You’re right Apple has a playbook of changing port types every few years, but there are adaptors available. The devices themselves still work, just that Apple knows they can use this one trick to encourage some customers to upgrade.
With wireless devices, protocol changes would brick the device, so they’d be less likely to do it so quickly. As far as I know, Apple haven’t announced any plans to deprecate the original Airpods, which came out 8 years ago and use some custom protocols alongside vanilla Bluetooth.
Maybe in the future they’ll start deprecating parts of the protocol (“in order to save your phone’s battery life” or something), but I don’t believe they have so far.
Specific to my comment, Apple removed code that supports audio over Firewire. It doesn't matter if adapters are available, cameras and microphones that used Firewire no longer work on MacOS 13+.
Again, it had a long run, I'm not upset that they "only" supported it for 10 years... but let's be very clear, the devices don't work. Also, this is them removing support for a protocol that is part of the base MacOS, so it's exactly like what will eventually happen when Apple stops supporting the original Airpods protocols.
I don't think that's any time soon, and if you're in the Apple ecosystem, go ham... let's just be very clear about the comparisons here.
With wireless devices, protocol changes would brick the device, so they’d be less likely to do it so quickly. As far as I know, Apple haven’t announced any plans to deprecate the original Airpods, which came out 8 years ago and use some custom protocols alongside vanilla Bluetooth.
Maybe in the future they’ll start deprecating parts of the protocol (“in order to save your phone’s battery life” or something), but I don’t believe they have so far.