I get the money argument better than the waste one. An AirPod is less embodied energy than one of those birthday cards with a built-in speaker that plays happy birthday. Is this really moving the needle? You could buy three pounds less of off-season fruit from another continent, if you really feel bad about it.
It's not the single set of AirPods that bothers me so much as knowing that, on a larger scale, a lot of AirPods are breaking on a similar time scale and it's a greater trend that causes damage.
I don't think there's much as an individual I can do to make a difference, it's just disheartening to see massive multinational companies dumping out electronics that become non-functional so quickly – even when they're a high enough quality otherwise that they wouldn't really become obsolete for a very long time.
