Hm. Not sure I would say that... there really isn't a one-size fits all unloading mechanism across trucking/delivery and there will be a human involved in that process till we really really standardized.
The value is now cutting the labor number by 1/3rd. Need a loader and unloader, no more driver. In food delivery this essentially removes your labor cost since the restaurant and consumer are the loader/unloader.
$69 to replace the earpads, which is the most consumable part for me on cans.
I have a pair of Audio Technica A700s, about $150 new that are now 12 years old; I'm on my 3rd set of earpads. AT gave me a new set free the first time I asked, and it cost me $10 with shipping to get new ones out of warranty. The current ones are 3rd party that are much better than the OEM pads and cost me ~$20.
Same - my Audio Technicas are over 10 years old and when the earpads started to wear, they dug up some new earpads from the archives and it was definitely under $30 total.
I'm sure there will be 3rd party knockoff pads. Just look at the "fancy" Apple Watch wristbands with clasps that are IMO way more expensive than they have any business being. A plethora of 3rd party replacements exist, many much cheaper than Apple.
> I have a pair of Audio Technica A700s, about $150 new that are now 12 years old; I'm on my 3rd set of earpads.
So you buy a new set of earpads on those every 4 years. But we can also compare with the same-market-segment-as-AirPod-Max (wireless+ANC+mic) Bose QC35, where many people have to replace their earpads _every_ _year_⁰ at $35 a pair (or $20 for third party ones that might last longer but definitely feel worse). So the question I think will be how long the pads last on these. Do you have to replace them every year like with the Bose ones or only every 4 years?
⁰ - QC35 ear pad extreme comfort but lack of durability is basically a meme among owners now.
Could you share the link to these 3rd party earpads please? Maybe they have earpads for my K702's as well, I couldn't find anything with good reviews on Amazon.
I'd bet that Apple will stop servicing them after a few years though, as they do with all their products.
And regular AirPods are definitely a throw-away product, since the 'battery service' is really just a full replacement. You'd have to physically destroy them to remove the battery.
So you're fine throwing perfectly working 600€ headphones into the trash just because 7 years passed? Corporatism at it's finest. It's not ever about the use you get out of the product but how brushed the ego feels when swiping the credit card for Apple.
I own several (wired) headphones which are either approaching or older than 7 years and are in perfect condition. Sure, some had the ear pads or a cable replaced, but just like stereo speakers, there's really not much you can do to really break them.
I'm still rocking the same pair of Sony mdr-v6 studio headphones that I bought nearly 20 years ago. The rubberized foam on the cups has completely worn away but if anything it actually makes them even more comfortable.
What's the point of shoving all the aluminum there and making it so heavy if you are not planning to support them long enough? My plastic Bose QC 25 have been fine after 5 years of almost every day usage.
That's fair if the device we're talking about is a phone. Those will of course become obsolete much sooner. But headphones don't get worse just by the passage of time. I'd love to still use them in 15+ years. Do you think Apple will still service them then?
Also, why not make it so that they can be used passively? What's the downside?
Same reason they put the charging port for their mouse on the underside. It's a wireless device, and for some reason, they think that if it supports a wired mode, it won't be as special (or whatever their idiotic reasoning is).
And, why use the lightning port?! Aside from the price, choosing to not use USB-C for a charging port killed it for me. I like being able to charge all my devices off one power brick, and I'm not spending $600 on headphones if I need a stupid lightning port for the next 6+ years.
You know that it's only lightning on the headset side, right? That it's USB-C on the other side, though you're free to include any adapter cable you'd like.
This misses the point. EVERY device I carry with me charges via USB-C right now.
My laptop, my work laptop, my headphones, my phone, my tablet/e-reader (remarkable).
It's insanely liberating to know that I can pretty much always find a charger for everything, and I only ever need to pack a single wall-wart.
Flying? One charger. Road trip? One charger. Biking to work? One charger.
Better yet - Leave a charger at work, keep a charger at home, don't need to carry 5lbs back and forth every day.
Forgot my charger? Every person I hang out with has a usb-c charger floating around somewhere.
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You know what I really don't want to have to carry around anymore? Fucking cable adapters. You know what no one will have if I forget my charger? Fucking cable adapters.
Honestly - I probably wouldn't have bought these headphones yet because I'm quite happy with my current headphones.
But I'm very, very close to no longer even considering devices that ship without a USB-C port. And that's a shame, because I otherwise really like the Max, and probably would have slotted it in when my current cans die.
Getting over the hump to convert to USB-C initially was fairly expensive, but my job is good and I can splurge. I don't want to go back.
If your complaint is carrying a USB to lightning cable -- though you keep jumping to wall warts/chargers and not a 17 gram cable -- yeah, I guess that's a big burden.
But your comment seems like it might be contrived to begin with. This headset only really makes sense for iPhone users. That is the target. Those people are already carrying using lightning cables in their life. Pretty much anyone in the Apple ecosystem has to charge a multitude of things with lightning still.
They make plenty of sense for users of newer MacBooks and iPad Pros, too. Those people will be carrying USB-C to USB-C cables because that's what their MacBook and/or iPad Pro uses.
I'm not really what's contrived about the other poster's comment. If these headphones look good and sound good and have good noise cancelling, why would I only want to use them with my iPhone? I'm sure they'll sound great whether I use them with my MacBook, or iPhone, or my Dell XPS, or my Windows desktop, or my smart TV.
The lightning port isn't a deal breaker, but it can be an ergonomic annoyance. I've recently been favoring on Galaxy S9 over my newer iPhone because all of my other devices charge via USB-C and the iPhone is the odd duck that requires extra work. I have a USB-C to lighting cable so it's not that bad, but it's still extra annoyance I would rather not deal with.
"I'm not really what's contrived about the other poster's comment."
The guy I replied to 20 days ago here on HN, talking about Apple: "Don't buy their shit. Period."
No, they were never going to buy this headset. They are not the target market. What they demand would actually be detrimental to the target market.
Of the actual target market, the majority will have no problem with it needing a lightning cable. Their iPhones use lightning. Any iPad but the newest use lightning. The AppleTV remote uses lightning. The Magic Keyboard and the Magic Mouse use lightning. It just seems to be something that a person who would have no interest in this device would see as a problem (in the same way that people who don't use the Magic Mouse are absolute certain that the charger port on the bottom is an egregious deadly fault, while actual users just enjoy a fantastic mouse and it's an utter non-issue. It's why Apple should never listen to these people).
I have a work macbook. I have a personal XPS. I have an Android phone (because I can flash my own roms).
The chargers that ship with modern devices tend to be USB-C to USB-C (including Apple's own macbook charger).
I have absolutely no desire to fit a lightning cable into my life, and I'm hardly the only person I know who has a macbook and an android phone (about half of my company of 300 falls into the exact same bucket).
I don't typically buy Apple devices because I think they're oppressively locked down, but that's not really something I care that much about for headphones.
Plus, given the whole market for decent bluetooth headphones is ridiculously price inflated anyways, Apple's price here doesn't dissuade me nearly as much as normal.
Basically - I would absolutely consider picking up a Max, but lightning is a serious knock against the product.
The promo for this headset outright state that significant functionality require an iPhone or iPad (you know, oppressively locked down and all). It is over double the price of comparable headsets.
No, there was no chance you were ever buying this headset. You may see it as legitimizing your grievances, but I don't think any reasonable person actually buys that.
You, 20 days ago, regarding Apple - "Don't buy their shit. Period."
Of the actual people who would buy this, I'd wager that 99%+ have iPhones. Being able to charge the headset with the same cable you use to charge your phone seems pretty obvious.
No, it's still stupid that you have to use a different cable.
I have a C cable on my desk, the charger is hidden under it, I don't want to replace the cable ever. This one cable can charge my phone, laptop, power bank, earbuds, gaming headset, Nintendo Switch, heck, it powers my soldering iron – of course I don't ever want to buy anything with a different port!
Again, the iPhones have lightning ports. Almost everyone who buys this is going to be an iPhone users.
This is like complaining that the microwave at Best Buy doesn't have a Europlug because you're in Italy and that's what you use. Great, but not important to the actual buyer of the microwave in Milwaukee.
How does not having one specific standard of charging port (you know -- the one that came when everyone was rolling with the junkpile that was micro-USB) "reinvent a corded headset"?
Regardless, this complaint is pretty spurious. The device is clearly marketed to iPhone/iPad users, who carry a USB to Lightning cable with them as a matter of normative standards.
I have an iPad that doesn't have a lightning port.
I have a battery pack that doesn't charge with a lightning port, and can charge my phone without a lighting port (wireless).
When I'm traveling light, I don't need a lightning port for anything.
When I'm at my office, I can top off my headphones/iPad/etc off with the same cable I use to connect my laptop to my screen. I never have to worry about bringing an extra cable with me to work.
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It's just too bad, that's all. Apple seemed like they were ready to phase out the lightning port in favor of USB-C and wireless charging. They've done such a great job with all their other audio accessories that a lot of tech-minded people like myself were looking forward to these.
Well, as someone who doesn't own a lightening cable, it means that I would need a specific cable for these ones. Which kind of negates the point of a wireless headset if I need a specific cable to charge it.
I get I'm not the target market but that doesn't make my point valid. Please don't negate it as bitching.
Noise canceling heaphones used passively often sound a lot worse, because they can’t soundshape their way out of a suboptimal earshell and speaker design. Apple probably felt that either they had to compromise too much on the shape, or on the way they sounded passively, so they chose to just not allow for it entirely. I expect other manufacturers to follow suit because it creates more freedom in design.
Also, why not make it so that they can be used passively? What's the downside?
If by passively you mean plugged into a headphone port, the answer is that they can’t because they need power. Their big selling point is supposed to be computational audio. That obviously doesn’t work without the compute part, which in turn requires power.
I’m sure the product team at Apple considered that use case, and it didn’t make sense to include it in this version due to time/weight/cost/complexity constraints.
Key features like the spatial effects only work with an iPad or mac. So now you have a dependency on Apple keeping that part going for years as well, if you want to keep using them as you would have expected to at launch.
Stainless and aluminum headphones that weigh a pound are made to last a century, not a couple of years. I have a closet full of incredibly durable, beautiful Apple products that will show up in an archeological dig of our sad epoch but were only supported by Apple for five years max.
From Apple's point of view you are their ideal customer (not even selling your stuff to the secondary market when you upgrade) and proof that their strategy works.
Was going to say I just had a family member get a battery replaced for their iPhone 6 last month. With that said, I still wish their stuff was more user friendly for self repairs.
The battery is actually really easy to replace as it and the screen are the most common replacement(s). Remove the screws at the bottom, break the glue down, and unfold. Access to the screen and battery connectors are right there on top of the logic board. It’s so the service techs at the store can do it quicker. Anything else, they just give you a new device and ship the old one back to Apple.
Previously (think iPhone 4S and prior), the phone opened from the back. So a screen replacement necessitated deconstructing the entire device.
Could it be more accessible? Most likely. They could put in removable batteries (like older phones had), but they’ve chosen not to (presumably for space reasons (internal batteries take up less space)), and it seems the entire industry followed. But just because they’re not easily replaceable, doesn’t mean they’re not easily serviceable. It takes a bit, but an experienced person can do it about 30 minutes or even less. iFixIt’s guides help a lot here.
Apple supports devices longer than any other manufacturer. Case in point is iOS 14, which came out a few months ago and still supports the iPhone 6s, which came out in 2015.
Sort of. They still ship (or shipped until recently) iPhone 6 in some geographies.
Apple is very aggressive about transitioning stuff when a decision is made. In 1999, your new, pre-iMac laserwriter became a legacy product when iMac was released. MagSafe 1 laptops were orphaned for power adapters pretty quickly. Many HP and Lenovo devices utilize common power supplies that have been around for 10-15 years.
Other products, like AirPods are engineered with planned obsolescence. It's not a dig on Apple, it's part of their process and part of why they are so good at what they do -- Apple builds for a specific customer persona, which may or may not be you. Similarly, the need for commercial customers to have a common power supply is something that makes HP or Lenovo a good choice.
In the more open market, interfaces live a long time. My dad uses an Epson FX-80 dot matrix printer (which was purchased used when I was like 6 years old in the 80s) to print invoices, on a newish computer he found that still supports parallel interface.
That's fair if the device we're talking about is a phone. Those will of course become obsolete much sooner. But headphones don't get worse just by the passage of time. I'd love to still use them in 15+ years. Do you think Apple will still service them then?
Also, why not make it so that they can be used passively? What's the downside?
> But headphones don't get worse just by the passage of time.
They didn't when they were just speakers on a strap, but that is a bad mental model for thinking about modern wireless headphones. Remember that a lot of these headphones now have CPUs in them, and they're integrating into a moving spec. The iPhone 6 mentioned here only supported Bluetooth 4, while the iPhone 12 supports Bluetooth 5.0, plus some other addons like LE and A2DP. And that's before we consider any protocols that manufacturers add on top of that, like Airplay.
Even Airpods aren't "fire and forget" devices nowadays. Apple is still shipping firmware updates for Airpods. It's fair to say that long term support for these will be much less costly than an old iPhone, but it's not free.
> Also, why not make it so that they can be used passively? What's the downside?
The simplest answer is probably "Apple customers don't want it". If you really care about using your headphones passively with a wire 20 years from now when the battery is dead and Apple won't service it, you were pretty unlikely to be buying Apple anyways. There are tons of available headphones on the market to serve that set of requirements. And since Apple really values clean lines, removing a jack that they don't think many of their customers will use is a no-brainer for them.
"Your wired headphones are reliable mechanical-electrical devices. Apple is making a computer that you wear on your head, and it just can't compete in areas like reliability, repairability, and Apple's profitability."
The most honest answer is: we don't know if Apple will still service them then, because they've never made a product like this for comparison. We also don't know whether non-Apple service centers will be able to service them later, which might even be a more important question. (Once your device is out of warranty and AppleCare coverage, Apple's repairs are going to be pretty pricey even if they're still available.) But I don't think saying "well, they only support phones and computers for a few years after they stop making them" is necessarily a guidepost here.
> Also, why not make it so they can be used passively? What's the downside?
My quasi-educated guess is part marketing, and part technology. The marketing part: Apple considers these AirPods Pros that cover your ears, and insist that they have all the AirPods Pro features. The technology part: from what I can tell, these headphones are DSP-ed up the wazoo, more like HomePods than AirPods, so there's a good chance that passive mode will sound like crap.
I know a practical counter-argument is "so what, there are other active noise-cancelling headphones that let you switch them to passive mood and they sound like crap when you do that and everybody's just okay with it," but, that is not Apple.
(For the record, the AirPods Max are not on my shopping list.)
I'm fairly sure the downside is "they'd sound worse". Headphones like this are doing a lot of signal processing -- just hooking up an input directly to the driver is going to sound notably less good.
We can argue that it's a trade-off that you should be free to make for yourself... but it's very in-character for Apple to just take a strong stance on that kind of thing.
With a 20 hour battery life I'm personally okay with it. If it was more like 4-5 hours then the need for a passive mode would be more pressing.
Worse in this case is a complicated comparison. The computational stuff is cool and that will definitely stop working when drivers eventually rot out of support but for general audio quality these won’t be in any way comparable to a cheaper 3+ decade old set of headphones. A huge amount of the extra complexity is making up for using Bluetooth – that has advantages but it means that you have to support a protocol stack, codecs, etc. just to approach the quality that you’d get from wired headphones for $50 in the 1990s. If you really value not needing a cable or the computational features that may be worthwhile to you but it’s important to remember that a lot of the extra cost and reduced reliability and service lifetime is required by non-core functions.
Fair, but if Apple can replace the battery that means that so can anyone else, so yes, I expect you'll be able to replace the battery in 15 years, assuming anyone still makes the battery you need (which would apply to an easily replaceable battery as well).
Re: passive listening, I don't know why they didn't. But I think it is fair to assume there was a real trade-off. Do you really think a smart business like Apple would make their excessively expensive headphones less functional for absolutely no reason?
> And regular AirPods are definitely a throw-away product…
Please don't — they're recyclable[1]. Recyclers wouldn't normally make money from recovering recyclable materials, but Apple pays[2] to make up the difference.
To be fair, I wouldn't be surprised if there's less things if value in an airpod than it's worth. At the point where recycling in and of itself might be more polluting than mining the 0.02g of precious metals and the gram or two of other metals. The structure in airpods is mostly plastic and glue.
iirc they project small green region around the actors and real props, so that ambient light and reflections are still mostly correct but they can also get clean matte out.
how do you differentiate open-mindedness from a closed-minded preference in other direction (i.e. straight men who specifically want to out-earn their spouses)?
You can see if there's a change in who initiates divorces after the couples switch their income ordering.
It would be particularly indicative if
1) Women who start out earning their husband start initiating divorces at higher rates, while men stay constant or decrease the rate of divorce.
However, to differentiate that from the hypothesis that all people moving up in the income spectrum have an tendency to split up with their current partner to find a new one, it would also be useful to see
2) Men who start out earning their wives do not start initiating divorces at higher rates, while women stay constant or decrease the rate of divorce.
You could also see how a switch in income ordering affects divorce rates in homosexual couples to factor out the gender aspects.
Another, less direct metric would be seeing who uses income filters in online dating more, though few sites seem to offer it nowadays.
important to remember that header image is result of professional concept artist drawing over gaugan result (bottom left). explanation of paper is not awful but not great, would recommend to read the original https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.07291.pdf
The videos are great, consumes a lot less water than I imagined. Seems like most of the water is lost during the de-suction process, if they can scavenge that it could really cut the water consumption down nearly to zero.
If they have an additional ring around the outside of each cup, could they not suction the water back into the system?
Also, wouldnt this be easily defeatable with small dowel protruding "thorns" - or dimples, as on a golf ball - maybe alternating convex/concave dimple patterns? or other ridges?
I don’t think it’s possible to build a suction cup (or in fact any climbing tool) which will work 100% of the time against any countermeasure. However this design does seem a significant step forward from existing suction cups.
Edit: I got downvoted. Is a powered vacuum pump not possible in this application? (Like putting a vacuum cleaner nozzle against the wall, possibly using a more powerful motor than usual, for more suction.) I think it's a fair question but maybe I'm way off base here.
Presumably you were downvoted because your question suggests that you haven't actually read the article, which does mention how it compares to other powered suction (i.e. "vacuum pump") devices.
