AirPods Pro 2 are Still Completely Unrepairable

6 years of AirPods from Apple, yet they are still e-waste in the making, completely glued, epoxied, laser welded & plastic sonic welded closed, including the charging case. It hard to recycle e-waste of the kind that hardest to recycle. See this amazingly clear IFIXIT video about this https://youtu.be/WsxHWKJA7ig 

Shameful to make consumer electronics without replaceable batteries since the LIPO or lithium polymer rechargeable battery often the first part to fail & without working batteries the devices do not work, often destined for a landfill as toxic waste, sometimes they are diverted to e-waste streams, shredded & the materials processed like a mine would process raw materials, isolating the valuable parts for reuse & plastics for plastic recycle & waste to a landfill or dump. 

Apple made a big splash by making the Screen & Battery in the iPhone 14 easy to repair, even the back glass now repairable for a much lower cost than previous models. Good job with the latest iPhone Apple, could you please invest some similar thinking into making the AirPods repairable. 

Conspiracy theories abound about Apple designing obsolescence into their products to limit useful life & doom the products to e-waste status within a few years of use. I have had better luck with iMac & MacBook, including the M2 MacBook Pro I am writing this posting on right now. Thanks Meg :)  

I have an iPhone SE2 & Apple Watch SE & will likely get the Apple Watch 8 in short order. I love the Apple Watch collection & have been buying them since the 2nd Gen back then. I started with Fitbit's even further back, but their cable pin charging solution & very short useful life battery with no battery replacement option was off-putting & I already had an iPhone SE so the switch to Apple Watch was natural. I also really like the Apple Watch easy to change bands system. I use a cheap made in china $8 on Amazon Milanese Magnetic Stainless Steel Mesh Loop Band as my daily & other than having to adjust it to keep it tight, I love the way it wears! 

Its not just Apple, a lot of wearables have sealed non user replaceable batteries, were never designed to be repairable, are glued or epoxied or sonic welded closed, hard to open, hard to repair, with parts not available or no official repair instructions made available, doomed to become complicate e-waste at EOL or end of life, often when the finite life LIPO battery faded to the point of giving poor runtime per charge or short battery life, after just a couple of few years of daily use. 

It amazing what lithium ion batteries have enabled in mobile compute applications, really modern marvels of information technology worn as wrist watches or information jewelry, they even have the 3rd generation Aura ring packed with sensors like the Apple Watch, all in a package that wears as a ring on your a finger - really amazing technology in hearing aids, wireless earbuds, the integrated circuits battery powered that they can pack into tiny electronics really amazing technology, but the dark side of toxic e-waste at EOL really not roses & sunshine!  

The Right to Repair

When you buy something, pay for it, you own it, its your personal property to do what you want with. The company that designed it, made it, sold it to you, its no longer their stuff, its yours, and you should be able to replace the battery & close it up & still have it waterproof, without breaking the display or touch input. The Swiss watch industry proved long ago how to make high technology fit into a waterproof wrist mounted case, so did Apple with the Apple Watch Ultra! So they know how to use silicon gaskets instead of glue or adhesive polymers that fail when you open it. They know how to make precision screw backs & screw down cases to enclose the electronics in the Apple Watch. It does not take much more then the crazy stuff they are already doing to make the Apple Watch or AirPods user serviceable, with batteries & screens that can be easily replaced while maintaining sweat resistance, water resistances, dust resistance & other IP6 + certification after being repaired. 

Repairing is a lot more eco friendly than e-waste recycle as e-waste very energy intensive to recycle, producing additional emissions, acid rain & climate change from carbon combustion energy emissions created whiling moving the stuff around in diesel trucks & trains & vans & to make electricity using coal & natural gas, gasoline & diesel for example, these are all examples of combustion with toxic emissions making climate change worse faster, toxic air pollution that harms public health & bad for the environment, with acid rain that corrodes infrastructure & makes aquatic environments acidic & toxic to fish which makes fish stocks deplete faster & makes ocean, lake & stream ecosystems worse with water pollution. Carbon combustion also finite, limited, running out & a dead end just like diesel gate at VW. This is why repairable electronics are important, because they reduce pollution by enabling these complicated products to last longer before being recycled as e-waste at EOL.