Apple’s AirPods 5, which went on sale for $129 last month, have now been torn down by iFixit, and it found something it has not found in ten years of AirPods teardowns. The earbud battery can be reached with a hair dryer and a clamp, rather than a professional jig and a rework station. The overall repairability score is still only 2 out of 10. But for a product line that started at a flat zero in 2016, a route into the battery using household tools is genuinely new.
Why the AirPods 5 earbud is the story
The change comes down to the battery design. iFixit says pronged batteries are back, a setup it last saw in the AirPods 3 but not in last year’s model. Getting into an AirPods 3 bud reliably was work for skilled third-party repair technicians with specialty equipment. This time, low heat from a hair dryer plus a clamp was enough to open the housing.
That matters because those are tools plenty of people already own. iFixit is careful not to oversell it, and so are we. Its first attempt through the stem melted the plastic. The approach that worked still needed patient heating and careful prying, and iFixit says plainly that this is not an easy home repair.
Finally, after selling 80 million pieces of disposable AirPod trash every year for ten years, Apple has produced AirPods that can live longer than their batteries.
One practical catch: replacement batteries for these are not on the market yet. So this is a finding about access, not a repair you can go and do this weekend.
Left and right are not interchangeable
iFixit tried swapping the left and right earbud batteries. The result was only a partial charge. The two cells have reversed polarity and off-centre prongs, so the difference is physical rather than a software lock. Anyone sourcing spares later will need to match the correct side.
Further into the stem, the teardown finds two other parts of note. One is a capacitive touch layer, present on the wireless-charging-case model. The other is the H2 chip, which handles active noise cancellation using three MEMS microphones.
The charging case is still a write-off
None of the earbud progress carries over to the case. iFixit describes tight seams that resist opening. Even with its own professional rework station, the inner layer took damage. By the time the team reached the case battery, the case was destroyed.
That is the part worth holding Apple to. iFixit’s result suggests a worn case is still a replacement rather than a repair. It is also why the 2 out of 10 score is fair despite the better news on the buds.
What it means for buyers
Treat this as a first crack in the wall rather than a fix. If a spare-parts supply appears, a worn AirPods 5 bud could become a repair instead of an automatic upgrade. Until then the buying advice is unchanged, and the case remains the weak link.
Source: iFixit
