Done with Airpods

There was a period of time where I was a true Apple fanboy and one of my favorite products were the AirPods. I still remember sticking the Airpods Pro’s into my ears the first time and experiencing transparency mode, they felt like the best headphones ever made. I’ve owned a pair of “classic” Airpods, the Airpod Pro’s and the Airpod Max’s but now, besides the OG pair which I gave away, all the others are sitting on my office shelf, broken.

So what happened? Lets start with the Airpods Pro’s, of which I have two pairs that are both equally broken. The Airpod Pro’s are a fantastic pair of earbuds that work extremely well…for about a year. After the first year of ownership, what started to happen is the speaker would start to unglue itself inside of the earpieces. I first noticed this as a minor rattle when playing bass-heavy music but over time it got worse and worse until you couldn’t listen to anything besides a podcast or phone-call without a constant rattle that overpowered whatever it is you are listening to.

At the time this was a known defect and I took my Airpods into the Apple Store and got a replacement of one of the ear pieces that was faulty. This fix lasted for a few months until the new earpiece started rattling just like the old one. By the time the rattle got so bad my Airpods were long out of warranty so I figured this was an issue with the first gen devices and bought another pair of 2nd gen devices, hoping for a better outcome.

Unfortunatley that did not happen and a year after I purchased the second pair, the same rattling returned and plagued both ear-pieces. I again went to the Apple store and had them replaced under warranty but like clockwork, after another year or so the same thing happened and turned my Airpods into a rattling paperweight.

During this time the Airpods Max’s came out and my friend got me way to hyped on them and I decided to take the plunge. The Max’s were expensive headphones but I rationalized the purchase by telling myself they would last upwards of a decade. I figured the entire thing was made out of very high quality materials, and with replacable ear-cups, I could just replace what wore out over the years.

Well how wrong was I because just about 2.5 years after purchase (and 6 months out of warranty), my Airpods Max’s just stopped working. They have always had an issue where sometimes they would just refuse to connect to your phone or computer. This issue was easily fixed by restarting the device or doing a factory reset so I never thought much of it. That was until a few days ago when I picked them up one morning to see that they weren’t connected to my iPhone. I figured the batteries were dead so I plugged them in for a half hour or so and picked them up again to face the same issue. At this point I knew they had juice in them and figured they just needed to be restarted. But even after a restart they refused to connect and after an entire day of troubleshooting and trying everything under the sun, nothing seemed to help.

I took them into the Apple Store the next day where I was never told what exactly was wrong with them, but that it would cost $350 to get them repaired. If the repair cost ~$100 I probably would have gone for it, but at $350, we’re talking a very nice pair of brand new headphones. And furthermore, had I paid the for the repair, I would be ~$750 into a pair of headphones with no assurances this woudn’t happen again.

So I threw in the towel on Airpods. While they are very premium headphones, premium doesn’t necissarilly mean high quality and a lifespan of ~2 years for a pair of their headphones completley breaks any value proposition about them lasting you a long time. Since then I went out and bought myself a USB-C to 2.5mm headphone adapter and a pair of wired Sennheisers and couldn’t be happier. One thing I immediatley noticed after going “old school” is just how much BS you put up with when you get BT headphones. From battery to connection, I realized that I had to tinker quite a bit with even my Airpods to get them to work sometimes. Now with a pair of wired headphones, I always know they are ready to go and the only tinkering to be done is plugging them in.