Apple Airpods. So sleek, so clever, so well marketed. As someone who spends a lot of time on Zoom calls at work - and also as someone who ended up with one of the first MacBook Pros at work to go USB C, meaning the USB headsets floating around the office were no longer an option… I really HAD to get hold of a pair - no cheaper headset could possibly do!

Who am I kidding?

Fine - I wanted to buy some cool Apple tech. And they did work well for Zoom calls for the most part - despite some occasional nightmares in getting them to connect (usually when I was already late for a call) - but I think that was more the bluetooth setup on my Mac - as it was always resolved with a reboot.

Airpods are also terrible on the tube. They’re relatively quiet, and the tube is not - so I used cheaper bluetooth headsets on the tube anyway…

And then there’s the airpod shuffle… if you’re on a longer call, you often have to pop one airpod out to charge in the case for a few minutes - then repeat with the other one to get to the end of the call. For really long calls, that can be a lot of shuffling… and then you discover the airpod case has a flat battery…

Then recently the left airpod decided it was done. It had had enough. My phone and laptop would claim the left hand airpod battery was charged to 100% - but it would connect for exactly 30 seconds and then disconnect. Which would take the working right airpod with it.

Every. Single. Time.

Pretty much every Google Search you do suggests resetting and re-pairing your airpods. Which I’d tried to no avail. Apple will replace a faulty Airpod - but out of warranty they charge £65 per pod… and it wasn’t a certainty that doing so would fix the problem.

What I really needed was a cheap way to check if the left hand airpod had failed…

eBay…

Turns out lots of folk have lost or broken one of their airpods, and there are lots of people happily trying to sell you a replacement - with prices ranging from £20 - £40 plus. Some folk will also sell you the charging case with one airpod still in it.

I’d watched a few - and missed out on a few, but one stood out.

Bitten by a dog…

Turns out that’ll put a lot of people off (for some reason…) at which point I won a working left airpod, a dog chewed right airpod and a slightly chewed airpod case for just under £25. Result.

Swapping the airpods out seemed as simple as popping the new left hand side pod into my charging case, and holding down the reset button on the back. Bingo - I have a working left and right airpod at the same time. Oooh - and it’s staying connected. However, my new left hand airpod is significantly quieter than the right one. This isn’t good.

To the internets…

…where the answers to all things can be found. (Yes, I had to suck on an airpod from eBay. Yes that’s pretty grim - but I can at least confirm that it works, and that normal volume was restored.)

So now I have a working pair of airpods again. And wow, I’d missed them actually - they work really well on calls, and sound great for music too. Alas, I now have to accept the right hand side airpod is starting to fail too, as the battery life on that one drops far quicker than the left - and it’s good for about 20 minutes of video call before it disconnects abruptly - taking the left hand side airpod with it. The more things change the more things stay the same.

And besides, there’s always eBay…