I’ve used many pairs of wired headphones over the years, cheap and expensive, and never had ones with a cable that didn’t eventually fail, unless they mostly stay plugged into a single device.
The article prominently highlights mobile usage, in which case wireless headphones easily win on longevity.
I think it’s maybe close to a wash between non-replaceable batteries in wireless headphones dying and cords failing, in my experience at least. The ideal case IMO is over-ear headphones that have a replaceable cord—I have some 14 year old Bose QCs and some newer Beyerdynamics, both of which I’ve replaced the cord on.
Have batteries actually ever FAILED in wireless headphones? Sure, they degrade and charge becomes lower, but I've never had them outright fail. A headphone that lasts my 2-3 hours of commute/daily use is completely useable, even if it's original charge lasted 5 hours.
Cables do fail though, completely. They become unusable.
In my entire life time of using headphones/earbuds since school with the PSP, ALL wired options have failed after 1-2 years for purely mechanical cable reasons. Not a single wireless failed for electronic reasons. The did fail for me dropping them and stepping on them reasons, though.
My sennheiser earbuds are now down to 15 minutes of battery life. Less if it's a cold day. Sure, they're not completely dead yet, but they're effectively useless. And it's not like I can easily replace the batteries. Most wired earbuds or headphones at a similar price point have replaceable cables.
Shure sells wireless earbuds where the BT / battery sits outside the earbud itself and can be user-replaced. You can even attach them to good ol' 3.5 mm cables! And, since the connector on the earbud is standard, you can actually attach either other-brand earbuds or other-brand BT adapters. Other brands probably have something similar.
I have a pair or Shure IEMs I bought as wired over a decade ago. I've converted them to a lighting cable when I bought my iphone 7, then switched to BT when that cable failed.
Sure, the IEMs are bigger than airpods or similar models, but I find it's a good compromise. I wouldn't go back to wired headphones while at work, and certainly not while on the go.
I also have that model, and even though the battery still seems to last for ages, I was wondering if it was replaceable.
Does Sony sell a replacement, or do you have to go through a 3rd party? Is everything held in place with screws, or do you need to mess around with glue and whatnot?
I bought a pair of Philips headphones with a replaceable cord. Instead the jack became loose.
I’ve been using Bluetooth wireless headphones exclusively when I’m portable since 2006 (Sony Ericsson HBH-DS970 represent), with only wired use at a desk and I’ve never looked back.
All my corded headphones lasted at most 2 years of mobile use. My QC35s are still going strong. Wired sucks for mobile use. And if the cord doesn’t go, the 3.5mm socket does. I replaced multiple sockets on my iPod and iPhone 3g. That replacement process sucks.
What are you doing that destroys cables and jacks like that? I use wired earbuds while riding my bike and I've never broken a jack, and the one time I broke the cable was because I made a mistake and dropped them while riding, which got them tangled up in the spokes.
I've used tons of wired as well. Maybe have bad one pair fail at the wire? I'm super active with them too. Snowboarding with them and my Sony g shock in 1998. Lots of cycling and running usage. You've had every single pair of wired headphones fail for you? Every single pair?
What is a "Sony g shock" if you don't mind? I know Casio's G-Shock and Sony's Sports series... did you mix them by chance as I suppose or is there a Sony range I'm not aware of?
Haha whoops, I totally conflated the two! The Sony Atrac3Plus had a feature called "G Protection". It was the only "anti skip" cd player that I tried that actually worked really well back then.
I also exaggerated the year a bit. After looking it up, I think this cd player came out in 2004!
Cord failure is definitely a problem, but if you’re moderately capable with a soldering iron, it’s easy to repair the cord if the failure is away from the headphone side. It’s even fairly easy to replace an 8mm or 0.25” jack.
Your soldering skill (and sense of adventure) would have to be far better than mine to even consider doing that for wireless earbuds.
The few times I've tried to solder headphone wire I've been defeated because the wire isn't wire, it's some kind of copper and synthetic fiber weave, that the solder just won't adhere to.
It's an unbelievably thin stranded wire, but the wires are coated so they can be in contact with each other without shorting. It's all twisted around a thin thread of cotton or nylon to add strength, then then encased in it's sheath.
The trick is to gently scrape the stranded wire with a blade for the solder to stick and to make a good connection.
I've repaired a few headphone wires; theyre usually thin copper wires covered with enamel insulation. Burn off the insulation with a blob of solder, or sand it off, and the solder will stick.
You’re right, the kind of cable often used is not easy to solder. This makes it hard to solder a broken cable together again, or to replace a broken / bent plug. So best replace the entire cable and its plug — it’s still an inexpensive part.
You’ll need to solder it to the contacts inside the can, but that’s quite straightforward.
In case the internal cable that goes from one can to the other breaks, you can replace it with any bit of audio cable so you can use one that’s easy to solder.
There are lots of wired headphones out there with replaceable cables
Honestly though you can get the best of both worlds.
I impulse bought some over-the-ear headphones at the airport when I realized I had forgotten mine that do bluetooth, but can also use an audio cable when the battery dies.
When using wired the audio quality is much better.
Absolutely, As I said, it comes down to personal usage, needs, preferences. I personally never lost a cable (I did need to replace the earpads, but that happened on both Bluetooth and wired:). I do tend to use connected wireless earbuds when I go jogging etc.
I’ve repaired many pairs of wired headphones over the years, as electronic repairs go they’re very simple. The same can’t be said for the wireless ones.
Plus, the more high end ones come with repleceable cables.
Let’s critically think about this for just a second. Your concern doesn’t appear to be with the audio, isn’t it with the connector? That’s a whole different argument than what we’re talking about
Isn’t it the wire that failed, not the audio part of it? So why not do what I did? You put some JB weld across that bend in the wire, which is cheap and could probably be engineered to last a lot longer… now I have headphones that last a really long time. You could also get a better connector and simply put that on there, right?
Ultimately I prefer Ableton too, as it’s just much more polished, but there is merit to music-as-code. Traditional DAWs, which are based on traditional instrument interfaces, have incredible amount of state, which is so easy to get lost in. It’s so much easier to learn something new from a code snippet, than from a YouTube tutorial which shows a series of state changes via clicks and keyboard shortcuts.
Agree. I keep asking LLMs to tell me some jokes from time to time, but never once I've found it's funny. For me, when I find myself burst out laughing from LLMs joke, I'd know we've reached AGI.
If a 3rd party product advertises compatibility with a Google service and you use it to login via a first party Google login page, doesn’t the responsibility fall somewhere between the offending product and Google itself? In practice it’s structured pretty much like a phishing attempt.
Notably some model providers explicitly allow that very flow, while others will ban you without notice.
Why do you call it self-hosting? It appears to be installable app with a fancy homepage. At what point does the software being covered by an open license changes the responsibility model?
That's exactly what self hosting is, you install some app on your own computer host(s).
> At what point does the software being covered by an open license changes the responsibility model
When you agree to an open license that says you're liable for anything and not the author of the software.
> THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
Maybe it’s related to what I tend to use the agents for, but I guess I don’t understand what is this for. Typically I try to structure the tasks in a way that require me to do or check something important when the agent gets back to me. If the agents query is trivial enough I can respond from my phone, it was likely not needed at all. If the agent finished - fine. It will have to wait until I get back in front of the computer anyway.
I've used similar things (omnara/happy) while taking walks. Sometimes I'll get an idea about the problem I'm working on and I can just dictate it into my phone and check in 15min later. I stopped being able to do that when claude added those nice interview panes to clarify things because it didn't work back then. But mostly it's really annoying when you think you've created the plan/prompt and that it's ready to go. But it gets stuck or decided to stop while you're away. I pretty often need to give Claude a "continue" kick. To be fair this happens far less after Opus 4.6.
Also, I felt the need to use it far more when I was on Pro vs a Max plan. On Pro when you hit the usage windows it's nice to be able to kick claude back into gear without scheduling your life around getting back to the terminal to type "continue".
- Plan mode -> answer questions/make corrections, continue planning
- Some of us don't do full yolo mode all the time, then tool approvals or code reviews are required, nice to do a quick review and decide if you need to go back to your computer or not
- Letting claude spin or handle a long-running task outside of normal work hours and being able to check in intermittently to see if something crashed
I don't dangerously accept permissions outside of a few scripts I have reviewed as safe. This means claude gets stuck often when testing it's work, but also means it doesn't uninstall production workloads from the kubernetes cluster.
Also an acceptable solution - create a "runner" subagent on a cheap model, that's tasked with running a command and relaying the important parts to the main agent.
There’s no reason not to try things. I’ve experienced CTS symptoms when using a regular mouse, which got fully resolved for years now by switching to a vertical one. Regardless of whether I should also make lifestyle changes, there’s zero reason to go back to an inferior mouse, just because that’s the design someone came up with in the 1960s.
The article prominently highlights mobile usage, in which case wireless headphones easily win on longevity.
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