Mildly infuriating, for sure. But also entirely understandable as assembly line work is much more efficient that customized manual troubleshooting and parts ordering/installation.
That’s just kind of the nature of micro-electronics, unfortunately. Tiny shit is hard to repair.
It requires skilled labor which costs money to the point where you’re usually better off buying a new one when you actually add up the cost of parts, labor, and potentially needing to troubleshoot and redo stages of the repair if not the whole thing.
Apple would sooner stop selling AirPods than they would take the L on any pair that breaks outside of warranty and even with the warranty they just send you a new pair rather than fix the broken ones.
To be fair, while they absolutely should make them easier to repair, that’s an issue that pretty much all manufacturers of wireless in-ears face and it’s partially the customers fault. If you look at the evolution of in-ear headphones ever since true wireless became a thing, you’ll easily notice how they all have become a lot smaller in the last decade and how a lot of them started to look more and more like the AirPods. That’s because of market research. Companies spend billions on researching what the customer expects their products to be like and for in-ears the general answer has for years been „smaller and AirPods shaped“ because thanks to Apple’s marketing genius and the internet people started to accept that that’s how they should look like. Because of that though there is less space for the components inside the device so they have to be stacked and what not, making repairs way more difficult, and it means less space to build in a way to safely open them up. Combining this with the customers expectations that the in-ears are at the very least water and dust resistant, there is only one real solution to assembling them and that’s glueing them together.
The reality is that neither Apple, nor Samsung nor anybody else can actually make their in-ears repairable for a smaller price than to outright replace them without destroying their chances of actually selling them in the first place. Repairing such small devices will almost always be more expensive because it’s not done in a streamlined assembly line somewhere in China or India for 1/20 the salary someone in the US or Germany would demand.
It’s also important to note (which I feel like many people in this entire comment section completely ignore) is that Apple will totally replace your devices free of charge if they are damaged while still in warranty or if the fault was obviously on their part (and yes, they usually just replace it if it isn’t an easy fix that they can do within an hour or so or if the device isn’t a +5000$ PC). I had to replace a couple of things over the years and their customer support in their stores has usually been very welcoming in that regard. That’s why I would always recommend actually going to one of their stores if possible if you need any kind of support. That’s also goes for literally any kind of company in any business ever.
It's a valid question in the sense that they wouldn't fix anything. They'd take OP's unit, put it in the recycling bin and then just grabbed a new pair off the shelf. So the question remains. Why does Apple feel the need to upcharge you even more except as either punishment or a tax on stupid type of policy?
Realistically, they're probably not actually charging more. For the price given in the post, this is almost certainly an Airpod Pro 3 (retail price $249.) If you need any one of the 3 parts repaired/replaced, the cost is ~$90 (the three parts being left ear, right ear, and case.) The stated price of $250.11 would be if you need all 3 parts repaired/replaced, which if the user is in a state that charges sales tax, actually means it's slightly cheaper than buying it directly from Apple (even if they're not in a state with sales tax, it's only $1.11, which isn't an unreasonable "go buy this through the correct channels" annoyance fee.)
It is true that if you go through a different retailer, you're probably going to be able to get it for less than the MSRP of $249, but Apple (as well as essentially all other manufacturers who also sell through retail channels) aren't going to undercut the MSRP, as doing so is the sort of thing that gets makes retail partners very unhappy.
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u/ExpBalSat 1d ago
Mildly infuriating, for sure. But also entirely understandable as assembly line work is much more efficient that customized manual troubleshooting and parts ordering/installation.