Jeweler turns AirPods into an 18K masterpiece

News
By Oliver Haslam
published

What you need to know

  • The jeweler took standard AirPods and covered them in gold.
  • The AirPods were taken apart and reconstructed in the process.
  • They're still fully functional.

Apple doesn't make its own AirPods Edition, but if it did you can be pretty sure they wouldn't be cheap. Apparently still scarred by the $10,000 price tag of the Apple Watch Edition, Apple has left it to someone else to work their magic. And that's exactly what YouTube jeweler Pablo Cimadevila has done.

We've seen plenty of high end, gold plated iPhones in the past but we don't often get to see the manufacturing process. This time Cimadevila brings us along for the ride and the video is as amazing to watch as the golden AirPods are to look at.

The finished result is what the jeweler calls Airgolds. But don't get too attached to them because you can't buy them. That's probably a good thing too. We can't imagine they'd stay in your ears with all that super slippery gold. If you're already paranoid about losing one of your AirPods, having one gold plated doesn't sound like a good idea to say the least.

This is not an [advertisement] and Airgolds are not for sell. The idea of ​​turning Airpods into gold is inspired by the campaign 'Think Different' that was an advertising slogan used from 1997 to 2002 by Apple.

You have to take your hat off to Cimadevila regardless of the practicality of the finished product. Taking AirPods apart without breaking them is no mean feat and reassembling them doesn't sound like a fun way to spend an afternoon either.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.