The Sennheiser Momentum 5 earbuds make your AirPods look like e-waste

Wireless earbuds are among the most disposable products in the world of audio, let alone in tech in general. Because the batteries inside them are so tiny — small enough to fit in something that sits in your ear — they get worked harder than any of the cells in most other products. Every time a bud runs down and the case tops it back up, that counts as a charge cycle, and those cycles slowly wear the battery out. After a couple of years of daily use, most wireless earbuds stop holding a charge and can’t survive a commute. The problem has, then, been that those batteries are often sealed shut with glue, leaving no way to fix or replace them, with the only real solution being to throw them out and buy new ones.

For the most part, many consumers just accepted this as a natural design constraint of the product category — an expected obsolescence in exchange for the freedom from wired connections. But with the new Momentum True Wireless 5, Sennheiser just proved it doesn’t need to be that way.

This isn’t the first time we have seen replaceable batteries in earbuds, but it is the most complete package so far. Last year, Google gave the Pixel Buds 2a a replaceable battery in the charging case, which, as I said at the time, was a step forward with an obvious limitation: the batteries inside the earbuds — the ones most likely to degrade first — stayed sealed. The Fairphone Fairbuds, to their credit, were the first to have replaceable earbuds in both the case and the earbuds themselves. However, they don’t exactly have the best sound quality, and we experienced more than a few app and connectivity issues.

What makes the Momentum True Wireless 5 exciting is that they not only come with user-replaceable batteries in both the earbuds and the wireless charging case, but also deliver the sound quality, features, and experience you would expect from premium flagship earbuds.

All it takes to swap in fresh cells is a compact screwdriver and a few minutes; a similar approach Sennheiser took with the recent Momentum 5 headphones. No service center, no trade-in program, no tossing your earbuds in a drawer because a part the size of a fingernail wore out. And the batteries you’d eventually be replacing are strong to begin with: 12 hours of playback per charge, where most flagship earbuds manage six to eight, plus around 40 hours total with the case and an 8-minute top-up that buys you another hour of listening.

It’s a pretty damning indictment of the other top contenders. Apple’s AirPods Pro, the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds, and Sony’s WF-1000XM6 now have no excuse. You can’t tell me that earbuds are simply too small to make batteries serviceable, especially considering some of those earbuds are larger than Sennheiser’s. Nor can you tell me that there isn’t enough consumer demand for replaceable batteries: our readers are clearly hungry for them. When we asked whether all wireless headphones should have user-replaceable batteries, the answer was about as close to unanimous as polls get — 98% of more than 4,000 voters said yes.

The other common argument I’ve heard is that making the battery removable means you lose waterproofing, since an open seam is a place water can get through. The Momentum True Wireless 5 undercut that excuse, too. They’re IP54 rated, enough to handle sweat and rain, while still giving you a battery you can pull out and replace. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, the way manufacturers like to imply.

Still, Sennheiser isn’t doing this purely out of goodwill, either. Among a few other big changes, the EU will require portable batteries — including the kind in earbuds and headphones — to be easily removable and replaceable by the end user, with that rule taking effect February 18, 2027. So every brand still gluing batteries shut is on borrowed time either way. But I think there’s a difference between doing the minimum to meet a legal deadline and doing it early, so Sennheiser’s earned some credit. I wouldn’t expect Apple, Bose, or Sony to follow suit anytime soon.

We likely won’t see replaceable batteries from the big names until they’re forced into it, and given how product cycles work, that probably means 2028 before it becomes the norm.