A few weeks ago, I noticed that I was not able to hear out of my right AirPods nearly as well as I could my left one. I was getting over a cold, so I figured that I was just congested. A couple of weeks later, is started noticing that my left AirPod doing the same thing.

My AirPods looked perfectly clean on the outside, but it turns out that ear junk can go through the grill and get side the actual device. I saw recommendations on Twitter for sucking on them to clear out whatever got in there, but that was too gross for me.

Luckily, I still had a couple weeks left on my one year warranty; so Apple swapped them out for a new pair for me¹. Hopefully the more water-resistant model that Apple is reportedly working on will fix this issue as well.

So if your AirPods don’t sound as good as they used to and you are still within your warranty, it is probably worth a trip to the Apple Store to get them swapped out for a new pair.