uying wireless earbuds has long felt like a rigged lottery: brands promise smart features and years of service, but actually pack fragile electronics into glued plastic shells that are impossible to open. To find out what is really inside without falling for marketing gloss, enthusiasts put the Yandex Drops through an X-ray microtomography scan, giving the company an engineering-grade birthday present for September 23.
What is hidden inside the body
The Yandex Drops hit the market as the company's first wearable AI (artificial intelligence) device and have been on sale since June 2026. Scanning lets you peek right through the plastic casing without a single scratch and check out how everything is packed. For an honest look, the case and a single earbud were zapped at 80 kV / 150 µA with a 24.44 µm voxel across 721 projections, while a separate earbud was shot at a sharper 14.12 µm resolution.
"Unlike a classic teardown, tomography leaves the sample intact while revealing hidden layouts, glue joints, and empty cavities — without turning a single screw."
Inside, we found a dense multi-layer sandwich: a horribly complex web of ribbon cables, a stem circuit board, and a driver paired with a magnet system. This kind of layout leaves zero dead space inside the housing.
Specs on paper and in your hands
According to the official spec sheet, the Yandex Drops pack an 11mm driver, a processor with an NPU (neural processing unit for handling AI tasks locally), and three microphones in each earbud. Battery life is rated at 46 mAh in the buds themselves and 520 mAh in the charging case, which supposedly adds up to 30 hours of total playback. The hardware looks beefy on paper, but for a regular buyer, it spells total doom for any DIY or cheap repair: tight component placement and lots of glue mean trying to swap the battery has a near-zero chance of success.
This is a textbook case of modern crammed electronics where cutting-edge tricks live right next to a strictly disposable build. The earbuds will work hard for their advertised lifespan, but the moment the battery gives up, you won't be fixing them with household tools — you will be throwing the whole thing in the trash.