Fairbuds

I love my these earbuds. They are sleek, well designed, and I can’t tell a difference between the sound qualities of these and my apple earbuds. Yay! I’m so grateful to have found a solid set of good, repairable earbuds.

The headphones are nice but I need to update firmware and the firmware update option in the app settings just has release notes, no option to update.

I recently purchased some Fairbuds and was excited to have a new set of earbuds with a replaceable battery. I saw the reviews about the sound quality, but I figured I could EQ it to an acceptable level. To start, the sound quality is so much worse than I thought it would be. Maybe I’m spoiled, but I can’t remember the last time I heard an off the shelf product that was this bad. I’m trying to not be disrespectful because engineering is hard, and getting this kind of thing right is challenging, but oh dear, I genuinely am surprised the Fairbuds were shipped with such a poor level of quality. On to the EQ. It doesn’t apply. No matter how many times I uninstall and reinstall the app, factory reset the headset, apply firmware updates, the eq simply does not function, so I cannot eq away the sound issues. Also, the eq in v3 of the app has 2 fewer bands than screenshots show, so even if the eq did work, I wouldn’t be able to fix it with the same amount of precision that I had been led to believe. I’m extremely upset and disappointed because I believe in fairphone’s mission and the work they’re putting in, but delivering such a poor quality product in both hardware and software, only serves to reinforce the idea that repairable electronics are of inherently lower quality, which does far more harm to their mission, than releasing the product in the first place. I genuinely believe that not releasing the Fairbuds in this state would have been overall better for Fairphone’s mission.