Battery Airpods

by phonescased Admin January 23, 2020

Right, let’s talk battery life: the AirPods Pro’s charging case will give you over 24 hours of listening time when fully charged, with each full charge of the AirPods Pro getting you five hours of listening (that’s with noise cancelling or Transparency off – you’ll get four and a half hours with it on), or three and a half hours of use if you use the AirPods Pro as a hands-free mic for calling.

These numbers are pretty accurate in real-world use – you’ll never really use the AirPods without either noise cancellation or Transparency on, but when flipping them in and out of the case you’ll rarely hit a dead battery.

Should your new AirPods Pro die on you, Apple claims you’ll get one hour of listening time from just five minutes of charging, and we found that to be a little stingy - chucking them in the charging case from dead yielded 35% battery life, which was a little over an hour’s use.

That charging case is slightly annoying in that it’s hard to know how much juice is left in it. When you take the AirPods out you can head to your iPhone’s battery widget to check out how much power is left, but otherwise you’re left looking at the small LED on the front, which is only ever green or amber.

While we only needed to charge the case twice over a week’s hard use, we did hit a situation where it was completely dead - it would be nice if there was an early warning somehow.

In terms of charging the case, Apple has unhelpfully put a USB-C-to-Lightning cable in there. Unless you’ve got a new iPhone 11 Pro, or new MacBook, you won’t have the necessary charging block (as there isn’t one in the box either).

However, the good news is that nearly every person that buys the new AirPods will have a standard Lightning cable or two kicking around, so you’ll be able to charge them that way.

Don’t forget that this is a wireless charging case, so you can plop it down on a charging pad and get juicing. You might think this is something of a ‘nothing’ feature that you don’t want to pay for, but trust us, invest in the ecosystem.

There’s something really awesome about being able to just put down a phone or set of AirPods and have them charge up over the day - get one of our best wireless chargers and you’ll rarely run out of power again.