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Comment by dc_ist | Hacker News Reader

I owned a pair of the first gen AirPods Max. After a couple of months of usage, I began noticing a rattling inside the right earcup. I had never dropped them or exposed them to any sort of physical damage that could knock something loose. The rattling would happen every time I tilted my head in any direction. I had taken them to Apple Genius support in store 3 different times and 2 of those times the onsite tech agreed that there was a rattling sound. All 3 times they were sent to an Apple repair facility and they always came back with "cannot reproduce". I sold them on FB Marketplace for a deep discount, having alerted the potential buyer to the issue before I sold them to him. Never again will I purchase a set of AirPods.

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All three pairs of AirPod Pros I've owned have had rattling issues that would reproduce when I physically moved/tilted my head. It's really annoying.

For the price that is insane.

This is exactly why I will never buy them at all again.

Same here. Three pairs and all had this issue after some time. One of the pairs was a used one with the same problem.

I had this problem! Then I cleaned the earwax out of the mics and it went away.

Yes, my AirPod Pros do this too, and I've found that the issue is due to a problem with the external microphones which are involved in active noise cancelling. In order to fix the problem I had to disable ANC, and use them like a pair of basic wireless headphones, which has been quite disappointing. I've found that basically any instance of dropping the headphones on a solid floor, even while in the case, will result in this rattling sound occurring.

I had this exact problem on my AirPod pros too! It is the internal mic, but if you forcefully suck the air out from the black mesh microphone openings, it gets rid of it.

There’s some random form of someone out there who figured this out, so credit to them, but this fixed mine (I couldn’t bear transparency mode for the longest time lol)

Funny that something similar swore me off another brand’s headphones. The noise cancelling would amplify mechanical vibrations of the headphones, so much so that even eating with them on would cause a deafening bass. Walking with them on was also incredibly loud.

I sent them to support with a very good description of the problem, came back the same, “cannot reproduce”.

It seems support workers for both companies just connect them to an audio source and check if sound comes out relatively alright.

Prior to the third time going to Genius Bar, I was able to reach a senior manager for Apple repairs in a phone call to Apple Support. And even after asking him to take down a note on my incident to have the repair tech physically open the right ear can, they still came back with "cannot reproduce". There was either a screw loose in my brain or the headphones. Guess we'll never know which.

Servicing is not done by Apple, it's 3rd party contractors. They have a rubric of possible issues from Apple and their profit margins are thin. I suspect contacting Apple support about Apple support issues would have resulted in a swift replacement of the item.

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