I have a confession to make: I am trapped in a toxic relationship with my Bluetooth earbuds, and I need Framework’s modular magic to save me.
Like many of you, I face the exact same tragedy every two years. Right around the 24-month mark, my earbuds act like they have a built-in self-destruct timer. The frustrating part? The audio still sounds amazing, and my ears are perfectly adapted to the active noise cancellation. But I’m forced to throw them away because of three reasons:
The charging contacts rust/corrode into green mush.
One of them may quit unpredictably with no clue.
The battery decides it only has the stamina for exactly half a podcast.
Repairing them? Sure, if you enjoy fighting industrial-grade adhesive with a heat gun, sacrificing your fingertips. My Proposal: The Framework-Style Modular Earbud Case
I am dreaming of a modular Bluetooth earbud case (and eventually the earbuds themselves) where the most common points of failure are user-replaceable.
Case battery dying? Pop out and swap it to a better and larger mAh battery!
Pogo pin contacts getting rusty? Just replace the contact module instead of tossing the whole unit.
Earbud battery giving out? A simple swap without requiring a chemistry degree to dissolve the glue.
To get the ball rolling, I have prepared and attached some design sketches/renderings below! (Quickly made by AI to convey this idea, the rendering may contain unreal design )
I’d say they should not. Reliable wireless audio products are really hard to get right, and Framework may be spread too thinly as it is.
In any case, user-serviceable ear-buds have been done already, by Fairphone. I have a pair of them, and I think they are astoundingly awful, but maybe I just got some duds. By all accounts Fairphone support is more snowed-under than Framework support, so I didn’t try to return them… maybe I will try to sell them one day.
Unfashionably, I’d say that if folks want a low-landfill, low-environmental-impact hands-free device, they should get some wired buds with a USB connector. They’re cheap, they’ll last for a few years, and there’s no battery to dispose of.
I agree that spreading the Framework repairability mindset to as many types of products as possible should be on all our minds, but I think @Squiggler is right in saying that Framework should stay focused on what it already has its hands full with at the moment. We all want the Framework printer and tractor, but one thing at a time.
I’d love to see more earbuds that are repairable. I haven’t used any Fairphone stuff so I have no idea how good they are. One thing I do have to say is I had some Raycon earbuds that I finally replaced about 2 month ago and I had been using them since 2020 or so. They were in really rough shape and I had been using just one of the earbuds (it was still usable) for about 2 or more years on it’s own. They had been dropped from a ladder and have landed on concrete several times (I work in construction). The battery got to a point where the earbud would only last about 4-5 hours which was fine given that 10 minutes in the case would give me like an hour and I’d usually charge during lunch anyway. They lasted WAY longer than they should have! Well worth the investment of about $100 when I bought them.
Interestingly, I noticed the other day that the new earbuds coming out from Sennheiser (Momentum 5 I think) have user-replaceable batteries. It doesn’t necessarily make the entire thing repairable, but I found it pretty neat that what I would consider a big-name brand in the space is adding some amount of repairability to their product. It’s a good sign.
Realistically that is about as much ‘repairability’ as you are going to get from wireless earbuds. The electronics inside will be an epoxy blob, and the transducer will be very flimsy, and not suitable for working on without a microscope.
True enough. Now that I’m looking at the Fairbuds, I think the only replaceable thing on the buds themselves are the batteries as well. Compared to the Fairbuds XL (which is a weird name, why not the Fairphones… oh wait, I see why), which has a lot more replaceable parts.
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