Batteries Make AirPods 5 More Repairable Than Older Models, But Not By Much
AirPods have long been difficult to repair, but Apple may finally be making some progress.A new iFixit teardown finds that the AirPods 5 are slightly more repairable than their predecessors. While AirPods released in the past 10 years have received a 0/10 rating from iFixit, the AirPods 5 released earlier this month got a meager bump to 2/10.The increase is primarily due to the AirPods 5's battery design. Experts at iFixit broke into the stems using a hair dryer and a clamp, and found that Apple had switched from soldered batteries to pronged ones.
- ▪AirPods have long been difficult to repair, but Apple may finally be making some progress.A new iFixit teardown finds that the AirPods 5 are slightly more repairable than their predecessors.
- ▪While AirPods released in the past 10 years have received a 0/10 rating from iFixit, the AirPods 5 released earlier this month got a meager bump to 2/10.The increase is primarily due to the AirPods 5's battery design.
- ▪Experts at iFixit broke into the stems using a hair dryer and a clamp, and found that Apple had switched from soldered batteries to pronged ones.
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| Original publisher | PCMag |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcmag.com/news/batteries-make-airpods-5-more-repairable-than-older-models-but-not-by-much |
| Publication time | Wed, 30 Sep 26 13:18:32 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-30T13:37:01.472Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-30T13:37:01.472Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | oz16xDcLyVlw · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
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| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
AirPods have long been difficult to repair, but Apple may finally be making some progress.A new iFixit teardown finds that the AirPods 5 are slightly more repairable than their predecessors. While AirPods released in the past 10 years have received a 0/10 rating from iFixit, the AirPods 5 released earlier this month got a meager bump to 2/10.The increase is primarily due to the AirPods 5's battery design. Experts at iFixit broke into the stems using a hair dryer and a clamp, and found that Apple had switched from soldered batteries to pronged ones. Soldered batteries are difficult to replace, while pronged ones can be twisted and removed from their station, like removing a plug from a wall outlet.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCMag.
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