AirPods Pro 3 Teardown: Still a Tragedy

AirPods were a major star of Apple’s product rollout this year, with fun new live translation features and heart rate monitoring. So we had to dig into the AirPods Pro 3, though we expected them to put up a fight. 

We’ve hated AirPods for a long time. Six years ago, iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens called them “evil” when he talked to Vice reporter Caroline Haskins. She agreed, calling them a “tragedy,” explaining that when the battery stops holding a charge after about 18 months, they’ll “slowly become unusable” and can’t be repaired or recycled.

Sadly, behind the shiny spec sheet, AirPods are still a tragedy. The AirPods Pro 3 are as unfixable as ever.

The Unrepairable AirPods of Yore

The first time we took apart a pair of AirPods, we literally bled on the teardown table, trying to figure out how to slice our way inside. Apple locked away the buds’ tiny lithium batteries under layers of glue, making them essentially disposable. We gave them a 0/10 repairability score.

AirPods 2 in 2019, same deal, and same for the Pro. Deja vu in 2022. And again in 2024. AirPods Max, the over-ear headphones, fared startlingly better. But the classic in-ear buds have scored a zero, again and again. 

Can you guess why, when you take a look yourself at our CT scan, courtesy our Lumafield Neptune scanner?

Closer Look at that Spec Bump

On paper, Apple has given these buds some respectable upgrades. The Pro 3 buds bump up water resistance from IP54 to IP57, meaning they’ll shrug off rain and sweat a little better. They also introduce a new infrared window that enables heart rate monitoring right from your ear. That’s a neat trick for athletes and health-tracking obsessives. And Apple’s Active Noise Cancellation, powered by the brand new three-year-old H2 chip, still stands tall in the industry.

The silicone tips even got a subtle redesign. Apple now uses foam-infused material to improve noise isolation, which we confirmed under our Evident DSX2000 microscope. That tip is looking mighty foamy indeed:

Small refinements like this show Apple’s commitment to user experience. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for repair experience.

The Battery Blues

Every AirPods teardown comes down to one question: can you replace the battery this time? 

The short answer is no. The long answer is also no, just with more frustration. Opening up a bud requires heating it to just the right temperature and carefully prying it apart with sharp tools, often leaving permanent scars on the housing. Inside, the coin-cell battery is glued down so firmly that only heat, tweezers, and a lot of luck will free it.

Even then, the design forces critical flex cables through solder points and glued channels that make reassembly nearly impossible. One wrong move and the microphone array or ANC hardware is toast. After hours of careful work, we ended up with shards of plastic, torn ribbon cables, and destroyed drivers. Not exactly a success story.

A single disassembled AirPod, components arranged roughly along where they connect to the flex cable. This thing ain’t going back together.

The Charging Case Story

The case tells the same tale. This year Apple switched from twin batteries to a single 1.334 Wh cell. That change shaves the advertised case life down from 30 hours in the AirPods Pro 2 to 24 hours in the Pro 3. On the plus side, Apple did reduce its reliance on rare earth magnets by rethinking the magnet layout to line up with MagSafe and Qi2 chargers. But that bit of engineering restraint doesn’t make the case any easier to open. The glued-in internals shut down our disassembly before we could even reach the battery.

Tone Deaf on Repairability

We wish we could say otherwise, but these buds are still disposable by design. Sure, the batteries are technically removable with specialized tools and a willingness to destroy the housing. But for any normal user (or even most repair shops) the process is a non-starter. And even if you managed to swap a cell, sealing the bud back up is another battle. 

It’s a real shame that these $250 headphones are essentially disposable (to be clear, don’t throw them in the trash: though most recyclers we’ve talked to can’t handle recycling earbuds, Apple will take back AirPods for recycling). 

This is not a challenge of physics. With the Fairbuds, Fairphone has already shown that you can build compact, high-performance earbuds with replaceable batteries. Apple simply chose not to. By ignoring repairability, they continue to set a low bar that the entire industry has followed.

So here’s our verdict: the AirPods Pro 3 sound great, track your heart rate, and handle a dunk in water better than before. But when it comes to repairability, they’re still a 0 out of 10.

Nine years on, the chorus remains the same. If you’re tired of disposable gadgets, check out our recommendations for truly repairable devices. Or revisit our iPhone 17 Pro teardown to see how Apple can get it right when it wants to.