PSA — Don’t Buy Used Airpods

Nate Harrison
2 min readFeb 13, 2020

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So here is the deal. I have gone through 5 sets of AirPods. And I don’t mean that the battery has run out on 5 sets of AirPods. I mean that I have bought and sold 3 pairs and currently have 2 pairs. Here is one thing that I learned in selling my AirPods; you should never buy used AirPods.

So AirPods are the most polarizing product that Apple has dropped in the past 5 years. It has started not only a new product category for Apple but also a new category for the entire tech industry. There are plenty of videos that talk about all the AirPod alternatives and straight up copies. It has changed the way that people listen to music and interact in public. They are everywhere! And people can’t seem to get them fast enough.

But….

You should not buy them used! Here are 3 reasons.

1. That’s icky.

AirPods are gross. In fact, any headphone is gross. There are legitimate vacuum cleaners made just for headphones because…they get gross. So please don’t buy use headphones. It’s gross. I don’t care how many wipes you wipe it down with or if you sanitize it….just don’t.

2. The battery

The battery on AirPods are tiny. Each individual headphone has a battery in it that powers that done headphone. Then the case has a battery that charges the headphones together. Because of the nature of how people use headphones, we always want to keep our AirPods charged, therefore, we plug them into the wall all the time. This slowly degrades the battery over time. It’s kind of like on your iPhone you can go see your battery health in the settings app, and it’ll show you how much max percentage your iPhone has left compared to the initial capacity of the battery. AirPods have the same problem but, as of right now, no way to actually check the battery health. So just expect at after a year of using them, the battery life is going to decrease depending on your usage. By 2 years in, your AirPods may last 30 minutes max. So don’t buy use AirPods because you don’t know the max capacity of the battery.

3. The price

Now I know that AirPods are expensive. I hated dropping $250 on my new AirPods…but I don’t regret it. And if you think you would regret it, there are plenty of other, cheaper options to get. Do your research and find the ones that are best for your use and price range.

But for goodness sake, don’t buy used AirPods.

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Nate Harrison

Writing about Apple and design…sometimes minimalism.