AirPods scored above zero for repairability for the first time in ten yearsAirPods scored above zero for repairability for the first time in ten years

iFixit published its teardown of the AirPods 5 on 29 September 2026 and scored the earphones 2 out of 10 for repairability, the first time any generation of AirPods has scored above zero.

One change accounts for the whole of it. The battery inside each earbud can now be removed and replaced without necessarily destroying the earbud in the process. AppleInsider, watching the same teardown, describes the method: the outer cover comes off when the bud is properly clamped and heated, and the battery then comes free of a little glue, attached by two prongs. 9to5Mac adds a constraint that matters for anyone attempting it, which is that the left and right batteries are not interchangeable, because they use reversed polarity and slightly different contact placement.

Everything else is as it was. Both outlets say that going any deeper into the earbud remains destructive, and that the charging case still cannot be opened by anyone, with any tools. AppleInsider notes that the case holds a larger battery and so should in theory last longer, but that when it does fail the owner's only options are a new case or a new set of AirPods. iFixit's teardown also includes CT scans showing how tightly the batteries, the MEMS microphones and the H2 chip are packed into each bud. Since the first AirPods in 2016, every model had been scored zero.

Is this actually repairable?

Our take

Two out of ten is not a repairable product. It is the distance between impossible and merely hostile, and it is worth marking anyway, because for ten years this was the clearest example in consumer electronics of a product designed to be thrown away. A pair of AirPods dies when its batteries do, which is a question of years, and until this model there was no version of the story where that was fixable by anyone at any price.

The polarity detail is the part APPDOOK finds most revealing, because it tells you how deliberate this was. Reversed polarity and different contact placement mean a replacement battery is side-specific. Any repair supply chain that grows around this has to stock two parts, label them correctly, and have technicians who know that fitting the wrong one is not a mistake you can undo. That is a solvable problem and nobody has solved it yet, so the practical repairability of the AirPods 5 today is lower than the score suggests. A score measures whether a thing can be opened. It does not measure whether a part exists to put back in.

It is also worth naming what none of the sources say. Neither iFixit nor Apple explains why the design changed, and no source we read names a regulation, an environmental target or a customer demand as the reason. AppleInsider raises Apple's 2030 environmental goals as context, which is fair context and is not the same as a stated motive. We are not going to supply one. What can be said from the evidence is narrower and more useful: the change was made to the part with a wear life measured in charge cycles, and not to the part that is welded shut.

What this means if you own a pair

Practically, less than the headline implies, and the charging case is why. The case is the component every owner handles most, drops most and charges most, and it remains a sealed unit whose failure ends the life of the whole product regardless of how healthy the buds are. A repairability improvement that stops at the earbuds addresses the half of the product that was not going to strand you first.

The honest advice has not changed much: expect a service life governed by batteries rather than by sound quality, and factor a replacement into what you think you are paying. What has changed is that a competent repair shop now has something to offer other than a shrug, and that a pair with one dead bud is no longer automatically a pair of dead AirPods. For a product line that has been scored zero since 2016, a two is a low bar cleared, and clearing it at all is the news.