True wireless earbuds are flimsy, easily lost and prone to battery failure. Given their size and cost, companies would rather you throw them out when they succumb to the inevitable. Fairphone, however, has built a pair of buds with easily replaceable batteries, as well as a swappable cell in the charging case. And, look, if the engineers working at this tiny Dutch company can work this out, then the army of designers in Apple and Samsung’s steel-and-glass cathedrals have no excuse.

Fairbuds are a pair of true wireless earbuds that look like Samsung’s Galaxy Buds, with the outermost surface on both sides being a controller. Fairphone promises six hours of battery life on a charge with an extra 20 hours nestled inside the case. The buds are packing the usual feature list, including ANC, multipoint connectivity as well as an IP54 rating for sweat and water resistance. As usual, the company wants to make the argument (on paper, at least) that just because the devil has the best toys, you can still have fun while wearing a halo.

Fairbuds are the company’s second crack at the true wireless whip after its 2021’s obviously named True Wireless Stereo Earbuds. Those were made with fairtrade gold and 30 percent recycled plastic, but were still more a part of the problem than the solution. At the time, I gave the company grief for launching a product so at odds with its environmental goals. In retrospect, the crap name should have been a clue that these were a stopgap. Since then, the TWS were dumped off, and the company released Fairbuds XL, a pair of over-ear cans that I rather liked.

Fairphone says that the Fairbuds here are made with 70 percent recycled and fair materials, while 100 percent of the rare earth elements and tin are recycled. The company also claims to offer improved pay for factory workers compared to rival manufacturers and works with suppliers to improve working conditions for the people on the production line.

Photo by Daniel Cooper / Engadget

I don’t think it’s unfair to say Fairphone prioritizes repairability over look and feel, so these won’t take a podium at the Beautiful Gadget Awards. I had a pair of AirPods Pro on my desk and, sat beside the Fairbuds, the difference between the two is almost comical. Fairbuds’ case is about twice the size and, while the corners are rounded off, it’s still going to be an unwelcome presence in your jeans pocket. It’s not as if there’s acres of wasted space in the case but it’s a product that the armchair designer in me keeps wanting to slim down.

There are other irritations, like the fact the action button is on top of the charging tray but the status light is on the side by the USB-C port. That’s not a deal breaker but you hope these fit and finish issues are the focus for any future version two. But the point of these irritations is that elegance has been sacrificed on the altar of repairability, and that’s why you’d buy a pair.

I probably need to make clear, for the people who will point to the iFixit guides showing you how to swap the battery in an AirPod and a Galaxy Bud that it is possible to do so. But if the guides ask you to use a heat gun, scalpel, vice, pry bar and glue-dissolving solvent, then that’s not an easy job just anyone can do. When I say that you can swap out the battery on each Fairbud with the same level of ease as you could a ‘90s cell phone battery, I mean it.

In fact, my first attempt took all of 30 seconds since all you need to do is get a small, flat-headed screwdriver to slide off the rubber gasket. Once done, you just need to gently pry out the hinged holder and the battery will slide out easily. Swap in a new cell, slide the rubber gasket back in place (if you’re gentle, it mostly plops back into position without any fussing) and you’re done.

Similarly, the charging case has a replaceable battery held in place with a single philips head screw. A few twists and the charging plate pops out, revealing the 500mAh cell underneath, with users able to buy replacement outer shells, charging trays and case batteries. You can also buy eartips, earbuds and earbud batteries from Fairphone’s online parts store.

Photo by Daniel Cooper / Engadget

It’s likely you’d only want or need to swap the batteries once every three or four years so you won’t benefit from this flexibility on a daily basis. Reading lots of online chatter, a rule of thumb is that most TWS buds last for between two and three years before things start to go wrong. Fairphone, too, offers a three-year warranty on the buds, but I’d hope to see a well-used pair of Fairbuds lasting for twice as long, assuming you don’t lose them in a sewer or leave them in the back of a cab.

Sadly, I can’t be as praiseworthy for the Fairbuds’ sound quality which isn’t as strong as you may hope. They’re not bad by any means, but the default sound profile lacks a dynamism you hear in competitors. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing a lush orchestral piece by Jerry Goldsmith or something beefier, like Korn, you’ll feel the sound is rougher and flatter than other products. It’s like the top and bottom ends of the sounds are being sliced off to keep everything from getting too out of hand.

There are sound profiles in the Fairbuds app that I found similarly lackluster with users able to opt between standard tuning, Bass Boost or Flat. None of them feel distinct. There’s also a Studio option where you can adjust the tuning along eight specific frequency bands. It’s here that you can really improve the sound quality but it’s more time and effort than I’d be happy putting in on a regular basis.

At least the fundamentals are all pretty good: I’ve been testing these for a big chunk of the last five days and I’ve not felt the need to recharge the case battery at all. Even with ANC on, I think I’ve squeezed at least 20 hours out of these things and I’ve still got juice left in the tank. And the ANC itself offers the same background muffling you’ll hear in every other mid-range ANC earbud.

One of the mantras Fairphone has always repeated is that it doesn’t expect to build a phone that will topple the big manufacturers. Its products are designed to appeal to folks who want something a little more ethically made, and to act as a north star for the technology industry more broadly. There are plenty of engineering questions — around durability, bulkiness and ease of use — that linger. But Fairphone’s impact here should be to lay down a challenge to its bigger rivals to use their vast resources to build an earbud that isn’t condemned to live in the trash from the moment it was born.

Fairbuds are making their debut in Europe today from Fairphone as well as a variety of retail partners across the territory. They are priced at €149 and while there’s no word on the matter now, it’s likely that we’ll see them making their way to the US at some point in the future.

Conversing with your computer has been a dream of futurists and technologists for decades. When you look at 2004’s state of the art, it’s staggering to see how far we’ve come. There are now billions of devices in our hands, and homes that listen to our queries and do their very best to answer them. But for all of the time, money and effort, chatbots of any stripe have not swallowed the world as their creators intended. They’re miraculous. They’re also boring. And it’s worth asking why.

Chatbot is a term covering a lot of systems, from voice assistants to AI and everything else in the middle. Talking to your computer in the not-so-good old days meant typing into a window and watching the machine attempt a facsimile of the act of conversation rather than the real thing. The old ELIZA (1964 to 1967) trick of restating user inputs in the form of a question helped sell this performance. And this continued even as far as 2001’s SmarterChild chatbot. The other branch of this work was to digitize the analog with voice-to-text engines, like Nuance’s frustrating but occasionally wonderful product.

In 2011, the ideas in that early work joined up to make Siri for the iPhone 4S, which was quietly built on Nuance’s work. Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, saw Siri’s promise early and launched a large internal project to make a homegrown competitor. In 2014, Alexa arrived, with Cortana and Google Assistant following in subsequent years. Natural language computing was now available on countless smartphones and smart home devices.

Companies are largely reticent to be specific about the price of building new projects, but chat has been costly. Forbes reported in 2011 that buying the startup behind Siri cost Apple $200 million. In 2018, The Wall Street Journal quoted Dave Limp, who said Amazon’s Alexa team had more than 10,000 employees. A Business Insider story from 2022 suggested the company pegged more than $10 billion in losses on Alexa’s development. Last year, The Information claimed Apple is now spending a million dollars a day on AI development.

So, what do we use this costly technology for? Turning our smart bulbs on and off, playing music, answering the doorbell and maybe getting the sports scores. In the case of AI, perhaps getting poorly summarized web search results (or an image of human subjects with too many fingers.) You’re certainly not having much in the way of meaningful conversation or pulling vital data out of these things. Because in pretty much every case, its comprehension sucks and it struggles with the nuances of human speech. And this isn’t isolated. In 2021, Bloomberg reported on internal Amazon data saying up to a quarter of buyers stop using their Alexa unit entirely in the second week of owning one.

The oft-cited goal has been to make these platforms conversationally intelligent, answering your questions and responding to your commands. But while it can do some basic things pretty well, like mostly understanding when you ask it to turn your lights down, everything else isn’t so smooth. Natural language tricks users into thinking the systems are more sophisticated than they actually are. So when it comes time to ask a complex question, you’re more likely to get the first few lines of a wikipedia page, eroding any faith in their ability to do more than play music or crank the thermostat.

The assumption is that generative AIs bolted onto these natural language interfaces will solve all of the issues presently associated with voice. And yes, on one hand, these systems will be better at pantomiming a realistic conversation and trying to give you what you ask for. But, on the other hand, when you actually look at what comes out the other side, it’s often gibberish. These systems are making gestures toward surface level interactions but can’t do anything more substantive. Don’t forget when Sports Illustrated tried to use AI-generated content that boldly claimed volleyball could be “tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with.” No wonder so many of these systems are, as Bloomberg reported last year, propped up by underpaid human labor.

Of course, the form’s boosters will suggest it’s early days and, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said recently, we still need billions of dollars in more chip research and development. But that makes a mockery of the decades of development and billions of dollars already spent to get where we are today. But it’s not just cash or chips that’s the issue: Last year, The New York Times reported the power demands of AI alone could skyrocket to as much as 134 terawatt hours per year by 2027. Given the urgent need to curb power consumption and make things more efficient, it doesn’t bode well for either the future of its development or our planet.

We’ve had 20 years of development, but chatbots still haven’t caught on in the ways we were told they would. At first, it was because they simply struggled to understand what we wanted, but even if that’s solved, would we suddenly embrace them? After all, the underlying problem remains: We simply don’t trust these platforms, both because we have no faith in their ability to do what we ask them to and because of the motivations of their creators.

One of the most enduring examples of natural language computing in fiction, and one often cited by real-world makers, is the computer from Star Trek: The Next Generation. But even there, with a voice assistant that seems to possess something close to general intelligence, it’s not trusted to run the ship on its own. A crew member still sits at every station, carrying out the orders of the captain and generally performing the mission. Even in a future so advanced it’s free of material need, beings still crave the sensation of control.

To celebrate Engadget's 20th anniversary, we're taking a look back at the products and services that have changed the industry since March 2, 2004.

Blink is once again attempting to challenge conventional wisdom about how good a $40 security camera can be. The Amazon-owned company is today announcing the Blink Mini 2, which crams in plenty more smart features into that relatively tiny body. Headline features include better image quality day and night, as well as a built-in LED spotlight for color night vision.

Blink

Paired with Blink’s custom system-on-chip, the Mini 2 will also offer smart notifications and person detection. Those features will require a Blink subscription which, for $3 a month, will get you cloud recording, 60 days of video history and live streaming. You’ll also need to pony up some more to use the Mini 2 outside — $49.98 will get you the camera and the necessary weather proof power adapter.

The Blink Mini 2 is available today in the US and Canada.