AirPods 3 teardown can’t explain boost in battery life

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AirPods 3 teardown can’t explain boost in battery life
Each AirPods 3 battery offers less capacity than the ones in AirPods Pro.
Photo: 52audio

Apple’s recently released AirPods 3 have a longer battery life than either AirPods 2 or AirPods Pro. But a teardown of the new truly wireless headphones finds batteries that can’t fully explain the extra time between charges.

Watch a video of the teardown showing why along with some other internal details of AirPods 3.

AirPods 3 battery questions

52audio disassembled the new wireless earbuds and discovered inside each one a battery that’s 133 mWh. That’s certainly more capacity than the 93 mWh ones in AirPods 2. This surely helps increase the listening time — Apple says its newest model offers 6 hours vs. the 5 hours of its predecessor.

But the battery in AirPods Pro is 160 mWh. That’s far more than in the AirPods 3, but the Pro earbuds offer 4.5 hours of listening time. These devices offer Active Noise Cancellation while AirPods 3 don’t, but turning off ANC only increases listening time to 5 hours.

It appears Apple made some significant enhancements in power efficiency. Which isn’t surprising — Cupertino has been able to improve the battery life of successive iPhone models without building in huge batteries.

Case changes, too

The AirPods 3 teardown by 52audio also included the case. This shows the changes added for MagSafe include just a pair of batteries — which explains why the case doesn’t cling as tightly to chargers as iPhones do.

The case includes a 345 mAh battery. That’s not as much capacity as the 398mAh one in the AirPods 2 case. And it’s far less than the 519 mAh one in the AirPods Pro case.

Watch the full teardown for more details:

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