Fairphone Fairbuds launch with replaceable batteries, titanium drivers and ANC

EU has single handedly done more to improve myself my life than my own government with this one law.

i hope this eu law makes it happen elsewhere, if anything for them to take better advantage of the economy of scale.

and if they dont ill be coveting some eu devices.

I don't believe the EU will make earbuds batteries serviceable. Phones and laptops, sure.

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.

Do you not know that batteries stop being able to charge eventually?

Yes we are and that's okay we're not against headphone jacks, it's just that this post right here is about wireless earbuds

You can get a decent pair of sonys for €150? The conversion rate must be better than I thought!

Can you replace the battery at the Sonys?

I don't think that would fit on the earbuds.

Not to mention we already had repairable wired headphones that we can't use now if we get a fairphone.

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.

So you basically said there's no need for fair wired headphones because cheap 20€ chinese wired ones perfectly serve that market?

Even better that fairphone builds true wireless earbuds with all those fair features, because there is no alternative there already.

The simple point is, no one forces you to use wires. Bluetooth has been a thing for decades.

But basically every (yes some exceptions) company that makes phones forced you to use wireless ones.

And in the case of Fairphone it is just simply hypocritical.

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.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://www.piped.video/watch?v=EAogtqyN22M

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Get a portable dac amp so you can connect your wired headphone over usb-c and upgrading its sound quality at the same time.

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.

They are now a small fraction cause this trend is already 8 years old.

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?

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"

if you hate bluetooth. USB C dongle earbuds are quite impressive nowadays like JBL or anker. no pairing

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

Apple's autumn 2023 iPhone event

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

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.

Is it? Closed source means it's probably listening and recording and selling

Hang on, is THAT why call quality is abysmal with practically every bluetooth device?

I mean even Sony didn't get it working on my XM4s, I don't know why people expect it from $150 earbuds.

The high prices at least should be obvious, a product using fairly sourced components will always be more expensive.

Other's make it cheaper because they don't care about "fair". How do you think cheap products become cheap? Think about it for a second.

As a DJ and audiophile in general, yeah I'm not thrilled on headphones using batteries and Bluetooth. I'll give up my hard-line when I'm dead.

Sure, some wireless for exercise or casual use is fine. Full deal breaker if I'm performing though.

no one uses wired headphones until they suddenly really wish they had wired headphones

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 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 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 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

There's no way I'm spending a lot on a headphone I need to toss in the garbage when the battery becomes useless.

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.

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.

Nah I like em because I'm paranoid. I had paranoiac family who weren't power users who behaved similarly at the dawn of this shit.

Nowadays there is an earbuds with USB C wireless adapter like Anker Soundcore P10 or JBL Quantum. that is good and no pairing

Nobody knows what they're missing out on after the early mp3 era conditioned people to be used to shitty audio quality.

Yep. Lots.

IR blasters were great!

"Shit, where's the remote? Oh well, I'll just use my phone."

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.

Restaurant TVs.

You've never lost your remote???

This seems like part of their android os for FP5, TWRP is a common open source android recovery image: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWRP_(software)

Probably a attempt to open source the component they can, in the release note, they list the components that are not working.

FairPhone's is not really the open source crowd though?

Exactly, wired headphones are everywhere.

My wireless earbuds were such a game changer I'll never go back, I don't know why so much hate.

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.

And then they have no port to plug into on their phone.

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.

I'm not sure, I assume due to the lock in to carrier stores in the US? Or just expenses of doing business. I can't even order those earbuds to the US.

there is the fairphone 4 on Murena with e/os/ but they don't even have fairphone 5 😭

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

So, you're not all right?

I've had three sets of earbuds where the right one has died of no apparent cause shortly after the warranty expired.

I'm starting to think it's intentional.

But any reason to prefer wireless is sort of moot because having a 3.5mm jack doesn't preclude a wireless headphone feature.

So… I was more referring to a 3.5mm jack on the phone.

Commute time is a little over 2hours each way. Office use is 6-8 hours. Listening + calls and needing a microphone.

Would rather not to have to do the dance for multiple devices and chargers vs just one and a single usb input.

Some of the bushes busses and trains have a usb but you have to get lucky and then decide what needs charging more…the phone or the buds.

Give me a wired option any day. Also used less battery power and sounds better.

edit... typo

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.

I think he meant having the 3,5 mm jack in a phone.

Just to be pedantic; a battery is significantly larger than 2 tiny wires of copper. The battery is almost 50% of the volume in the earbud.

The buds don’t need a jack. Just the lead that connects to the phone or whatever. That takes no real space.

I'd give up the space of a battery for a jack, yes

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.!<

Wired still has some advantages. Mainly sound quality.