The repairability smarts are being applied to headphones

Repairability of the Fairbuds Over-ears: A Comparison with Other Headset Manufacturers and the Case Against Battery Defects

Fairphone is taking a much more proactive approach to repairability with the Fairbuds XL, however. It’s making spare parts easily available via its website, and the headphones themselves have a modular construction that’s designed to make it easy to detach and swap out the part that’s developed a fault. The hope is that trifling issues like “age and complexity” won’t consign them to a landfill just because their battery has lost capacity, a cable has frayed, or control buttons have grown unresponsive over time.

In the future, wireless headphones are an ideal consumer tech product. They don’t run an ever-evolving operating system like Android that needs to be continuously updated to deal with security vulnerabilities. The model headphones which might be several years old can still be competitive, despite the small improvements made to them last year.

In fairness to Bowers & Wilkins, its response isn’t unusual among headphones manufacturers. I asked a handful of brands if they’d be able to repair a pair of their headphones with a dead battery, and the results were mostly disappointing. Marshall Group tells me it currently has no in-house capacity for repairing its headphones (though it claims it’s working on it), and Bose says it generally replaces headphones for customers if the battery dies under warranty and swaps them out for a new, discounted product if they die outside of warranty. Neither Sony nor Apple provided an official response, though Apple advertises a $79 out-of-warranty battery repair service for the AirPods Max, and a 6/10 repairability score from iFixit suggests battery replacements are not just possible but relatively straightforward for Apple’s flagship over-ears.

The Fairbuds XL can be easily broken down into around a dozen distinct components. Sometimes this is a toolless process, like when removing the user-replaceable battery or detaching the ear cushions. When you want to remove the earcups from the headband, there is a standardPhillips head screwdriver that you need.

I wouldn’t say the disassembly process is completely effortless, and there were a couple of moments when I was scared I was about to break the headphones before they unclipped. But I’d prefer this to a pair of headphones that are so easy to dismantle that it feels like they’re about to fall apart in your hands. The rating for dust and water resistance should make them less likely to get injured by rain or sweat, despite the modular construction. Premium headphones don’t come with water resistance, so it’s not bad. Sony’s WH 1000XM5s, Bose’s QuietComfort 45s, and Apple’s AirPods max don’t have an Intellectual Property rating for example.

The joystick on the right ear cup is a great way to control the Fairbuds XL. Marshall’s headphones have a button that can be held down to turn on or off the headphones, and also have a lever that can be used to control the volume and skip tracks. It’s simple, it’s easy to find with your thumb while wearing the headphones, and it’s far more reliable than competing swipe-based controls or buttons that have to be pressed up to three times to skip tracks. The noise cancellation and transparency mode is activated by the separate ANC button.

I’m less of a fan of the lack of a dedicated 3.5mm port. Fairphone doesn’t let you use the Fairbuds XL as wired headphones with a 3.5mm cable, but instead it gives you wired connection through the USB-C port, which is similar to what Apple did with the AirPods Max. You should be able to use any number of aftermarket plugs and cables to connect your headphones to your device. The vastly varying specifications of these aftermarket accessories meant that I had a bad experience with the cables I had on hand. Pick up Fairphone’s 3.5mm-to-USB-C cable to avoid hassle.

Multipoint connections allow the Fairbuds to be connected to two devices at the same time, with the switch between them as needed. When hopping between devices, the implementation is solid and there isn’t any lag. But actually getting connections established to two devices is a little confusing, and it felt like I was using trial and error to get to that point. As far as I can tell, you need to put the headphones back into pairing mode after connecting them to your first source device — and essentially ignore the “disconnected” notification that plays. They established connections after they turned them off and on again.

That is not due to a lack of support for the codec. Even though there’s no support for LDAC or aptX Lossless, the Fairbuds are able to support aptX HD. And there are also a series of four equalizer presets to choose from in the Fairphone app (see the “agree to continue” section below) if you want to attempt to adjust the sound — though you can’t fine-tune them further.

The sound of the Fairbuds is not detailed or neutral, regardless of what preset I was listening to. As a result, I stuck to the default preset, which Fairphone describes as having an allround powerful sound with real presence. Listen to a layered track like Paranoid Void’s “Null,” and the Fairbuds XL make it harder to hear the separation between guitar and bass. It’s the same with Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight,” where all the string instruments feel less distinct.

I never wished I was listening to music on a different pair of headphones. They have a lack of fullness to their sound that I would expect from this price point.

Also firmly in the “not a deal-breaker but annoying” category is the Fairbuds XL’s microphone performance, which made my voice sound muffled and a little hard to hear as soon as background noise picked up. I wouldn’t trust these headphones for important hands-free calls.

On Using Smart Devices as a Tool for Evaluating Contracts with Theoretical Insights into Users’ Incapacity

Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it — contracts that no one actually reads. It’s impossible for us to read and analyze every single one of these agreements. Most people don’t read agreements like this and can’t negotiate, so we began counting how many times you have to agree to use devices when we review them.