This is the REAL problem with Apple's AirPods Pro
This article may contain personal views and opinion from the author.
Don’t buy the AirPods Pro. As much as they sound great and pair extremely easily with iPhones, they have one major flaw that you must know before you spend $250 on a pair of headphones, probably the most you have ever spend on headphones in your life.
And that one critical flaw of the AirPods Pro is that they are a disposable product.
Built to die
Planned obsolescence
You read this correctly: after a couple of years of use, your shiny $250 AirPods Pro will have to go in the trash and you will need to buy new ones. That is the textbook definition of a disposable product.
Aren’t all wireless headphones this way?
Nope.
Apple, on the other hand, is one of very few companies to manufacture its headphones so that they are impossible to repair. And it’s not like Apple was unaware of this: we are definitely not the first to point one this critical flaw, also present in the original AirPods. Wired recently reached out to Apple about the new AirPods Pro and got the following commentary: “[AirPods Pro] are no more repairable than previous versions.”
With all of this in mind, let’s go back to the beginning of this article where I say you should not buy the AirPods Pro. Well, now that you know that they are a disposable product, you can go ahead and spend $250 on them. They sound great, they are comfortable, they fit many people a lot better than the original AirPods. Just be well informed that if you use them often, you will also be throwing them away in 2-3 years and would have to spend just as much on a new pair.
This is the type of planned obsolescence and consumerism that I cannot support, but it is the exact direction Apple is driving this industry into.