Not recent, maybe a year or so ago. My AirPods Pro (gen 1) had one side experiencing occasional not charging, despite being placed in the case correctly with the indicator blinking when inserted. I reached out to Apple and they told me they don’t have ways to see battery health remotely like they could with iPhones and iPads. They replaced the bud for me without question, but somehow sent me the opposite one. So they ended up putting in another order for the correct one, and they doubled up the order somehow. If you’re keeping count I now have 5 buds and only one defective. I returned the defective unit and convinced my local store to sell me a new charging case as if I had lost my other charging case. Now I have two pairs, and they both work great.

If nobody speaks up we rely on you to do the test.

My airpods pro from day 1 has kept me going for.. 4 years now? I’ve exchanged the buds twice and the case once. I’ve just explained to them the problem and they would just swap it, but of course thats when I had my applecare+.

Right now? Im just waiting for them to die out before replacing them. Almost got the new one last year, and i really wanna get one new pair right now, but they aint dead yet.

From what they have told me over the last few years across multiple devices is that the battery must be below 80% health. Normal batteries tend to float around high 80’s by this time.

The good news is they have a flat replacement fee that covers accidental damage. So you can bite them both and they’ll have no problems swapping them out for the base fee. Kind of whack I know.

If you have AppleCare+, you pay only one incident fee to replace a single AirPod or both AirPods, with or without a Charging Case.

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/airpods/repair

You can get an estimate of the repairs above. I wouldn’t mention anything about the battery and just bust up both left and right units and get them swapped under that pretence.