this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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But of course we all know that the big manufacturers don't do this not because they can't but because they don't want to. Planned obsolescence is still very much the name of the game, despite all the bullshit they spout about sustainability.

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[–] trebuchet@lemmy.ml 110 points 7 months ago (35 children)

This article seems to omit the most important fact about headphones - how do they sound?

I love repairability and all, but it hardly matters if I don't want to use them in the first place because they traded off too much quality for repairability.

[–] Jax@sh.itjust.works 17 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Biggest complaints I've seen aren't with sound quality, it's with the noise cancelling being bad and the shape of the ear cups (the latter could have just been the shape of that user's ears were the problem).

Mind you, these were reviews from Fairbud XLs released about a year ago. Things could have improved or gotten worse in that time, in any way. I can't tell you for sure.

That said, I don't think it makes sense to correlate focusing on repairability and quality of the product going down. I actually went out and found the reviews I'm referencing simply because the concept is absurd and I needed to know for sure.

Always keep in mind what you say online, Poe's law is forever in effect.

[–] trebuchet@lemmy.ml 13 points 7 months ago

Nah I wasn't being sarcastic.

As I understand it, in engineering these types of mobile space constrained devices you essentially have a "budget" of space. Every hardware feature you include generally eats into this budget and if you want things to be user accessible or repairable it eats into this budget majorly.

That budget has to come from somewhere, so you can pay it with things like reducing the size of your battery or reducing the size of your drivers which in turn represents a reduction in sound quality.

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