Users reporting moisture inside Apple's $550 headphones | Hacker News Reader

Users reporting moisture inside Apple's $550 headphones

interestingengineering.com

38 pointsneya26 comments

Metals have very high heat transfer coefficients.

In cold weather, the heat that usually conducts from your head to warm a plastic interior is instead being instantly transmitted to the environment.

With a cold spot right next to your head, it acts as a condensation point for a water that is always being emitted from the human body. (A fun experiment you can do in dry cold weather is hold up a warm finger to a window and watch condensation immediately appear even at a distance.)

The design is especially prone to this failure mode in the dead of winter when you have the highest temperature gradients.

Because these aren’t waterproof, I doubt they did much testing outside where you would experience such large deltas in temperature.

According to the article this issue can also appear indoors. Which, if true, would be even more concerning.

I bought them yesterday and today after reading the headline I check and yes indeed there some moisture when I remove the earcups. But far fewer drops than on the photo, my room is at 19-20° and I haven’t used them outside at all. So there might be some cases where the moisture accumulate more with humidity ...

Also it probably suffers from the "worked fine when we tested it in sunny California" phenomenon.

Which itself is probably a result of "Only 11 people on the planet even know this product exists until launch day."

Can't have that and also proper testing.

Took me a couple of goes to realize “in gold rooms” is a typo for “in cold rooms”, and wondering if gold rooms are a new audiophile thing.

That said, hot ears trapped in cold metal headphones seems like a recipe for condensation.

Do they not test outside of warm Cali temperatures at Apple?

Oh, I thought it might be a dig at the high price of the headphones. But your explanation makes more sense.

I've always assumed, no. If you use their laptops in clamshell mode without the AC on in the summer connected to a monitor, it'll start throttling and slowing down to a crawl. The only solution is to turn on the AC or disconnect from an external monitor.

A little further on, the article calls them apple’s “sleep” headsets, which I assume is meant to be sleek. Not exactly quality proof checking.

Not debating the actual content of the article, but what kind of English is this? Did anyone proof read this? Emphasis mine.

... reported long wear times in gold rooms ...

... with their sleep premium ...

It's ironic the author's name is literally "English" and the article has so many typos.

This could be the butterfly keyboard all over again. I find it really hard to believe that Apple isn't testing their products with real people, it's more likely such issues are just getting ignored or shrugged off when discovered. Which is possibly more disturbing.

...or the rattlegate, which is very much happening with the current generation of airpods pro.

Still annoyed that Apple made me use one of my $29 AppleCare replacement slots for that when many forums say that they've gotten theirs replaced under warranty.

And the signal drop issues with the iPhone 12

All of these seem like natural expected results of designing and developing something in secret to the level that Apple takes it.

When only a few people even know something exists, you can't very well test it properly.

Or maybe there is something else going on in the case of the headphones, like Apple execs thinking they know everything and ignoring the expertise that may actually exist within the organization in the form of Beats employees.

They were probably just wearing them wrong

I know this is a tongue-in-cheek comment, but this really was my experience with the faulty, extra-space-inserting butterfly keyboard on my 2019 MackBook Air. The repair tech actually said maybe it is the way I type. I explained that I have a 2007 MacBook that still types flawlessly and my typing style hasn't changed. It took six trips to the Apple store to get my keyboard replaced under warranty.

And yeah, my 2007 MacBook still types flawlessly. It and the 2013 MBP I had for work a while ago really sold me on Apple's hardware. Disappointing.

Ahh yes the legendary support that is always touted as an advantage of Apple products.

All I have found with apple techs is they are better salesman at trying to gaslight you into thinking the problem is with you not their product.

Reminds me of that time when I went to an Apple store to have them check my failing MacBook Pro screen. After waiting an hour for some fat dude to come along with an iPad in which he apparently had some sort of store service app installed, he concluded that the price for getting the screen fixed was $800.

Went to an independent shop and had the problem fixed for $100.

Fuck Apple.

Designed in California.

I remember my wife’s iPhone 5 dying one winter just from condensation corrosion. The operating range is still 0°-35° non-condensing. So never use them outside and then inside. My nokias never had this problem.

Look you can't expect them to invent something exotic like conformal coating, and then use it on a cheap throw-away $900 device like an iphone do you?

We have to have some understanding and reasonable expectations for poor Apple just struggling to make ends meet.

> It's theoretically possible that many over-ear headphones have the same condensation issues, but users simply aren't able to see them due to the pads being fixed in place.

This isn't the first time people talk about the magnetic pad attachment as if it's something new or innovative or even useful. I've seen magnetic attachments for 5-10 years, and non-magnetic ones that require you to rotate aren't even bad, they're slightly better.

So who is going to be first to patent ear pads that are stuffed with silica gel instead of foam?

Brings new meaning to 'wet behind the ears'.

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