HI I’m Gwendolyn with ifixit and today we are tearing down Apple’s brand new AirPods.
what makes them so interesting?
Well they’re completely wireless thanks to Bluetooth technology and Apple's new W1
chip.
The earbuds themselves are covered in dots, grilles for speaker action, microphone holes
and black dots for IR proximity sensors, and they even come with a nifty storage slash
charging box to boot!
Wanna see how they fit all that in this tiny package?
So do I!
Let’s tear them down.[a]
We started with heat but were not able to crack open the pods.
So we turned to our razor blades to finish the job.
Once opened, we are met with tons of glue, complex cables and the world's tiniest coaxial
connector.
The earbuds offer nothing but annoying roadblocks so we turn our attention to the stem.
That shiny metal cap provides contact points for charging the AirPod, and surrounds the
primary microphone.
Opening the stem reveals lots and lots of glue!I guess we’ll be cutting our way to
this battery.
This little guy is a 93 milliwatt hour battery which is the equivalent of a little over 1%
of the charge capacity in an iPhone 7.
Also coming out with the battery was a long antenna.
Finding the antenna here explains a bit about the AirPods' design.
That hanging boom is for more than just balance—it's also to improve reception.
Pulling up the complex flexible circuit reveals the tiny logic board.
On board we see what we suspect to be the Apple W1 chip and the Cypress programmable
system on a chip.
To see the complete list of chips we’ve identified head over to the teardown at ifixit
.com.
And keeping with the theme, entry into the charging box proved just as difficult if not
more than those pods to open.
Finally we get the battery free.
This 3.81 V, 1.52 Wh lithium polymer cell has roughly 16 times the power capacity of
the ones we dug out of the AirPods' stems—meaning you should be able to top them up eight times
between case charges.
After peeling off more sticky components like the sync button and a pushbutton switch, We
remove the logic board.
Some chips of note the STMicroelectonics ARM Cortex-M0+ MCU and the NXP charging IC (as
seen in iPhones 6s and SE and both iPad Pro models)
We’ve come to the end of our teardown and now we turn our thoughts towards repairability.
How did the Xscore?
It got an abysmal 0 o[b]ut 10 meaning they’re pretty much un-repairable unrecyclable future
ewaste, and heres why
* Accessing any case component is impossible without destroying the outer casing.
* And Glue is the only external fastener used in the case or earbuds.
And that’s our Teardown!
For the complete teardown including tons of beautiful high quality images head on over
to ifixit.com.
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[a]From Apple Proximity/optical sensor
“automatically control the audio and engage the microphone, giving you the ability to
use one or both AirPods.
They also enable AirPods to play sound as soon as they’re in your ears.”
From TD Voice accelerometer
Beamforming microphones are coupled with an additional accelerometer in order to filter
out unwanted noise [b]Has this ever happened?