The newest AirPods Pro landed with the usual choreography: a polished keynote, a wave of five-star unboxing videos, and a chorus of reviewers calling them the best earbuds you can buy.
And yet, watching people line up to replace a pair of earbuds that still work fine, it's hard not to notice what we've actually built here.
Millions of us now treat $249 earbuds as a disposable item, something to upgrade every two or three years like a phone contract.
They just become slightly less impressive, and that's enough.
We've quietly accepted that "still works" is no longer a reason to keep anything.
The environmental cost doesn't show up in the review.
These are tiny devices sealed with glue, powered by batteries that degrade, and nearly impossible to repair without destroying them.
When the charge stops holding, most of them go in a drawer and then a landfill.
A generation ago, we called it a stereo we kept for fifteen years.
We walk through grocery stores with them in, order coffee with them in, nod at neighbors with them in.
The product is marketed as a way to hear better, but its real function is often the opposite: a polite, expensive way to signal that we'd rather not be spoken to.
We paid a premium for the right to ignore each other.
None of this is a knock on the hardware, which does what it promises.
The problem is the story we tell ourselves about it.
Every year, a company improves a product by a sliver, and we respond by throwing away the previous version and calling it progress.
So before you click buy, ask an honest question: is your current pair actually failing, or does it just feel less exciting than the ad?
If it's the latter, you're not buying better sound.
You're renting a feeling, and paying full price to get rid of something perfectly good.
We've turned everyday listening into a subscription we never agreed to, renewing it every time a company tells us the old one is obsolete.
Final Thoughts
That's a values problem, and no amount of noise cancellation will quiet it.