Apple’s AirPods are the perfect distillation of how Apple uses lock-in to simultaneously enable great products, and to prevent anybody else from doing the same. They also exemplify Apple’s antipathy towards the right to repair: AirPods are just plain disposable tech, a $250 gadget that lasts a few years before you have to toss them and replace them.
Apple Hates The DMA
The 2022 Digital Markets Act is a set of European laws designed to prevent Big Tech companies from abusing their dominance to stifle competition, and to stop them from locking users in, and competitors out, or their platforms.
Apple hates the DMA so much that it put out a whining press release that attempts to show the consumer-friendly laws as unfair, and anti-innovation. Mostly the arguments come down to “You can only trust us.”
Lost in Translation
For example, Apple delayed the new AirPods Live Translation feature in the EU. This lets users chat with speakers of other languages, with the iPhone listening, translating, and speaking to both parties. It’s magic, sci-fi level tech, and Apple says that the whole conversation is processed on-device to ensure privacy (the alternative would be sending the recorded conversation to Apple’s or a third-party’s servers for translation).
So why was this feature withheld from EU countries? According to Apple, it’s because the DMA says that it has to make features like this available to other developers, and Apple doesn’t trust any of them. “We designed Live Translation so that our users’ conversations stay private,” says Apple, “and our teams are doing additional engineering work to make sure they won’t be exposed to other companies or developers either.”
Even if we agree that you can only trust Apple (in which case, why does Apple even let banking apps, medical apps, or location-based software like map apps into the App Store?), then this doesn’t explain why you can’t use Live Translation with any other headphones. It’s just audio going through headphones, and headphone mics, after all. Google just released an update to Google Translate which brings live speech translation to any headphones.
Which brings us to another locked AirPods feature: reading out your messages. The Siri voice can read out messages and alerts from pretty much any app on your iPhone, but only if you’re using AirPods, or Apple-owned Beats headphones that contain Apple’s H-series chip. Why? Who knows? This time it’s a worldwide restriction, not only in the EU. Why can’t the audio be sent out to any connected headphones, either via wire or Bluetooth?
Repair
The AirPods repair story is less of a story and more of a long joke. They’re just not user-repairable—at all—and there’s no better evidence of this than Apple’s complete lack of repair materials and documentation.
New York state senate bill S1320 “requires original equipment manufacturers to provide diagnostic and repair information” for their wares. Apple’s self-service repair website offers no AirPod parts, manuals, or schematics (the site does have manuals for “iPhone, iPad, Mac laptop, Mac desktop, Apple display or Beats”).
Likewise, the AirPods documentation pages contain no user manuals—just a quick start guide, regulatory compliance information, and info (AirPods 4, AirPods Pro 2, AirPods Pro 3).
But here’s the twist: Apparently the AirPods can be repaired, at least by Apple. Apple lists “battery service” on its service pages: “We can replace your AirPods battery for a service fee.”
But wait, there’s a counter-twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan. Apple probably isn’t even replacing the batteries itself. It’s probably just sending you a new unit, which means that the entirety of the electronics and housing are destined for the shredder.
It doesn’t need to be this way. FairPhone’s FairBuds are just as tiny as the AirPods, but they manage to get a 10/10 repairability score from iFixit, in part thanks to their easily-replaceable batteries. Apple could manage this too, if it wanted to.
AirPods are the products that rely most on Apple’s lock-in practices. They only work properly with Apple devices, and many iPhone features only work with AirPods. At the same time they make these devices impossible to repair, so you can’t even replace a battery yourself.
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