AirPods Cleaning & Refurbishment

Before assuming an AirPod is broken, consider what it spends its life inside. Earwax, skin and dust compact into the speaker mesh over months, and because it builds gradually most people never notice the sound getting worse — until one side is obviously quieter than the other. A large share of "one AirPod has stopped working" turns out to be a blocked mesh rather than a failure of anything.

The same applies at the other end. The charging contacts on the buds and the pins in the case collect the same debris, plus pocket lint, and once the connection is poor the case stops charging reliably. That produces the classic "only charges if I press it down" complaint, and cleaning it properly fixes it.

A proper clean is not a cotton bud and a hopeful poke — that pushes debris further into the mesh and is how people turn a muffled AirPod into a dead one. We clean the meshes, contacts, case pins and housings correctly, and on AirPods Pro we replace the tips. It is the cheapest thing you can have done to them, and on an older pair it very often restores sound people assumed was gone for good.