We used to have earbuds that don’t need to be charged because they had a headphone jack, didn’t get lost so easily because they had a cord attached to a headphone jack, never lost the bluetooth connection because they had a headphone jack, and they cost less because they had a headphone jack. https://bsky.app/profile/daisyfm.bsky.social/post/3l3mfjc6sn62k
But they did tangle all the time. That was annoying.
And the cord would sometimes break inside/connector went bad.
Yeah, you’d snag the wire or slightly bend the connector and then you were just playing a game of making sure it stayed plugged into the exact right angle.
Had to make sure there has just the right tension on the left wire or you’d only get half the track. Bonus points for weirdly mixed stereo where that just sounded shit
Or replace it, those things were like 50 cents and all sorts of devices had earbuds delivered with them, included in the price.
and then you’d just replace them with one of the other three dozen you bought from Wal-Mart for five bucks back in 2016
And people wonder how the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and others like it came to be 🤦
hey I’ll have you know I keep all my broken earbuds in the same box in the garage with all the other cables and assorted dongles I can no longer identify and will likely never use, like any responsible citizen should
I don’t think earbuds make up a significant percentage of the patch to be here virtue signaling and shaming people for what they were encouraged to do by corporate greed. Your source says the great majority of the patch comes from agriculture and fishing.
Cheap and disposable plastics and electronics IS a significant part of the world garbage problem and yes, plastic particles is MOST of the garbage patch specifically.
Whoa, dude, hold your horses! I’m in no way blaming consumers. Making consumer electronics cheap crap that breaks easily and everything of decent quality prohibitively expensive is 100% on the greedy corporations, not their victims the consumers.
Ok, admittedly a poor choice of example. Doesn’t invalidate my intended point though, however ill-stated heh
When people talk about disposable plastic they don’t mean electronics like earbuds. They mean packaging, plastic bottles, plastic bags etc.
This is tough -
(US here) Gets me thinking about dollar store headphones. Consumers could buy decent headphones for about $10 direct from overseas. When that’s equivalent to more than an hour of wages, there’s still demand for the $1 version. Should this need not be met out of a sense of social responsibility?
(I don’t have a perfect answer myself)
Econ 101 on my mind here btw:
The problem is that our economic system has encouraged an environment where reputation is a thing to be immediately cashed out. You can’t even know if those $10 earbuds are any better than the $1 version.
You can make some reasonable assumptions although they will be imperfect:
Wouldn’t be as frequently imperfect if freaking review fraud weren’t entirely ubiquitous (grrrr)
If you think Bluetooth earphones won’t also be in that pile once the batteries stop holding charge after 2 years, you’re in for a world of dissapointing sex
My AirBudz are over five years old and still play for like five hours before I need to charge them… and I used them 40+ hours daily for all of those years.
How are your days 40+ hours long
We must know the secret of your 40+ hour days. Are you on Earth? What’s the battery tech like on your planet? We could use some help.
My point wasn’t wired vs wireless. It was disposable crap that breaks vs corporations not deliberately making crap the only thing most people can comfortably afford.
But they need to skimp on those few milligram ounces of solder per bud, so that they can make one extra low quality bud!
Or rather so they can make the same number of buds and double or more the profits for the amoral shareholder dividends.
Hah! *affably slaps shoulder* Yeah!
I’m here for the wired headphone -> pacific garbage patch vs lithium battery child labor -> wireless headphone fight 🍿
Or we could just have quality standards and price controls so that regular people can afford decent headphones that don’t break all the time whether they prefer wired or wireless 🤷
And a worldwide ban on child labor, of course.
Don’t fool yourself. Slave labor of children is not exclusive to batteries. They make most of the world’s textiles, for example.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/reports/child-labor/list-of-goods-print
Did I give you the impression I was fooling myself, or were you just speaking to the wider audience?
The wording implies that the wired headphones weren’t manufactured using child slave labor.
I disagree, but I also failed English 101 so 🤷🏻♂️
Somewhere the discussion chain has the following transition:
-> Hitler
Or if you buy the better ones you can usually replace the cord with a new one, making it work again.
The TWS equivalent to that is one of the buds no longer turning on. I just had to RMA a pair because of that.
Yeah! That’s why I loved Sennheiser IEMs, they had oval cables that never tangle up, no matter what you do. Still have a pair for my Switch
Loved those as well and I am very angry they are no longer sold (at least not here). Even Sennheiser doesn’t escape the enshittification for their mid-range earbuds
Only because people couldn’t be bothered with learning the over-under cable coiling method.
As a runner I hated cables. All the time I’d be in the middle of a run and my hand would catch the cord mid stride and yank them out of my ear.