David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work was one of my favorite books as a kid, and since then I’ve always really been into seeing the mechanical guts of any gizmo I can. iFixit is happy to oblige, ripping into every new Apple product that gets released, but over the years their tear-downs of iPhones and iPads have more or less become routine as little really changes as Apple refines both product lineups. Apple’s new AirPods, which I posted a first impressions piece on yesterday is a horse of a different color. These things are unbelievably tiny, and a iFixit tear-down of the AirPods shows off just how densely packed all the innards are of the headphones.
I guess it shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise, but the entirety of the AirPods themselves and the case they’re held in are totally glued together, and taking them apart destroys them. Still, it’s really cool to see how everything is put together. A lot of folks scoffed at the $160 price tag, but there’s an impressive amount of engineering taking place here to make these things feel so magical. I’m a day now into owning mine, and I still like them a lot.
