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Comment by _yb2s | Hacker News Reader

Very cool! I am curious if it takes standard batteries, or something custom from them that will be unobtainable in a few years?

I'm also curious if the noise cancelling is any good... I'm tired of being locked into overpriced low quality Bose products, but historically they have been the only ones with truly good noise cancelling. As I have ADHD I need really good noise cancelling to do my job in an open work environment.

Lastly, I'm wondering what the deal is with the earbud tips, as I've found I often need a custom or weird sized one to get things to stay in my ear. The Bose ones generally work for me, as they come with a large array of sizes, but the photos make this look like just a single size.

I'll keep an eye on these- if I can answer these 3 questions/issues I'll buy a set.

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I can't find this on the product webpage (why?!), but reportedly the battery is standard, it's a LIR1054.

https://www.heise.de/news/Fairphone-Fairbuds-In-Ears-mit-Wec...

Do consumer standard lithium-ion batteries exist yet? (Aside from 18650s, which might barely count).

It's 2024; how come companies like Sony, Panasonic, Energizer and Duracell haven't jumped on offering one or two standard replaceable lithium-ion cells, with integrated circuit protection and slim enough for modern consumer electronics, that people can buy off-the-shelf in drug stores? Many devices are still running on alkaline batteries these days, like smoke detectors and kitchen scales.

It didn't take that long in the old days for standards like AA and AAA batteries to hit the market, and they didn't worry too much about applying them to new chemistries with differing voltages. And with efficient DC-DC converters that are cheap enough to introduce into consumer electronics, battery voltage hardly even matters that much nowadays.

Do these count:

https://energizer.com/batteries/energizer-ultimate-lithium-b...

They’re really light and last a long time, but are not rechargeable.

I think you are moving the goalposts. The batteries I linked to are consumer standard lithium chemistry batteries that people can buy off-the-shelf in drug stores and be used in smoke detectors and kitchen scales.

No we’re talking about rechargeable batteries here… disposable lithium are too expensive and wasteful for frequently used high drain devices. I love them for emergency equipment like spot trackers and emergency strobe lights

When I said lithium-ion I was indeed referring to secondary (rechargeable) batteries. Apologies for not making that clear.

AA and AAA Nickel-metal-hydride rechargeable batteries exist, but it doesn't seem anyone ever made a li-ion equivalent.

Lithium rechargeable AA cells do exist, and they're perhaps even more mind-bogglingly complex than you'd ever imagine: https://paleblueearth.com/products/pale-blue-lithium-recharg...

In order for them to function: They've each got charge circuitry, buck converter circuitry (to get down from 5v to ~3.7v lithium voltage for charging, and from ~3.7v lithium voltage down to 1.5v to be compatible with end-user devices), and each one includes its own USB C port.

The comment you're replying to specifically said lithium-ion battery. What you linked to is a lithium metal battery. They aren't the same thing.

Kind-of, you can typically get rechargeable lithium versions of the same form factor as alkaline batteries, as well as the fact that many "proprietary" batteries like digital camera batteries are actually pretty common and standard, or widely available. For example, if you design a device to take standard gopro batteries, that will be easy to get for a long time. Standard button cells, which have been lithium for a long time, can be obtained in rechargeable versions.

However a major issue is that the charging circuitry/method/design is not standard for rechargeable versions of non-rechargeable standard batteries. So you often need to remove it and charge it with a charging system from the battery manufacturer instead of charging in place.

I've had a few gadgets -- for example, an Instax bluetooth instant photo printer -- that ran off of batteries originally introduced by Nokia for phones around 2000 (BLC-1/2), including charging them. I doubt many people buy them for their Nokia 3310 these days, but they're readily available from many manufacturers[1]. I think some old Canon DSLR battery form factor is used similarily.

[1] Many manufacturers, possibly a single factory somewhere in China.

The wikipedia page list a full pages of li ion battery sizes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battery_sizes

Are any of those rechargeable li-ion batteries sold at the drug store to put in your smoke detector? Industrial standards exist, but that's not the same as consumer standards.

I bought a set of AA lithium from Amazon not too long ago, hoping to solve the problem of disposable batteries. They had a micro USB port in the side for recharging and everything.

Sadly, they were crap and stopped working after one charge. More e-waste.

The battery looks like a standard hearing aid battery

Fantastic! The best part about hearing aid battery standards is that there are so many of them to pick from!

I don’t think they’re standard batteries given the specialized form factor (size/shape/weight). On the spare parts page for the Fairbuds (https://shop.fairphone.com/shop/category/spare-parts-4?categ...) there is nothing mentioned about the battery specifications, so I assume it’s proprietary. That said, the parts are cheap - less than 10 euros for replacement earbud batteries is very reasonable.

For earbud tips - you can get aftermarket replacements of many sizes and shapes for cheap. Look on Amazon or Alibaba, but some brands are more well known like Spinfit.

As for active noise cancellation - my experience has been that anything outside of Bose or Sony is only OK at best. I doubt these are any better than the average set out there. But with the right aftermarket tips you can improve the quality of isolation on cheaper earbuds significantly.

EDIT: others have pointed out that the batteries are indeed standardized.

They have standard batteries: https://www.eemb.com/product-241

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