Re: in all seriousness
"The battery ? unobtainium."
The battery appears to be a standard one.
"The circuitboard ? good luck buying a BGA rework station, getting your hands on the custom chips and developing the fine motor skills to replace 01005 capacitors off a flex board."
For the AirPods, you wouldn't need speciality BGA gear. A hot air rework station would do the job. I hate dealing with BGA chips, personally, but I wouldn't worry too much about ones that are as small as that. Dealing with those tiny SMD capacitors and such can be a little fiddly, but it's not as hard as you're implying. The custom chips could be easily obtained by getting your hands on other people's broken AirPods. However, the chips are the least likely thing to go wrong.
I'm not saying that repairing these things would be a walk in the park, and certainly most people wouldn't do it even if it were -- however, it's not really a huge problem for electronics hobbyists, and if you didn't have to destroy the things to get access to the nougat center, it would likely be a tidy little side business for electronic repair shops.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
