I think it’s maybe close to a wash between non-replaceable batteries in wireless headphones dying and cords failing, in my experience at least. The ideal case IMO is over-ear headphones that have a replaceable cord—I have some 14 year old Bose QCs and some newer Beyerdynamics, both of which I’ve replaced the cord on.

I've used tons of wired as well. Maybe have bad one pair fail at the wire? I'm super active with them too. Snowboarding with them and my Sony g shock in 1998. Lots of cycling and running usage. You've had every single pair of wired headphones fail for you? Every single pair?

Most high end headphones have a replaceable cable. What have you tried on the expensive end of the spectrum?

Same here. Wired headphones never lasted anywhere near as long for me as wireless ones. Any with inline controls were especially prone to failure.

Cord failure is definitely a problem, but if you’re moderately capable with a soldering iron, it’s easy to repair the cord if the failure is away from the headphone side. It’s even fairly easy to replace an 8mm or 0.25” jack.

Your soldering skill (and sense of adventure) would have to be far better than mine to even consider doing that for wireless earbuds.

Absolutely, As I said, it comes down to personal usage, needs, preferences. I personally never lost a cable (I did need to replace the earpads, but that happened on both Bluetooth and wired:). I do tend to use connected wireless earbuds when I go jogging etc.

I’ve repaired many pairs of wired headphones over the years, as electronic repairs go they’re very simple. The same can’t be said for the wireless ones.

Plus, the more high end ones come with repleceable cables.

For me it was worse, the headphone port on my phones always eventually failed. Maybe these rich people replace phones too quickly to experience that.

I use wired at home, where I'm not cycling the connection very much.

One of the key features (for me) of my Sennheiser HD 600 was the replaceable cables. Plugs at both ends of the cable.

I LOVED my Grado headphones but destroyed three pairs of them and was soldering my own ends on the cables over and over.

I have not had an issue with any wires wearing out anywhere since my walkman headphones in the 90s.

There are lots of wired headphones out there with replaceable cables

Honestly though you can get the best of both worlds.

I impulse bought some over-the-ear headphones at the airport when I realized I had forgotten mine that do bluetooth, but can also use an audio cable when the battery dies.

When using wired the audio quality is much better.

Let’s critically think about this for just a second. Your concern doesn’t appear to be with the audio, isn’t it with the connector? That’s a whole different argument than what we’re talking about

Isn’t it the wire that failed, not the audio part of it? So why not do what I did? You put some JB weld across that bend in the wire, which is cheap and could probably be engineered to last a lot longer… now I have headphones that last a really long time. You could also get a better connector and simply put that on there, right?