't gone bust in my pocket in a few months. Probably time to see about a cable for the earphones that terminates in USB-C on the phone end, but that was difficult to search for.
I love my wired ones, and have been nursing some BT earbuds for years, but it's hard to use wired and not to move to BT anymore without buying a phone specifically for the 3.5mm jack.
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.
People keep whining about this but honestly people who listen to music with wired headphonea are a small fraction of a 1%. And they probably have this data from their telemetry.
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?
Yep. I refuse to buy a FairPhone for this simple reason: I hate bluetooth. It means I have to buy a new expensive device to get audio quality that's worse than before and requires batteries again. Fuck that.
I also find it ridiculous that they call themselves "fair" but making bluetooth buds probably increases pain and suffering, because more materials have to be used to make them than a simple jack headphone.
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"
I wouldn't trade my wireless stuff for wired ones at this point. Wireless earbuds have gotten so good that dealing with a wire would be a downgrade in most cases. When I work with mixing I always use my monitors with a wire, for obvious reasons.
Also as an aside; any company that claims to do anything "green" is profiteering off of greenwashing. Of course making stuff environmentally friendly would become trendy in the cringe corpo world. I think the most egregious example is Apple's autumn 2023 iPhone event. Just thinking back on it is making me cringe.
The "greenest" product is the one that is never made to begin with.
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.
I imagine phones no longer having headphone jacks isn't helping the wired headphones market. I'd gladly use wired headphones if it meant I didn't need to charge mine or worry about them dying on me. Aside from working out, it's not like the wire is exactly in the way...
I mean for working out and on the go I use Bluetooth ear buds.
But damn do I sometimes wish I still had a headphone jack on my phone. Like just grabbing my nice pair of open ear headphones, throwing down on the couch and listening to music for example.
And of course I always had backup wired ear buds with me, just in case the battery ran out.
But eh, I can live without the headphone jack, now I just wish they would have used the space for a bigger battery.
I still have 200 euro wired in ear headphones that are my favorite pair so I need to 3,5mm port. But I never got the loud commotion over the disappearance of the port, because you can easily use a 3,5mm to USB-c cable. Having said that,I do still appreciate such a port in my phone because sometimes I forget to take the cable with me or I lose it.
I use both wireless and wired, depending on what I'm doing. The earbuds fall out when I'm exercising, but have better call-quality because of the noise canceling.
And I use wired for chatting, when playing games with friends on playstation. And I still have an ipod I use occasionally... so I just kinda have both.
I prefer to have a headphone jack on my phone, but I have a dongle adapter for usb-c, if I want to use my wired ones. I would just prefer not to use the adapter if I didn't need to, because I've already had issues with my phone's charging port trying to crap-out on me. The charging port isn't as robust, and you do lose some quality with the dongle. I deal with it just fine; but a headphone jack on a phone might tip me towards purchasing that one, if I were looking to buy a new phone. It depends for me, but it's not the end of the world, just an inconvenience that could easily be avoided
Some devices cannot use Bluetooth audio devices, or it's buggy or laggy af. I don't mind wireless buds for the gym, but they sound worse and die before a flight across the US is complete. Wired headsets so don't have to be charged, or if they do have ANC, its usually a replacable battery instead of a rechargeable battery.
I dunno if it's just my Fold 4, but when I ride the train or visit an apartment, I get bombarded by pairing requests from Bose headphones and other bluetooth devices like home speakers. It's probably some setting that Samsung quietly flipped on in a recent patch, but it's really annoying. Fuck off, 𝙳𝚊𝚟𝚎'𝚜 𝙱𝚘𝚜𝚎 𝚀𝚞𝚒𝚎𝚝𝙲𝚘𝚖𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚝 𝟺𝟻 𝙷𝚎𝚊𝚍𝚙𝚑𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚜, I don't need pairing notifications every 10 seconds.
Pretty sure the market would be bigger if manufacturers didn't remove the feature in order to push to wireless.
What I like about them is not having a battery, meaning they have a lot less impact on the climate. And it isn't needed when they are always connected to an other device with a battery that is less than 1m away.
Starting to notice a trend with these "specialty" device companies, crap specs and high (relatively) prices.
The FP5, released last year has a SoC that performs worse than the Tensor. The TENSOR, a chip widely regarded as shitty, and can be had on a phone 200$ cheaper. :/
Every time it comes up I must lament the switch to screens too tall to watch content, the decision to remove wired 3.5mm jacks in order to drive sales of wireless headphones, the switch to increasingly fewer physical buttons. No more IR blaster.
cause it's cool and I like it, which should be reason enough. more practically it works for cases when you lose your remote, maybe cases where you want to change the channel on some TV in a pub somewhere, shit like that. it's fun.
The "demographic" of human being who doesn't want to wreck the planet if Fairphone's target.
If Fairphone is not trying to be universal anymore you should see that as a problem. So should every fairphone customer.
I'll buy a more sustainable phone than the fairphone when my phone loses support in 2027. I'll encourage everyone to buy a more sustainable product today.
Seriously, people act like there aren't solutions to that "problem" that aren't basically identically inconvenient to how it was before you needed an inline usb c to 3.5 mm adapter.
To preempt those that are gonna say "the adapter is inconvenient..," no, the 3.5 mm jack that takes up space in my pocket that is unused 100% of the time is the inconvenience. You want a jack. You can have one. You get to have the inconvenience that goes along with it.
This stereotype of Vegans has always bothered me. I've never once in my life heard a vegan announce to a group that they were vegan unless it was relevant to the conversation.
I have heard many people complain about vegans completely unprompted, however.
The US market has three big gatekeepers named Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. They charge huge money to certify devices to work on their networks. No certification and phones won't work properly for mission-critical stuff like VoLTE, VoWiFi, and in some cases 5G. Without these features, no-one will buy the phones.
You also need to be selling a big number of those phones to eat the cost of all that certification. And what do you know, the telcos operate the stores that sell the lion's share of phones in the US market.
All that adds up to niche handsets only working on 1 or 2 of the telcos, or only partially, and only selling direct to consumer or on Amazon or Best Buy or wherever in negligible numbers.
And that's why you can't buy a Fairphone at retail in the US.
they sell the fairphone 4 not the 5. And while I'm not against e/os/, that's kind of neat for me I think it'd be awesome if they sold the original model with android with all of Google Spyware lol
Which ones are you referring to? What's is your actual use time, like 8+ hours a day without charging? I use cheap generic MPOW ones I got for $40 and they easily last me at least 2 days
fun edit:
With a jack you can listen and charge you phone at the same time
With wireless headphones you can also charge your phone and listen at the same time
With wireless headphones you can also charge your phone and listen at the same time
Yes, but that's not the point. The point is that if I want to use wired headphones, I can't charge my phone. Something I was able to do before, and now it's a "privilege" for wireless users. It's bullshit.
One thing sibling comments miss is how you can offer a jack & them, as a user, can still use whatever style you want & disregard the jack. It’s a cheap part that takes up some volume but not enough to force an entire redesign. But when manufacturers remove the jack, you are forced users into consuming either the wireless earbuds (that they all ‘conveniently’ sell branded) or cosuming a dongle which takes up the one charging port, are unruly in a way that puts additional stress on the port & make the wires hang awkwardly. Almost all other gear with audio that isn’t a modern smartphone includes the jack which means you can’t bring your existing gear—or it starts prompting every apparatus to start adding Bluetooth capabilities which includes the latency, flakiness, slow pairing but also the security & fingerprinting issues of keeping devices with Bluetooth always on in the first place. Even with replaceable batteries, you still need microcontrollers & firmware delivery.
That is to say, if Fairphone cared about sustainability, they can offer a better earbud on repairability (pressing doubt on the frequency-response curve tho), but they should still be offering a jack on their phones since wired headphones/IEMs are a more sustainable (& private & secure) personal audio option.
The thing about wired earbuds and headphones is that they're already pretty sustainable. A good pair can last you decades, while wireless buds are usually throwaway products. So I think it's pretty cool that they're doing something about that for those that want wireless earbuds.
I think you misunderstood, I want wireless headphones that have the two earbuds connected via a wire so you know, one doesn’t just pop out if your ear and drop on the street.
Ugh? I used to burn through wired earbuds at a pace of maybe one pair per month. You basically have to sit and not move if you don't want to damage the wire IME
Because if you do any kind of outside activity including uh work? Once it falls out - it's gone forever. That's a pricey accident.
I know we are all made different but Earbuds do not stay in my ear for shit. That's why I just use headband headphones. >!Shout-out to Shockz. Dam near impossible to lose running.!<
All of these honestly ought to just come with a small hole and bring your own 'lanyard'/'string'. I can't imagine it would require much in terms of design to put a hole in a corner.
You may like Shokz. Their headsets are wireless and bone-conducting. The drivers get pressed to your temples with a flexible wire connecting them and you hear the sound conducting through your head instead of your ear canal. The only downside I've experienced with them is that they can only drown out so much noise, so if you're planning on using them in a noisy environment, probably go with another choice.
Nvm replaceable batteries, I keep buying 2-3 pairs of ear buds a year because I keep forgetting them in my pants when I wash them, or I give them a pat down and don't feel them inside of them.
I'm like, get a pair of headphones to last you more than a month, then we'll talk.
I can't tell you how many pairs of cheap earbuds we've gone through. Either lost or eaten (damn dog). Almost always just the right earbud. Never the left. I have so many lefts left.
My dog chewed on one of my Buds 2 Pro earpiece after owning them for two months cause I left the door open. Managed to open the case and everything lol
They sell cases for you to attach an airtag to your headphones case. And the pro version of the iheadphones have individual find my capabilities. Should allow you to locate all three items provided you remember to look while they still have batteries.
Now I just wish that they would bring their phone to a US provider that is not T-Mobile. I can't buy their phone until it runs on a network that I can use.
ASUS removed the ability to unlock or root their most recent phones. Not letting users run what they want on the device they own is a hard pass from me.
Awesome, but I'm skeptical. Not because it's Fairphone, but because previous bad experiences.
I bought Sony buds, after reading loads of reviews and those were the best! They cost me around 300 and what I got was just shit.
I (still) own a number of lg 800 Bluetooth headsets (those with a thing you wear around your neck) that cost me 50 bucks each, that have better audio quality, louder audio, better noise cancellation, are more comfortable, and after over 4 years still have a battery life of around 10 hours where those huge ass Sony ones cut out new after like 3-4 hours and they died after 1,5 years. I think those wearable bugs are just too small to be any good at all.
You can get decent TWS buds without paying tons of money. I currently have the Soundcore Space A40, and the battery still lasts for 6-7h after almost two years of constant use (8-10h brand new).
If you're paying over $100, you're probably overpaying.
I have Samsung Bluetooth earbuds that I have had for a few years and they work great but I rarely use them. I rarely listen to music through headphones. If I were to buy a new pair I may consider that ones from Pine.
I never understood why people care so much for wireless charging. It's less efficient, therefore you heat your device more which shortens the longevity of the battery, you charge slower, and if you move the device slightly, it won't charge, therefore it's less reliable (unless there is a magnet array like apple). Sure, it's useful in a pinch, but is it really a make or break feature?
I never understood wireless charging either, you still can't move your device around (well if we ignore the fact you can move it around somewhat with a cable). It requires a charging pad too, so it also takes up more space.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. I’m a person with ears that do not work with silicone tips either. I love the fit of AirPods. Tried AirPods Pro, and for my ears, they suck. Doesn’t matter what size tips I use, they seal poorly and fall out constantly. Regular AirPods fit great.
Edit: grammar
Edit 2: that being said, I want to try these because I really want replaceable batteries for my earbuds. It may be moot for me though as I live in the US and currently they aren’t shipping to the US.