Fairbuds

About Fairbuds

Fairbuds is Fairphone's audio range, and it exists to make the same argument the phones make, in a category where it is harder to make.

A phone is large enough to be modular without anybody being surprised. Headphones are not, and true wireless earbuds least of all: the whole category is built around sealed shells with glued batteries, thrown away entire when the one part that always wears out wears out. The range is two lines, an over-ear pair and an in-ear pair, and both are designed to come apart and to have their parts sold to the owner rather than to a repair centre.

Whether that is worth buying depends on something about you rather than about the products, which is unusual enough to be worth saying plainly at the top.

How does this range differ from the phones?

Same argument, weaker position, and it is worth knowing that before you buy into the range on principle.

The phone line is where Fairphone's case is strongest. A modular phone competes against sealed phones on features that are largely comparable, so the repairability is close to a free addition, and the long software support that comes with it is a real advantage rather than a compensation.

The audio range cannot claim that. Making a battery replaceable inside an earbud costs internal volume and adds joins, and that volume and those joins are exactly what a sealed rival spends on acoustics and on sealing out wind noise. So the audio products are genuinely more compromised than their competitors in a way the phones are not, and reviewers say so consistently.

That is not a reason to avoid the range. It is a reason to buy it deliberately, understanding that you are paying for a lifespan rather than for a sound.

Which of the two lines do you want?

Take the over-ear pair unless you specifically need something pocketable.

Fairbuds XL has room to work with. The modularity costs a larger body far less than it costs a fingertip-sized one, the battery is easy to reach in the ear cup, and the acoustic compromise is correspondingly smaller. It is the easier recommendation of the two by some distance.

Fairbuds, the in-ear pair, is the harder engineering problem: replaceable batteries in the buds as well as the case, plus replaceable shells, eartips and gaskets. It is the more impressive product and the more compromised one, and it is the right choice mainly when the alternative is carrying nothing at all because over-ear is too much to bring.

Both draw on the same spare part supply and the same argument about lifespan, so repairability should not be the thing that decides between them. Form should.

Who is better served by something else?

Three groups, and none of them should feel talked out of anything.

Anyone buying on sound. The established audio brands win at these prices and it is not close. If repairability is not a capability you would ever use, you are paying for an argument you do not want, and the honest advice is to buy the better-sounding pair.

Anyone who spends the day on calls. Microphone clarity is the range's most consistent weakness in independent reviews, and a pair that frustrates the people you talk to is a daily cost that no amount of repairability offsets.

Anyone outside the countries the maker sells into directly. The in-ear pair is not stocked at retail in the United States, so a purchase there is an import, and so is every spare part and warranty claim afterwards. The case for this range is a long ownership with parts along the way; that case weakens considerably when each part is an international order.

What is left is a real buyer, and a clear one: somebody who keeps things, would actually order a battery and fit it, and would rather have a product that lasts eight years than one that sounds slightly better for three.