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It just feels like a disposable $159 product is vastly more wasteful than a disposable <$1 AA battery

1. The parent comment is referring to waste in the environmental sense. Nature does not care how expensive the trash was--just the volume/composition 2. It's a big stretch to call AirPods "disposable" I (and many others) keep them for years. In the long run everything is rubbish; an expensive electronic device that lasts for years and years is not "disposable"

> Nature does not care how expensive the trash was

No, but the price is often a stand-in for how much energy/carbon it took to make the product, which is what I always assumed was the case here. I'd love to be wrong...

The price is usually more indicative of how much value it creates for the buyer, with a lower bound being how much it costs the producer to produce.

I suspect that the airpods are expensive because of how difficult it is to manufacture them rather than material use. They probably require the latest factories with time consuming manual labor to pack them all in the case and glue it up. As well as a thick markup that you $1 battery doesn't have.

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