How to FIX Dead AirPod - If Your AirPod Earbud Won’t Take a Charge You Can Try This Jumpstart Method

WARNING: Try this at your own risk! You may damage your AirPod trying this or, it might catch fire (maybe?), or just generally waste your time. I dunno, but use this as a last ditch attempt to get your dead AirPod working again before you junk it. All I can say is, it worked for me. Good luck.
Requires: 3V lithium battery (I used an Energizer 123). 2 wires, tape, and zip tie (tape could probably work here too if you don’t have a small zip-tie. A magnifying glass or zooming in on your camera so you can see the tiny contacts is also helpful.

[@robertregister2172]

How do you know which side is positive? I have two dead air pods I need to fix one left and one right

[@ChanceSummer]

This is an excellent question and one I didn’t cover in my video. Fortunately, I only had one dead AirPod so I zipped tied my two wires (see @2::09 - @2:16) to the good AirPod first and then simply used my multimeter tool to see which side was positive. On a DC battery if you connect the probes on multimeter backwards it still registers the voltage but will have a negative sign in front of it. Meaning, you need to switch around your cables. Anyways, my my AirPod pro (gen 2), so not sure if this is the same for all AirPods across all generations, the terminal on the outside (farthest from your head when wearing) was the positive + terminal. Negative terminal was inside / closest to head. If you pause at around the @2:10 mark you can see I had the positive cable (red) going to the OUTSIDE terminal. Maybe I simply got lucky (50/50 chance) or, my method of determining + - worked. If both of yours are dead that is a challenge so maybe do some Googling on complete tear downs of your model to see if they shed any light on it. I do know the battery location within the airport between gen 2 and gen 3 changed by watching a tear down video. Anyways, hope that helps and good luck, these AirPods are not really serviceable, which Apple has been slammed in the news for and my own experience with them is they don’t seem to last (the way I use them) beyond a couple years.

[@ChanceSummer]

Note I corrected my own reply as @2:10 shows what wire went where more clearly.

[@robertregister2172]

Thanks. It does seem the side with the letter (outside) is positive based on your info and teardown info