My partner bought fake AirPods off ebay. We kind of had a feeling they'd be fake but felt it was worth the risk. We got a refund from the seller pretty quickly and they told us to keep them.
The pods themselves looked exactly the same. The case was the real sign. It was clearly not the same as an original case. They actually worked, but they were essentially just generic bluetooth headphones.
We ended up listing them on FB Marketplace. Clearly marked them as fake. Person came and picked them up and I said again that they were fake. Got the same amount we paid for them. I don't understand this world sometimes.
The fake sellers must make enough off of people who don't realize that they are fake that they can just write off the few that do.
>Got the same amount we paid for them. I don't understand this world sometimes.
Someone wants ear buds, they want to signal wealth so choose expensive brand, but they want knockoffs because they're actually poor[er].
The main risk with knock-offs is they arrive broken, or just don't arrive, or... basically it's a scam of some sort.
So, you took on the risk of buying, assessed the earphones as working, the earphones are now probably worth more as they've been QC-ed (by you), moreover the buyer can actually see them working and refuse them if they wish.
Within the context the buyer seems relatively rational.
It really boggles my mind that this works on anyone. We all see the commercials for financing. We all see teenagers with no jobs having them.
I'm a bit mind boggled that Apple was able to turn <$1000 tech products into 'luxury' products. Maybe it makes more sense if you didn't get screwed by iTunes DRM and were more open minded during iphone Era.
When I lived in Vietnam, getting the latest iPhone (or really any product), as soon as someone smuggled it into the country (usually from Australia or Singapore), was a national pastime for people there. That logo is everywhere.
I concur. My mom sometimes talked about how her friends / coworkers just got the latest iPhone and that made her want to get one herself. I guess part of it is just FOMO but there's also something about the brand that drove people to do "unusual" things (like you said, smuggling phones from other countries just to be the first)
The energy of such fire is directly correlated to the battery capacity - airpods would probably just get hot and smoke a bit. The case could do more, but still limited in comparison to, say, a phone.
So I'd say the main risk of putting those things in your ears is suffering the horrible audio quality.
Sure, then don't use any earbuds that contain batteries.
We're dealing with tiny batteries in the 100mWh range here, which is less than 1/100th of phones famous for their... combustibility. Ejection of hot gas requires there to be quite a bit of energy present during the failure so that a certain extreme temperature can be reached. Below that, you'll just get a warm earbud.
> That's where the brand comes in: they're supposed to have something to lose.
Samsung is a huge brand, and had significant issues with battery fires. The bigger the brand, the less they lose because they swim in money and have specialists dedicated to PR damage control.
In fact, brands seem more likely to be the ones that manage to stuff more battery capacity in there, increasing risk and scope of damage.
Yes, huge brands have problems, but they are at least incentivized to solve them, whereas some no-name company has no such incentive because they have absolutely nothing to lose. And suing Samsung for damages means you are at least sure there is something worth suing.
The big companies cannot lose anything that matters to them, as they're too big and powerful, brushing off even the worst publicity. A small company collapses under pressure, and can be killed by even a viral meme going against them, with the owners suffering personal financial losses as a result.
Suing a big company like Samsung is an almost guaranteed loss with you thoroughly crushed and case precedent set so others have no reason to try. Suing a small company is a much more likely win, with reasonable damages.
Until this happens a few times and their algorithm flags you as an 'abuser' of the refund system (despite you doing nothing besides correctly calling out fraud) and you're banned or automatically ruled against in all disputes going forward.
> We got a refund from the seller pretty quickly and they told us to keep them.
A good will gesture to reduce the chance of you reporting them as selling fakes, and tarnishing their carefully manicured feedback scores, if they were in the business of doing this regularly.
If you charged the going rate for pre-used, maybe the buyer is planning to put them in official looking packaging (likely really official packaging picked up elsewhere, perhaps from their own purchase of an official product) and sell them as new for a profit?
Same here. My wife washed the old airpods so she got me some new and "better" AirPod Pros. They looked perfect and since I did not really care about getting other ones I did not much research. In any case they looked genuine and worked for a while until their flakiness got on my nerves and I went to a slightly embarrassing Apple appointment where I was told there were scores of service requests for this particular serial number. She got her money back since at least in our country EBay the company is now the seller and could not run away and as it was bought with PayPal...
What convinced me that they were originals
- packaging looked genuine
- paired out of the box without much hassle
- showed up as air pods with serial number
Lesson learned and bought the new ones and these were the differences:
- print inside the lid was 20% larger in original
- packaging of original was not shrink wrapped
- slight off-colour white of the packaging
- the lightning port of the fake was not feeling right
- the button on the case did not click distinctly
- the button on the case did not enter the special mode after 10 seconds like original
- ANC of original light years ahead. More modes displayed on the menu.
With hindsight the biggest give-away probably were the
- shrink-wrap plastic around the package
- lightning port feel
- much, much lower microphone quality. But since I never checked that out myself as I don't use them much for talking and so complaints from others were not so frequent.
- imperfect find-my performance but since I did not care about this feature much I suspected I mis-clicked somewhere and gave up.
- transitions from case to ear to case with sometimes not registering that it was back in case (contact issues in the case?) not so reliable with impact on battery.
- battery erratic behaviour
I guess if I would have been in the market for them and then bought them I may have found out immediately but so I just started feeling Apple starts slipping on quality with new products more complex but worse. As I got them as a replacement and just wanted to get on with listening during my walks they were able to fool me. They are certainly good enough to fool casual buyers and they are certainly bad enough to hurt Apple's reputation for quality products.
> but they were essentially just generic bluetooth headphones.
I heard that there are fake airpods that will connect and behave just like a normal airpod to iphones, as if they have a fake H1 chip or something. Can anyone confirm?
Might not even technically be “fake”. Apple has ghost shift problems just like every other major manufacturer that contracts out semiconductors to China.
I’ve heard that Apple drives such a hard bargain with some of their suppliers that selling ghost shift parts and the parts that fail QC to counterfeiters and repair shops is the only way they make any profit. The Apple contract pays for the factory and the bills but they make the real money on the side.
Yes. I have a set that appear to my iPhone to be legit, including auto-connect/disconnect, noise-canceling modes and all, though the functionality isn’t actually reliable. My iPhone doesn’t seem to know any difference between my real AirPods Pro 2 and these fakes.
I got my first AirPods off eBay recently that I was expecting might be fake, but they arrived new in the package with all the usual Apple paperwork and pull tabs and registered normally, even the Apple warranty, and everything seems to work, except if I get a notification when I'm playing audio, it just goes silent until I pause and resume the audio. It seems like other people have the same issue. Is this a real issue with genuine AirPods Pro 2, or is this potentially an incredibly good fake?
This is really cool and kinda makes me want to put various things I have under such scanner.
However several statements like
provide optimal power efficiently
along with other assumptions made this a bit awkward to read. What does it mean to provide 'optimal' power except making it sound like a commercial? Maybe it's just me, after all I was expecting a very technical article (as have been on HN previously, also from CT scans IIRC).
These critiques come up in every thread about a Lumafield post. But these articles are really sales pitches for the CT scanner and not a rigorous analysis of the item they put in it.
There has been an influx of social media “ads” for these CT scanners - probably the worst (and obviously paid) example is Adam Savage’s YouTube channel where they just throw random things into a CT scanner under the guise of “how does this thing we’re scanning function from the inside out” - but it just ends up being an advertisement for “check out the features of the scanner and the settings you can change” with literally no investigation into the object being scanned
I think they mean the space efficiency is optimal, since the battery is using all of the space available (as opposed to the counterfeit AirPod batteries which are a rectangular battery that leaves unused space in the round housing).
On the real vs. fake Apple product front: I get a lot of my electronic bric-a-brac from garage sales. The little iPhone cube chargers are so cute and practical, but: Is it a real one, or a dangerously cost-reduced fake? By comparison, less cute chargers from other major brands, that aren't a target for counterfeiting, are therefore more trustworthy. This is another "why we can't have nice things" kind of problem.
I'd be interested in some fake airpods if they lasted twice as long and sounded 80% as good. Literally I get perhaps a year out of a set of genuine bought at Apple Store airpods before the case gives up or one airpod goes muffled or craps out. After a year Apple don't want to know or care unless you have AppleCare.
Decided I wasn't going to fish out for a fourth set, so I bought some Sony ones for £20 with a wire between them. Seem to work ok and for that money, meh!
It sounds like what you have found out is that not all Apple hardware is worth the hype.
Personally, I have the beats fit pro. While still owned by apple and benefiting from the same chip integrations, these have held up just fine for me for a few years now of daily use.
Wired earbuds are back (Acording to some… and I’ve seen a few more lately out and about). I’m still using full over the ear headphones I bought 15 years ago. I had to get new pads but other than that they still sound great.
People buying stuff based on their partial temperature (“Earbuds are so hot..”) disgust me sincerely from the bottom of my heart. Usually the same crowd preaching all day about saving the planet from things like e-waste…
Great longevity as they tend to be for club / dj environments but I find they have way too much pressure on the ear to be comfortable as regular headphones for use at a computer.
A quick search shows that the Samsung Galaxy A14 5G and the Sony Xperia 1 V both have headphone jacks. They've got expandable storage too! If I had to get a cell phone today, the Sony one is probably what I'd be looking at.
The Galaxy "A" series is their budget line, and so the A14 didn't bring back headphones; the A line never lost them to begin with. Because wireless headphones are a signal of wealth, headphone jacks are often still present on budget phones.
Sony's models are too inconsistent for me to figure out what it's the successor to, so I can't say whether it's a good example of bringing back headphone jacks.
The Sony phone at least is certainly not a "budget" model, it's their latest flagship and they want $1,400 for it (too much really).
Wireless headphones might be a feature that "signals" wealth, but we should be careful not to confuse that with quality or value. Features like headphone jacks and expandable storage get removed because they save/make money for the manufacturer, not because they offer better value to consumers.
Many people like not having to deal with wires, but bluetooth (in addition to being used extensively to track you and reducing your security) is inferior in several ways when it comes to headphones (audio quality, latency, pairing issues, stuttering, disconnects, battery life, expense) but thanks in large part to the power of marketing, people can be made to feel good about being forced to pay more while getting less.
I had to replace phone last January and I went with the Xperia 1 III. It is without a doubt a smartphone. Does everything all the other smartphone do plus has the headphone jack (that I more or less use daily) and has expandable storage (or additional SIM card, my choice). I'm comfortable in recommending the Xperia 1 V based on my experience with the III.
You can get high quality fake AirPods that sound just as good. They pair with Apple products like the real thing and the batteries are solid. The problem they usually have is with the microphone. That's usually the case with a lot of this stuff. I've had super cheap (i.e $10) wireless off-brand headphones that sound even better than AirPods but the microphone is almost always poop.
AirPods or AirPods pro? My current set of AirPods Pro have long outlasted my original set of AirPods in terms of battery longevity. Both very heavily used.
It seems the switch from pouch cell (in regular AirPods) to button (in Pro) made a huge difference.
FWIW I have a pair of pros that crapped out around the same time, 14ish months and the mics weren't working - apple replaced them free (but not the charger) and they've gone another year or so now without issue. Obviously YMMV.
I'm on my second pair of Sony LinkBuds, and these are starting to go also.
The warranty covered the second pair because they lasted less than a year. I'm not sure if it'll cover the third pair, but I'll probably buy another if not, because I really like the hear-through design, and no one else makes anything like it.
Wow that's crazy, what are you doing with them? I have my second pair (upgraded to pro) and I had them under water so many times. I even jumped into a pool once and did a few laps before noticing I have them in my pocket (without the case). They fall down every 2 days. Both going strong for 2 years or more.
They seem to be offering replacement batteries for £49. That's either the Airpods or the charging case of all models.
That's obviously more that wired earbuds but I'm OK with that to have noise cancelling headphones I can always keep in little pocket of my jeans wherever I go.
I really enjoy these scans that have been popping up lately, so cool to see inside of things! Are there any intellectually property issues related to publishing these?
I've had a piece of (probably false) information stuck in my mind about how industrial design can be IP protected in some way, making it problematic to publish x-rays without licensing. Which I've thought of as another silly example of IP gone mad.
But apparently there is nothing to this, or has something changed in that space?
I have a similar probably false memory of schematics having copyrighted writing embedded in them so the layout can't be reproduced without a breach of copyright.
Use a flashlight to test. Real airpods, the plastic does a really good job at blocking the light and it won't diffuse. Fake ones almost always use shitty plastic and the light diffuses. When I was an Apple Certified iOS Technician, this was one of the tests we did.
I'm not sure that's true, I'd assume gravity is doing _some_ kind of job in keeping them inside by pulling down. I think losing them would be a lot easier if they were very light.
In the sudden movement scenario, gravity is overcome by rapid acceleration in the upward direction. In the no-dropped-item scenario, friction within your pocket (presumably) comes to the rescue to make up the difference between gravity and upward acceleration so that the item doesn't make a successful escape.
The friction in a pocket should be a function of tension (how tight your pants are, especially around the item) and not, as often is the case, proportional to the mass of the item. So this particular method of losing the item should be less common with something lighter.
> significant differences that have implications for performance and safety
This seems to refer to charging safety, but the thing that makes me fork out for genuine headphones is ear safety - I _assume_ Apple tries to protect from damaging sound levels and frequencies, and could be held to account in a way that counterfeiters could not.
> Apple tries to protect from damaging sound levels and frequencies, and could be held to account in a way that counterfeiters could not.
I doubt Apple tries this too much, or that they could be held accountable. There is the volume alert thing, but that (partially) works with 3rd party headphones too (though it's likely much more inaccurate). Android phones too give a warning if you set the volume very high for headphones. I don't think using 3rd party ear/headphones really change much.
That said, it is important to keep volumes "reasonable". Ear damage from high volumes is unfortunately very real.
I often accidentally set my phone volume to max by holding the volume button for too long, so enabling this setting earlier this year has been really helpful. 10/10 would recommend everyone to set this.
> Our CT scans reveal an intriguing difference between the heat sinks in the real and counterfeit chargers. The genuine charger uses a relatively thin heat sink that wraps around most of the transformer. The counterfeit uses a heavier, but simpler heat sink design. Apple’s heat sink requires more manufacturing steps to stamp and assemble and likely provides more even distribution of heat. The counterfeit’s design is more likely to lead to dangerous hot spots—especially combined with its less sophisticated transformer, which would tend to generate more heat.
This just seems like wild speculation to me. It totally reads like we found differences between Apple and the counterfeit. Let's make up a reason why Apple is better. Instead of coming from a place where you give it the counterfeit benefit of the doubt.
> Lastly, the contrast in overall build quality is dramatic between the genuine AirPods and their counterfeit counterparts.
That's undoubtedly true, but my anecdotal experience was that a pair of $250(?) AirPods Pro broke after a couple of months, and the $40 Chinese knockoff pair is still going after almost a year. I'm sure that, on average, the Apple ones last longer, but it's so hard for me to shell out another $250 on something that broke so quickly just because it's from a company with a headquarters that looks like a Lifesaver. And at about 1/5th the price, it's a pretty easy decision to replace the ersatz airpods if (when) they should break. Unless Apple comes out with something new and exciting, I'll stick with the fakes.
You can also convert the DICOM images to 3D model and print it.
I did it with MRI scan of my head (isolated the brain specifically) and kept it on my desk at work, ready to be handed to whoever came by wanting to pick my brain.
Saying available for ‘Apple Mac OS X platforms’ isn’t encouraging but auto segmentation and 3D printer support, and screenshots look good.
There badly needs to be a cross section platform viewer that gets full support on each platform. I’m using InteleViewer currently and it’s borderline abandonware on its native platform (Windows) and it’s creaking badly on the Mac. Having copy and paste being the Windows default keys (when in the Mac) is like a middle finger to the user every time you use it.
The way I see it, sooner or later, if the fakes are getting better and better and if differences are becoming so hard to spot, it might be ok to buy fakes. Especially if the difference in price would be greater than that in quality.
This way producers of fakes would be encouraged to make them better, becoming a strong competition.
I got some AirPods Pro 2 knock offs from Temu for £16.
Paired exactly like AirPods, was super shocked. Work great with an Apple TV. They don’t have multi connect though. But are actually more comfortable than the real deal. I find the originals hurt after about 45 mins.
If it's AirPods Pro, you probably have the wrong size tips on if they hurt. There's also some third party tips; I use them because they sound a little different but they're also different sizes.
And if the counterfeits are good enough, they will be compatible with the existing ecosystem of 3rd party tips. Foam tips were a huge upgrade to my AirPod Pro 2 experience.
It would be cool if they could put a chip inside the chargers and have the charger communicate over USB C whether it's authentic or not. Of course you could still use third party chargers that would lack this chip, but for people who like first party chargers or buying chargers from reputable brands (that would probably license this from Apple) it would be nice.
one true way to prevent counterfeiters from circumventing your verification would be to give each plug a unique code, then have the device send off to your manufacturer servers to check the unique code is valid, which the device then remembers. you'd also have to either permanently lock the plug to one device, or have some pretty invasive location data to ensure the codes were genuinely unique though. either way it requires network connectivity, servers, etc
alternatively, you could have a long and complex call and response behaviour, perhaps dictated by a deterministic neural net. this would certainly be hard to counterfeit, but not impossible.
Anything that can be communicated by an authentic charger could also be communicated by a counterfeit charger. You may have raised the cost of the scam (e.g. by requiring another chip), or delayed the start of a scam (e.g. until the inevitable leak of hardward signing keys), but at the end of the day you're trying to validate a device through a communication channel controlled by that very same device.
It's the same problem as with the satirical "evil bit" proposal for IPv4 [0]: Someone who is scamming you has already shown no compunction against lying to you through social means, and will lie to you through technical means as well.
Couldn’t the chip have a HSM that signs requests to authenticate that it’s authentic? Data is already exchanged during the USB charging handshake, this could just be one extra step.
The key might leak, which is why you could have a new key everyday that’s signed by an intermediate key and these are internet connected devices (iphones and macbooks and ipads) that could easily download a key block-list for a kilobyte everyday.
Additionally, if the device has already connected to a charger in the past but then the key gets revoked, it could continue to show it’s authentic across their devices connected to their iCloud account, much like how wifi passwords and airpods just sync across devices.
Solving the key-leaking issue is usually done by having a unique per-device key in the HSM, and having an online database that can be checked for authenticity. Then cloning a device requires pulling out an HSM, and if you do sucessfully pull the key off that it becomes suspicious that many different devices have the same key, and it can be blacklisted. This is what google uses (anticompetitively, in my mind) to force people to use geniune chromecasts.
Oh that seems like a smart way to prevent against key cloning. This seems quiet sound, although we don't live in a perfect world so I doubt we'll see this come until something bad happens like consumers losing faith in online purchases not being fakes or infamous fires resulting from "unlicensed" chargers.
I tend to believe that a moral compass is a made-up social invention. Children don't have it. We have to teach them these made up rules, how you should feel when you do something against those rules, etc. We ingrain it deep into you much like how religion is ingrained deep into young people, so that by the time you are an adult that's all you know, and it seems to work well, most people never even second guess these things.
As most things in life, it is more complicated than that. While the environment plays a major role in people's moral codes, there seems to be at least some innate development happening too. I'm not a trained psychologist but I've seen scientific evidence on some of these behaviors already showing up in babies as young as a few weeks old, suggesting some of the things we consider to be culturally nurtured can actually be part of the species as a whole. Netflix has an easy-to-digest docu-series called Babies and episode S0204 talks about that, if you're interested.
Oh nice, will give that episode a watch! Thank you. If it's true we also have some built-in moral compass by default, it certainly would improve my worldview from bleak to a bit better.
Wasn't it just two years ago that apple was caught using slaves? And that was after years of their factories and suppliers abusing children and keeping workers in inhumane living and working conditions. I think we can pretty much guarantee that a massive number of people who are intimately familiar with making apple products, including chargers, are living in poverty. Some people at Foxconn were even caught selling genuine apple parts that failed QA to be used in making counterfeit apple products.
the driver in the fake earbuds is basically like a wired earbud, which is crazy. i was expecting more sophistication there. no wonder they sound like crap!
There are lots of different types of drivers that work differently and they can all sound good or bad. I also don't think all wired earbuds/IEMs use the same kind of driver.
That's the airpods pro 2 case, which also features speakers at the bottom (for help with locating). Airpods Pro 1 didn't have this feature, but they did have wireless charging.
This is the second time inside a month I've seen Lumafield portray Apple products engineering prowess. First time being when they compared the USB-C cable (unfairly because they compared against the wrong type of third party USB-C).
Is this just happenstance or is there a connection between the two companies?
That's fair. And it's probably more interesting to showcase Apple products because they do produce relatively better engineered products in general that would look great with this kind of imaging technology.
It would be even more interesting for me if they'd compare these things against "real" competitors, i.e. in the same price range or the same quality, and not just "here is the XXX$ apple product vs this XX$ counterfeit". Otherwise these scans are really cool
I would like to see comparisons for things in the same price category too. Especially for something like usb-c cables where it's hard to know if you are just paying for a brand or actual quality.
Most of the time when you buy Apple you are buying a better engineered product and maybe these scans are just proving that it's actually hard to match their quality for the price.
That would be cool but doesn't really serve their purpose, which is to promote their technology. Besides, once they start making comparisons between competitors, they run the risk of angering companies and their fans.
The pods themselves looked exactly the same. The case was the real sign. It was clearly not the same as an original case. They actually worked, but they were essentially just generic bluetooth headphones.
We ended up listing them on FB Marketplace. Clearly marked them as fake. Person came and picked them up and I said again that they were fake. Got the same amount we paid for them. I don't understand this world sometimes.
The fake sellers must make enough off of people who don't realize that they are fake that they can just write off the few that do.