I love my AirPods, I’m lucky enough that they fit well and don’t call out and work very well when bike riding and walking and all that. They could do with a little more sound isolation for those loud train carriages, but 95% just great.
Until recently.
They have started to get lots of audio dropouts in certain places where they never did before, like walking from the train in Southern Cross Station to the street. This was never an issue before but has become one. Maybe they installed some new device which is causing interference… if it was the only thing I wouldn’t have an issue.
Probably 25% of the time one (and sometimes both) AirPods fail to connect. If it’s one and I wait, the second usually gets there by itself, if it’s both sometimes putting them in and out of the case sees them come back to life. Other times I have to power cycle the phone. Sometimes I have even had to delete and re-connect them to get them working again.
When using them I will sometime get random pauses, manually hitting play shows that one of the AirPods has disconnected (or thinks it’s out of an ear). This usually comes back by itself very quickly.
I bought these on 22/09/2017, so they are nearing two years old. The battery isn’t what it used to be, something which is especially noticed if I used them to make calls, but battery life isn’t the issue here.
Which leads to the questions:
Does anyone else have these issues?
Is it possible that as the batteries age they aren’t providing enough voltage to work as they should?
What is the warranty on these things? Assuming it’s only 12 months, has anyone argued ACL on what are pretty expensive headphones?