With completely wireless earbuds, the rule is: when the battery fails, they have to be disposed of. Not so with the Fairbuds, that allow you to replace batteries in just a few seconds. Combined with a repairable design, the earbuds should therefore have an extremely long lifetime.
Running sbc at higher bitrates than default sound subjectively better than most existing codecs. I use 552 kbit/s regulary and it sound great. Unfortunately the support for higher sbc bitrates is terrible.
I’ve not been able to listen to high bitrate SBC myself, but that tracks with my understanding, too. I read this article - https://habr.com/en/articles/456182/ - recently, when trying to confirm my understanding of why there’s such a huge difference in sound quality from codec to codec.
What setup do you have where you’re able to listen to 552 kbps SBC?