Can You Replace A Dying AirPod Battery?

AirPods, despite their popularity and solid sound quality for earbuds, aren't perfect – no piece of technology is. That's why it's not surprising that AirPods owners often complain about annoying issues that can be relatively easy to resolve by tweaking the settings. Yet while you may be able to find a workaround for connectivity issues, you can't fix a dying battery in one of your AirPods through software. Batteries have a finite lifespan, and because of their design, your choices are to either bin the in-ears or take them to Apple for service. Can you replace a dying AirPods battery yourself, though?

So why not just replace them yourself? Well, replacing the battery is possible, but it's too complex for most people. You'd be better served adopting healthy charging habits to extend your AirPods battery life. Here's the problem: that tiny headphone weighs just 4 grams (or 0.14 ounces), and it contains a speaker, a microphone, a bunch of microchips, and a small lithium-ion battery. It's a tight design, one that doesn't lend itself well to DIY or professional repairs, for that matter. 

Apple does technically offer a battery replacement service. However, when you bite the bullet on a $49 battery service (which swiftly increases to $69 per EACH earpiece if the warranty has expired, according to Reddit users), it's even too much of a hassle for Apple's repair personnel to deal with. They simply replace the earbud, recycle the old one, and send you on your merry way. That's something you'll unfortunately have to deal with unless you're very skilled with a soldering iron and have the patience to do a repair that's equivalent to doing microscopic surgery.

How hard can it be? Sites like iFixit have tutorials for fixing nearly everything. Although a tutorial for replacing AirPods batteries exists, the site notes that professional repairmen (including those at Apple) struggle with it and have categorized the replacement as very difficult. To give you a taste of what you'd have to do, it involves breaking up the seal to open up the tiny headphone with a heat gun at 100 degrees Celsius. Then, without damaging the minuscule flex cable, you have to carefully protect the interior with aluminum foil before removing the battery with a soldering iron. It's so tricky that you'll likely need tweezers to manipulate the parts while looking at them under a magnifying glass. All in all, not worth it.

Most owners agree that AirPods last about two to three years. This means that if the batteries start failing from regular wear and tear, you're out of luck, since the AirPods warranty is one year from the date you bought them. Since you'll pay $69 per AirPod for out-of-warranty repairs, that's slightly more than new AirPods 4 without ANC (or about $40 less than the ANC model). So it's much easier to buy a new pair without a DIY repair that will take you through hell and back and still cost more than a replacement.