The buds themselves are an unrepairable mess, even if there’s some evidence that Google was flirting with a serviceable design early in the process. However, the charging case is the best we’ve seen.

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Apple Hamstrings Audio Software for Everything But AirPods

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just open up any old Bluetooth headphones near your iPhone and have them pair automatically? Or have them seamlessly switch between your Apple devices? Or to have AirPods also work just as well with non-Apple gear? Unfortunately, this trick requires Apple’s H-series headphone chips, which are only available in AirPods and Beats models.

SOURCE: IFIXIT

iRobot’s Revenue Has Tanked and It’s Almost Out of Cash

For users of existing Roomba devices, there’s a risk: if iRobot were to go under or shut its cloud services (as happened with rival Neato), vacuums could lose features like app control, scheduling, or voice commands.

SOURCE: THE VERGE

Manufacturer Issues Remote Kill Command to Disable Smart Vacuum After Engineer Blocks It From Collecting Data

In other robot vacuum news, an engineer discovered that his iLife A11 smart vacuum was continuously sending telemetry data to its manufacturer without his explicit consent, and when he blocked the data-collection servers the device was remotely disabled via a “kill” command. See what happened when he reverse-engineered the hardware to bypass the kill command.

SOURCE: TOM'S HARDWARE

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