Last Updated on June 30, 2025 by stlplace
(Update 06-30-2025) After a bit back and forth, the current status: the right AirPod has 18% battery, the left – zero. Will hang on for a bit (charing etc.) before finally ditching it to the local Apple Store 🙂
(Update 06-24-2025) It seems the battery didn’t last long. Out of battery after about 30 mins or so usage. I will continue monitoring.
(Orinigal 06-23-2025) 我用AirPods 和在eBay上卖一些小东西以来，可能最不可思议的一件事。Most incredible thing happened to my AirPods Pro 1st Gen, and in my 20 years eBay selling journey. Let me elaborate below.
Today I decided to try the “returned case” with the AirPods Pro 1st Gen that I left at home. First I charged the case and the AirPods. And then I used it with my iPhone 16, and it worked! My phone says “(my old daughter’s 1stst name)’s AirPods Pro”.
Are we talking about Headless chicken 🐓 or dead cat 🐈 bounce?
Death Sentence
I sold the case via eBay in Apr 2025, as I cannot make the AirPods to work. So I thought the AirPods is already dead due to the age. I tried to charge the AirPods a few times, but it couldn’t connect to the phone after charing. Before all that we were visiting China (summer 2024), and I did recall sometimes my wife would take this away from her. And my wife may have left the AirPods Pro 1st Generation in her drawer for a long time. I am mildly annoyed by my wife policing our older daughter’s AirPods usage, if leaving it in her drawer accelerated the death, obviously I wasn’t happy, but probably at the same time I don’t want to fight my wife on this. There is this slogan: there are something in life money cannot buy; for everything else, there is MasterCard.
Now I think about it, perhaps leave it in the dust for a long time, may have helped the battery to come back to life? I know rechargeable batteries are not as predicable as the mechanical counterpart. Note I recycled my 1st AirPods at the Apple West County store. Since last year or 2, I am beefing up the eBay side business, and I was thinking maybe I can just sell the case because I assume the case is good.
You may refer to this post here Lost my AirPods Pro. Quoted below.
I paid $159.87 for Apple AirPods Pro (series number: SH36DK17G0C6L) at Amazon on November 25, 2020, and I just saw it’s $219.99 on Amazon now.
I am not sad. The AirPods pro is about 2 years old. Typical life span for AirPods is about 2 to 3 years. The pro has two advantage that my AirPods 3 doesn’t have: 1) It can connect to my old MacBook Pro (late 2012 model); 2) It has noise cancellation. For the latter I have this Anker SoundCore headset.
Customer Return
But the customer complained it didn’t work, after he received the item. Note I could not verify it end to end before ship it. Fortunately I asked for the case back this time. Nowadays normally I let customers keep the merchandise and I would still issue the refund. This time I was a bit curious regarding why the case didn’t work for the customer. Now I think it’s likely due to the fact I didn’t remove the AirPods from my Apple account or resetting the device. Again I am not 100% sure. I did google search, and I recall I removed the AirPods Pro 1st Generation from all my iOS and Mac devices.
Earlier I talked about AirPods Pro 1st gen here as well. Let me copy some stuff over:
1st Generation AirPods Pro: purchased Nov 25, 2020, on Amazon. Died and trying to sell the case on eBay now). Update 04-13-2025: sold the case on eBay.
Now at least I can use this pair of AirPods as the spare AirPods in my car: just like we have spare tire in the car, now we have spare AirPods too 🙂