AirPods Max teardown reveals some bad news

(Paradigm credit: iFixit)

Repairability advocates iFixit have performed the first partial AirPods Max teardown, and information technology's bad news for anyone who might desire to poke around inside Apple's premium racket-cancelling headphones.

The main issue seems to be that the speaker cover is secured with glue, meaning iFixit could simply access the 40mm drivers by heating up the AirPods Max to a mucilage-melting indicate. That's despite the presence elsewhere of relatively easy-to-remove screws, and so repairing or replacing individual components is likely to be a pain.

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The teardown fabricated some other interesting discoveries, similar how the AirPods Max use two divide battery cells located in the same earcup. However, there might be problem repairing these every bit well, every bit an X-ray revealed that the battery connectors could exist soldered in, which would make swapping out the cells trickier still.

"Nosotros're still property out hope for an easy bombardment swap procedure, though", reads the report. "The connectors aren't e'er piece of cake to spot from here."

While it's disappointing that the AirPods Max are harder to repair than other dissonance-cancelling headphones – the Bose QC35 2 can exist dismantled with just a couple of screwdrivers – it'southward not surprising. Apple hardware isn't e'er hard to disassemble but making repairs can be a dicey business: iFixit previously found that the iPhone 12 camera would repeatedly fail if replaced by a tertiary political party instead of Apple's own technicians.

It looks like if you practise buy the AirPods Max, you'll need to face using Apple tree's premium-priced, first-political party services if you ever want them repaired. Something to consider when y'all'll accept already spent $549 on Apple's new headphones.

If the idea of spending over $500 on a pair of headphones leaves you feeling a little queasy, then cheque out our best headphones list, as that has a lot of excellent cans for more than reasonable prices. Our current height pic is the Sony WH-1000xM4, which are well worth a look.

James is currently Hardware Editor at Stone Paper Shotgun, but earlier that was Audio Editor at Tom'due south Guide, where he covered headphones, speakers, soundbars and anything else that intentionally makes racket. A PC enthusiast, he as well wrote calculating and gaming news for TG, commonly relating to how hard it is to find graphics bill of fare stock.