AirPods deliver an industry-leading6 5 hours of listening time7 — and now up to 3 hours of talk time8 — all on one charge.

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Powered by the all-new Apple H1 headphone chip, AirPods deliver a faster and more stable wireless connection to your devices — up to 2x faster when switching between active devices,3 and a 1.5x faster connection time for phone calls.4The H1 chip also drives voice-enabled Siri access and delivers up to 30 percent lower gaming latency

Your AirPods Will Die Soon : The surprisingly short life of new electronic devices

Mar 21, 2019

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The lithium-ion batteries that power AirPods are everywhere. One industry report forecast that sales would grow to $109.72 billion by 2026, from $36.2 billion in 2018. They charge faster, last longer, and pack more power into a small space than other types of batteries do. But they die faster, too, often after just a few years, because every time you charge them, they degrade a little.

The result: A lot of barely chargeable AirPods and wireless mice and Bluetooth speakers are ending up in the trash as consumers go through products — even expensive ones — faster than ever.

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...the world will continue to generate a lot of waste. Of the 3.4 million tons of electronic waste generated in America in 2012 — an 80 percent increase from 2000 — just 29 percent was recycled. “Imagine that every single thing in the world has the same life span as a battery, and wore out after 12 to 18 months,” Wiens told me. “It would be catastrophic for consumers and even worse for the planet.”

But, of course, companies design for performance and sales, not life span. They make money when they sell more units...

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Waste is one of the inherent features of a consumer-spending-driven economy: Companies keep selling things in order to post profits, consumers keep buying them because they have disposable income, and our standard of living improves. There is little apparent downside when consumers throw things away — trash disappears from office buildings and apartment buildings overnight.

But lithium-ion batteries are different from other waste. Tossing them in the trash can create fires at waste-management facilities. And unfettered consumption has big upstream costs: The more devices with lithium-ion batteries that aren’t recycled, the more companies have to mine the finite resources that go into those batteries. Most lithium-ion batteries contain cobalt, which is often mined in terrible conditions in the developing world.

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When the AirPods were released, Wiens took them apart to see how difficult it would be to strip the headphones of their lithium-ion batteries and other material. He found that because Apple glues AirPods together, the only way to separate the battery from the case would be to use a knife, which means risking an explosion.

Wireless headphones don’t have to be difficult to repair; iFixit has found that Samsung’s Galaxy Buds, for example, are repairable, because they are held together with clips and not glue. But whether intentional or not, Apple’s design choice, Wiens said, is serving to discourage reuse or recycling by making it hard for consumers to do it by themselves, and expensive and dangerous even for professionals.

This frustrates even some hard-core Apple fans. After Chris, a Mac fan who lives in San Francisco, noticed that his AirPods would hold a charge for only about 20 minutes at a time, he looked into replacing the battery. (Chris did not want his last name used because he is a product designer who sometimes freelances for Apple.) He quickly found that it wasn’t possible. “If I could fix things myself, I would do it—it’s just so difficult to do it,” he said. Apple does allow consumers to pay for what it calls a “battery replacement” for AirPods, but each “replaced” AirPod is $49.

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Often consumers don’t know where to put products such as AirPods that no longer work. Do they go in the recycling? In the garbage? Will Goodwill even accept them? “We haven’t made it really obvious to consumers how to get rid of this stuff appropriately,” said Michael Rohwer, a director of Business for Social Responsibility, which works with companies that try to be more environmentally friendly. Because many devices today are so small, it doesn’t seem like a big deal to toss those old headphones or chargers in the trash.

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But even companies thinking about sustainability have two conflicting messages for consumers: Buy more, and be more environmentally friendly. On Wednesday, after Apple announced that it was launching the second generation of AirPods, fans on Twitter were ecstatic, bidding farewell to their old AirPods and thanking the CEO, Tim Cook, and the company for releasing the new product.

Apple said the new AirPods contain a chip that allows users longer talk time before the battery runs out. But it didn’t specify whether the battery would last more than two years. That doesn’t bother Desmond Hughes. Sure, his AirPods lasted only two years, he told me, but he can’t imagine living without them.