Oliver Haslam on April 1, 2023, 9:09 pm

Engineer Turns Broken AirPods Into Fully-Functioning Wired Earbuds

Apple’s AirPods are among the best and most popular earbuds around, but they’re generally accepted to have one problem — their batteries eventually won’t hold a charge for very long and need to be replaced.

Now, someone has taken that to the extreme and added some wires to keep those batteries charged.

AirPods were never designed to have replaceable batteries and trying to do it usually results in breaking them. So when batteries stop charging, the AirPods generally get replaced which is terrible for the environment.

That’s why engineer Ken Pillonel created this April 1st project that is anything but a joke. He was able to wire in a pair of cables that keep the AirPods charged during use and yes, that cable is USB-C so the folks in charge in the EU won’t come knocking on his door.

The whole project obviously doesn’t really make an awful lot of sense beyond the fact that it highlights the issues that non-replaceable AirPods batteries can cause. Apple isn’t alone here of course, and when you’re making batteries small enough to fit in an earbud they won’t last forever. But that also makes getting them back out almost impossible without breaking things, too.

Of course, if you’d rather not throw AirPods away every few years — Pillonel says his lasted three years before they wouldn’t hold a charge — Apple does make EarPods that connect using a Lightning cable. But you’ll miss out on some of the cool features of AirPods and won’t be able to use them with your Mac or PC, either.