Here’s why your gadgets die so quickly.

On Aug 2, 2022

(Daniel Diosdado For The Washington Post)

Our analysis of 14 popular consumer devices found most could stop working in 3 to 4 years because of irreplaceable batteries. Here’s how we get the tech industry to design products that last longer — and do less damage to the environment.

Updated August 2, 2022 at 9:38 a.m. EDT|Published August 2, 2022 at 7:16 a.m. EDT

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If you’ve got a pair of Apple AirPods, they’re going to die — likely sooner rather than later.

With mine, the battery lasted a little over two years. And when it could no longer hold a charge, I had to toss it out and buy new AirPods, because the dead battery is glued inside.

Is that just how technology works? No, that’s just how tech companies make more money from you.

We the users want electronics that are easy to use, beautiful — and also last a long time. So in my hunt for ways to make tech work better for us, I tried to figure out when 14 of my devices are going to die. Most of them, I discovered, could peter out within three to four years. And half of them are designed to just be thrown away. You can see all the details in my gadget graveyard.

Having to keep buying upgrades and replacements is annoying and it’s bad for our budgets. Even worse, it’s a hidden contributor to our environmental crisis. But I’ve got some ideas for how we can change that by forcing the tech industry to come clean.

Here’s a dirty little secret of the tech industry: “Almost every device these days has a battery that’s going to wear out, and it’s a built-in death clock,” says Kyle Wiens, the CEO of repair community iFixit. Today, there are batteries in everything from your toothbrush to your vacuum cleaner. They are consumable products, like printer ink or tires.

But buying gear with batteries sealed inside is kind of like buying a car where you can’t change the tires. We just don’t realize we’re doing it, or how it’s contributing to our climate and sustainability crises.

Gadgets don’t consume as much energy as planes and cars, but the damage they cause comes from manufacturing and disposing them. Making new devices requires mining raw materials such as cobalt, often at great human cost. Disposing old gadgets is costly and is fueling a rash of dangerous battery fires in trucks and recycling centers.

And according to Apple, of all the carbon emissions its products add to the earth over their life span, 70 percent comes just from manufacturing. That means every time you buy a new gadget like a laptop, you’re adding hundreds of more pounds of carbon into the sky before you even switch it on.

We the users want electronics that are easy to use, beautiful — and also last a long time.

But even if you wanted buy long-lasting devices, it’s often impossible to tell when any product’s battery might die. Of course, devices fail for many reasons, but dead batteries are the death clock that’s built in.

That’s why I spent six weeks pushing some of the…