With a bit of insight from the team at Creative Electron, our friends at iFixit embarked on their teardown of Airpods Max, Apple’s first-ever over-ear headphones. This is a complicated and revealing teardown, and combined with teardowns of two other premium over-ear headphones, helps explain the $550 price tag of the Airpods Max.
Most encouraging is the remarkable difference in reparability of the Airpods Max relative to their smaller Airpods siblings. The iFixit team was excited to see the ample use of screws, first revealed in the X-ray images. The Airpods Max establish a new iFixit record among all Airpods for reparability score (see the full teardown for their final verdict).