Apple's fifth-generation AirPods are the first the company has made that a skilled technician can open without destroying them, according to the repair outfit iFixit, which has raised the model's repairability score to two out of ten.
Every previous generation of AirPods scored zero.
The change responsible is small and specific. The batteries inside each earbud now sit on removable prongs rather than soldered leads, which means a battery can in principle be taken out and a new one put in. A clamp, a hair dryer on its lowest setting, careful heating and some patient prying were enough to open the buds cleanly, and once the adhesive strips were out the pronged batteries popped free.
The qualifications are more numerous than the improvement. The left and right earbuds use subtly different batteries with reversed polarity, so a battery cannot be moved from one bud to the other. The prongs themselves are welded slightly off-centre.
More to the point, replacement batteries are not yet available from Apple. There are no replacement parts of any kind, and no repair manuals.
The charging case remains effectively unrepairable, and cannot be opened intact at all. "It simply shouldn't be this hard to get to a battery," the team noted.
The batteries remain a closed system in another sense too: because of the reversed polarity a left battery is not a spare for a right one, and iFixit found the prongs welded slightly off-centre on the units it opened.
The hardware is otherwise conventional for the line. The AirPods 5 arrived alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and Duo as Apple's entry-level earbuds, with a USB-C charging case, a wireless charging case at a premium, an IP57 dust and water resistance rating, and an H2 system-in-package handling active noise cancellation. The wireless charging version adds a capacitive touch layer.
iFixit's own verdict on all this was that the earbuds were "not as disappointing as they could have been", and that the teardown team had "bled for AirPods. Again."
A score of two out of ten invites a reading, and the reading is available. The index runs to ten, so the AirPods 5 are twenty per cent repairable. Given that the box contains two earbuds and one case, and that the case cannot be opened, the fraction is closer to accurate than anyone intended.
The rate of improvement is where the result becomes historic. The previous generation scored zero. Two divided by zero is not a percentage increase in repairability but a new category of industrial progress, and Apple has now achieved all of it. Having moved from nothing to something, the company cannot improve repairability by an infinite factor a second time, whatever it does next year.
Read literally, which is the only way an index can be read, the position is this. The batteries are replaceable and the replacements do not exist. Repairability has therefore been established as a property of the device rather than as an activity available to its owner, and it has been established in the only place where it is measured.
The polarity completes the design. Because the left battery cannot go in the right bud and no third battery is available, the sole compliant repair is to put back the battery you took out. The prongs make this possible. The hair dryer makes it possible on the lowest setting.
The Department of Unnecessary Research observes that the eight remaining points on the scale are reserved for a product that can be opened by hand, repaired with parts, and understood from a manual. None of the three is scheduled.
The earbuds can now be opened. There is nothing to put inside them.