My 2 years of AppleCare+ are almost up for my AirPods Pro. It’s hard to tell whether my batteries have degraded significantly, but I’ve gotta imagine 2 years of use would take their toll, and frankly I’d like to get my money’s worth on the warranty. There are many reports on Reddit of people getting a no-questions-asked replacement for this reason, but a few people said Apple now does some sort of diagnostic. I couldn’t find any super recent feedback, though, and it’s unclear whether the diagnostic is checking for battery capacity or simply charging capability. Has anyone gone through this process recently?
Not recent, maybe a year or so ago. My AirPods Pro (gen 1) had one side experiencing occasional not charging, despite being placed in the case correctly with the indicator blinking when inserted. I reached out to Apple and they told me they don’t have ways to see battery health remotely like they could with iPhones and iPads. They replaced the bud for me without question, but somehow sent me the opposite one. So they ended up putting in another order for the correct one, and they doubled up the order somehow. If you’re keeping count I now have 5 buds and only one defective. I returned the defective unit and convinced my local store to sell me a new charging case as if I had lost my other charging case. Now I have two pairs, and they both work great.
That was a lucky outcome! Mine are charging fine, the only potential defect I’ve noticed is that they’re very slow to connect at times.
My airpods pro from day 1 has kept me going for… 4 years now? I’ve exchanged the buds twice and the case once. I’ve just explained to them the problem and they would just swap it, but of course thats when I had my applecare+.
Right now? Im just waiting for them to die out before replacing them. Almost got the new one last year, and i really wanna get one new pair right now, but they aint dead yet.
If nobody speaks up we rely on you to do the test.
I’ll report back!
From what they have told me over the last few years across multiple devices is that the battery must be below 80% health. Normal batteries tend to float around high 80’s by this time.
The good news is they have a flat replacement fee that covers accidental damage. So you can bite them both and they’ll have no problems swapping them out for the base fee. Kind of whack I know.
If you have AppleCare+, you pay only one incident fee to replace a single AirPod or both AirPods, with or without a Charging Case.
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/airpods/repair
You can get an estimate of the repairs above. I wouldn’t mention anything about the battery and just bust up both left and right units and get them swapped under that pretence.
Interesting idea. I had read elsewhere that they don’t have a way of checking battery percentage on AirPods, like they do for other devices. I’ll have to consider carefully how to proceed.
You mean battery health? I know the data can be pulled from an iPad by using their online diagnostic tools despite not being user accessible. I imagine they have the same for AirPods as they have to be able to get that data so not sure about that. If they can’t, then how do they test faulty batteries or other issues?
Regardless, let us know how it goes.
I personally haven’t because I refuse to buy into wireless only phones. Appy headsets have cables be is USBC or the preferred 3.5mm specifically because I saw this kinda stuff happening and do not want my products to be a part of planned obsolescence.
I am in no way helping on contributing to your issue. I am aware.
