AirPods Battery Replacement

The batteries inside AirPods are about the size of a shirt button, and physics is not on their side. A cell that small has very few charge cycles in it before capacity drops noticeably, and because AirPods get charged several times a day, most pairs are visibly worse by their second or third year. Five hours of listening becoming forty minutes is not a defect — it is a battery at the end of its life, and it is replaceable.

It is worth checking whether the fault is in the earbuds or the case, because they hold separate cells. If the buds run fine straight off the case but the case itself is flat by morning, the case battery is the one that has gone. That is a cheaper repair than doing both, and it is the sort of thing a diagnostic settles in minutes.

The catch, and the reason so few places do this: AirPods were built to be sealed, not opened. The housings are ultrasonically welded and the cells are bonded inside them, so this is delicate work with the right tools rather than a battery you click into place. It is entirely doable — we do it regularly — but it is not a job for a hobbyist with a craft knife, and a pair that has been prised open elsewhere usually arrives needing more than a battery.