.š„ Ż Ė ā¦ ā§āĖ ā Lai Yi Ohlsen
shanzhai airpods
I canāt stop thinking abt these AirPod pro āknockoffsā! Light research is suggesting itās all of the same parts, packaging, etc except for the H1 chip and the 0A2097 firmware, a version that doesnāt exist in any Apple manufactured products and thereby canāt be upgraded when new versions and bug fixes are released. Itās incredible how they ~almost ~basically work and are impossible to tell apart unless you know what youāre looking for... Itās like talking to a friend who just seems off in a way that only you could notice. Everything can be heard just fine but the audio stops out of nowhere sometimes and switching devices is super glitchy. But I can see how users could consider them āgood enoughā.
Thinking abt how Yu Hua says shanzhai (the Chinese term for these types of technologies and culture of hybridities ) has opened up a space for a sort of grassroots challenge to the elite. After all, the context for these āfakesā are Appleās commitment to closed, proprietary design that disallows for anyone but them to make genuine replicas, which is a funny paradox for an object so ubiquitous and mass produced . Its also next to impossible to repair any AirPods, once you open them you pretty much destroy them, making new purchases and non-recyclable disposal the only option (lol @ appleās environment initiative). Sarah Jessica Parker voice When investigating these glorified ear plugs, I couldnāt help but wonder, are these āfakesā an exploitation of the consumer or are they our best chance for liberation from a monopoly with no end in sight ?
Byung-chul Han writes how the concept of an original, as most of us understand it, is distinctly western and warns āThe creativity inherent in shanzhai will elude the West if the West only sees it as deception, plagiarism, and the infringement of intellectual property.ā Remembering that the recent moral (?) moments of big tech are as much if not more about anti trust as they are about free speech, I wonder where our US policy efforts to reduce the power of dudes in the most western part of the west will leave the hybridity and poetics and copies and collaborations that have been rising alongside them all along in the East ~