Bang & Olufsen announced its new $499 premium earbuds, the Beoplay Eleven, back in November, touting among other things their replaceable batteries “for sustainability” and alignment with the EU’s impending device repairability requirements. But an iFixit teardown tells a more complicated story about actually replacing those batteries, describing the process of just getting the case open as “a very onerous and labor intensive task… even for a trained technician.” And inside, the battery is affixed to other components in ways that require heat to remove it, which in itself wouldn’t comply with the EU’s upcoming rules. Given all the work involved, the earbuds scored an abysmal 1/10 on iFixit’s repairability scorecard.
Bang & Olufsen said the earbuds’ design “allows for battery replacement by service,” which, as iFixit notes, suggests that this isn’t meant to be a repair you can do yourself at home. It did ultimately turn out to be possible to take one of the earbuds apart without damaging any of the electronics inside, but the laborious teardown calls into question how feasible — and sustainable — battery replacement would be even when carried out at a B&O service center. After opening up the case and finding “a plastic weld mark barring access to the battery,” iFixit’s Shahram Mokhtari notes in the video that, “at a minimum, any battery replacement service would need to dispose of the plastic housing completely.”
“I’d love to see B&O’s process for changing these batteries out,” Mokhtari wrote in the blog post. “I’m willing to bet it’s neither cheap nor waste-free but I would love to be proven wrong.” The teardown also revealed the Beoplay Eleven to be a “carbon copy” of the 2022 Beoplay EX internally. “Even the peel-away film on the rear of each earbud says ‘Beoplay EX’ — not ‘Beoplay Eleven,’” Mokhtari wrote. Yikes.
In a statement provided to Engadget, Bang & Olufsen said, “When a customer buys a set of Beoplay Eleven earphones, we offer serviceability from our certified B&O service center to promote circular product choices over disposable alternatives. The process we have established ensures that the service-life of the earphones can be extended and offers our customers an alternative to replacing the product at the point where battery performance is no longer sufficient due to limitations in battery technology. By offering a service solution for our earphones, we want to give our customers access to join the path towards a circular future.”
The company pointed to its modular Beoplay H100 headphones and Beosound Level speaker as “great examples of this,” along with “legacy products such as the Beogram 4000 turntable and the Beosound 9000 CD-player which are still in use and being repaired on a daily basis by our service center in Struer.”
Update, January 22 2025, 11:48AM ET: This story has been updated to add a statement from Bang & Olufsen.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/headphones/bang-and-olufsens-new-earbuds-with-replaceable-batteries-dont-seem-to-be-very-repairable-174949894.html?src=rss
