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.
