A warning tale about Apple AirPods ... not for the squeamish

I bought my trusty Apple AirPods in October 2017 having held off ordering them following the initial announcement and finally caving after some review podcasts raved about how good they were.

These items pretty much immediately replaced some Phillip on ear blue tooth headphones I'd used most days and even for working out/running they were better, albeit a little quieter than my MPOW bluetooths.

I did notice that for one usecase, which was walking the dogs, when next to a main road I struggled after a couple of weeks to hear the sound on the 'pods above the traffic. Other than this, everything was great. Sure they occasionally lost linkage with the phone but to be fair less than other bluetooth devices so all was good.

Then in early January I managed to drop my left 'pod into a mug of water. Obviously I wasn't messing about trying to put them away one handed or anything, total accident. I duly fished it out (pun intended) without panicking whatsoever and towelled it off vigorously then whacked it straight onto a radiator to dry it out thoroughly. A few hours later they seemed to worked 'ok' but the volume on the left side ('wet pod') was virtually non-existent. The right also seemed to reduce too a little but was definitely the louder. I put this down to a balance problem or rather lack of stereo effect following the soaking.

This sound issue though now made the devices virtually unusable with any background noise at all to corned with so since the first week in January I've been messing about with the old white wired headphones in a draw near the door and my Phillips headset on an evening with the dogs and the MPOWs in the gym - total multi-device nightmare (yes, my diamond shoes really are totally first world). I even did a text talk with Apple Support to see if I could blag a new pair from them but because of the water 'incident' they were having none of it other than to charge me £90 plus for a replacement pod.

However this morning I was sat in the car in a supermarket carpark staring at my little white box because I swear the sound is getting quieter and quieter on them. I had my trusty Leatherman Juice with me as always so I idly had a scrape at the mesh of the microphone on the AirPods and disgustingly got a skin of muck off it with the first scrape. With a bit more work I managed to pull off about a millimetre and a half of nasty gunk and free up the sound output bit of them.

Two things to point out here. Firstly I don't think I produce any more than average ear nastiness - I'd just not noticed it building up overtime and secondly it transpires ear 'nasty' has a big impact on sound reproduction on AirPods - I'm now listening again at around 45% of maximum volume and having no issues with increasing volume to drown out average to high sound around me. I'm guessing that the 'wet pod' got worse either because the caked on dirt solidified as it dried to exacerbate the blockage or it may have been affected by the moisture more than I thought but has dried out slowly in the intervening weeks.

Lesson learnt. I shall clean the things every three or four days. I love my (newly cleaned) AirPods again.