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Don't buy the AirPods Pro - Another Rattlegate story

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Tagged with airpods2 rattlegate1 apple4

AirPods are awesome, and are also a failed product from Apple.

And I fell for it, as many, many others:

A little AirPods story

You are stoked to have received your fresh AirPods in your mail.

You use them regularly and have a pretty good experience.

One day though, after months of usage, you get a rattling noise in one of your AirPods.

You don’t understand where the issue lies, since you never dropped them and you know you handled them with cure (since it’s a premium product, not so sure about that…)

You become a detective, and comb through all 1000+ issues related to “AirPods rattling”.

“There is a fix!” - simply return the faulty AirPod to Apple and get a replacement.

You put out 99$ (more or less) and get them refunded when your faulty pair returns to their facility.

Not so fast

Now you say, “well that went smooth, a bit annoying but I have my functioning AirPods again”.

Time passes and your AirPods seem to work well. A month goes by and you almost forgot about that annoying rattling sound.

But.

The rattling noise comes back and hits you, in the ear. Sucker punch style.

It’s on the other AirPod though.

You think about your past replacement experience and really don’t want to go through this another time.

But what do you do? You don’t have many alternatives.

Except to learn from your mistakes

All’s well that ends well

Nah. It’s not “well”.

You put out 250$ to have a “temporarily working” product that you regularly need to replace (one airpod at a time).

That’s not ok, sorry Apple.

Airpods and Tinnitus?

There was an interesting discussion on HackerNews and on an apple forum (that now gives 403 Forbidden but is still available on web.archive.org)

Personally I didn’t have the side-effects described by others.

Perhaps it’s just bias and correlation vs. causation.w

Timeline

  • Purchased on beginning of April (April 9th 2020)
  • First “rattling” experience in June (June 4th 2020)
  • Contact support and order replacement (June 8th 2020)
  • Receive replacement (June 12th 2020)
  • Confirmation from Apple to have received the faulty part + reimbursement (June 15th 2020)
  • Second “rattling” experience in July (July 20th 2020)
  • So far so good I’ve to admit (February 2021)

Here, have a slice of pizza 🍕