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Practical Electronics | June | 2022
Volume 51. No. 6
June 2022
ISSN 2632 573X
Editorial
How to annoy customers and lose them
I recently had a chat with my friend Steve, who is in the market
for a set of Hi-Fi-quality headphones with both wireless and noisecancelling capability. After considerable research he liked the look
of a pair made by a well-known UK speaker manufacturer. He can
be a little obsessive – in a good way – when it comes to researching
expensive purchases, and was concerned that there seemed
to be no obvious way to replace the headphone’s rechargeable
lithium polymer battery. LIPO is a good technology – long lasting
and energy dense – but like all rechargeable batteries they have
a limited lifespan, certainly much more limited than a pair of
headphones. This worried him and he dug a little deeper.
Internet research showed this was a problem that others had faced,
proving to be especially challenging if batteries died after the
warranty had expired. They’d turned to the manufacturer for help,
who offered to fix the problem for £299… on a pair of headphones
that currently cost around £310 (as per Amazon). You can imagine
the frustration of those reporting this problem on the web.
Distinctly underwhelmed with the UK approach, my friend tried
a well-known and respected US rival. He emailed them and they
replied that in their headphones, ‘the battery is non replaceable’.
At this point, my friend turned to me because I already owned the
previous generation of wireless headphones from the UK firm he
initially liked. He asked if I knew about this problem. It was news
to me, and somewhat irritated I decided to do my own research –
but this time from an engineer’s perspective. Had anyone on the
Internet fixed a broken set of ‘my’ headphones, and how could I
undertake a DIY battery replacement?
Just to be clear, we are not talking about tiny in-ear ‘earbuds’, but
large over-ear headphones with plenty of space for normal-sized
parts and which should – in theory – be fixable. Mine have soft
leather pads that clip with magnets onto the speaker housing.
Removing a pad reveals the thin speaker grill surrounded by
even thinner stick-on fabric, but no way to get into the ‘speaker
cabinet’. However, someone on the Internet had discovered that
scraping off a little of the fabric reveals assembly screws that give
you easy access to the innards. In other words, a totally pointless
application of a cheap sticky-backed material was there to
deliberately mask how to fix a very expensive purchase.
It gets worse. The online repairer shared a photo of the battery in
the headphones. It’s nothing special; Amazon sell it for a tenner.
In other words, a respected UK audio manufacturer now thinks it’s
good customer relations to charge £299 for five minutes work and a
£10 part – thereby ‘encouraging’ you to buy new headphones, which
presumably join the others in landfill two or three years hence.
Electronic waste is a global problem. Is it too much to ask that
manufacturers design products that last, are genuinely fixable –
and are honest about repair charges?
Matt Pulzer
Publisher
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