Airpods battery life

Question

I just got my Airpods gen 2 a couple of weeks ago. However the battery life is nowhere near the 24 hours Apple says.

I took notes, and got 9½ hours of listen time, before the Charging Case was empty (5%; no longer charging the Airpods). Once the Case is empty, the Airpods slowly discharge, inside the Case, at around 6% per hour. This appears to be the case for others, but this would mean they would be empty within a day.

I exclusively use them when walking the dog, so 4 times a day, for about 30 minutes. I get only 4 days of use out of them, before I have to recharge them.

My question is; Is it normal to get so few hours out of them, with my usage pattern? Or should I have them checked out, by the store, under warranty? I know the 24 hour they promise is under ideal conditions, but getting around half that seems odd. Other than this, I'm really liking my Airpods.

Some additional info:

1. My volume is always below 50%
2. I have them connected to my iPhone 8 (which supports Bluetooth 5 AFIK)
3. "hey siri" is disabled
4. I only listen to podcasts (Overcast App)
5. After walking for half an hour, the Airpods charge is around 90-93%, which is about right (10% of 5 hours = half an hour). When I put them in their case, and wait for them to charge up again, the case looses 6-8%. One would expect this to be only 2-3%.
6. I measured charging only the case with a generic Charger Doctor, and got 326mAh of current usage (5% -> 100%).
7. One would expect the case to add 19 hours of usage (i.e. 24h total - 5h for the Airpods themselves). So I get exactly halve.
8. I tried looking this up, but everyone is only talking about the battery like of the airpods themselves (5h), not the case (or both combined).
9. (I don't live near a Apple store)

Answer 1

Apple:

A single charge provides up to 4.5 hours of listening time or up to 3.5 hours of talk time on your AirPods Pro. If you charge AirPods Pro for 5 minutes in the charging case, you will get about 1 hour of listening time or about 1 hour of talk time.

As mentioned in the comments:

No, it's not normal battery life. You should just return and replace them

Note: Telephoning, for example, puts a particularly heavy load on the battery, but even listening to music usually brings the editorial staff's Airpods to their knees after just under an hour and a half.

Answer 2

Apple supports their products remotely, so I would 100% open a case with them. They can often push a diagnostic profile to your device with your permission and read engineering logs to confirm your measurements and offer a mailed swap if needed.

• They will walk you through the likely cure - resetting each device, updating all firmware and software and re-pairing the device.
• Do you have an iPad or Mac to compare if the AirPods work well when listening from another device?

The only thing you might ask Apple support is to validate any other settings that could affect low power mode on the phone and on the AirPods. Making sure you let the microphone on the AirPods switch sides can help level the drain it can have when a call is happening. Hopefully you don’t have that drain from whatever app you play podcasts.

If you had the original AirPods or a refreshed version of the ones with the longest stalks below the buds, this is close to my experience but still short (I get far more than 9 hours out case - perhaps around 18 hours iirc). For the newer design of AirPods and AirPods Pro I get 36 to 48 hours or more and I’m measuring how long I can use them 75% of the time with 25% they are in my ear but not playing. (And in the case of Pro they may be noise cancelling when in ear and not playing.)

I wonder if you ever got a resolution, generally bad batteries fail very fast (weeks to month) and you get a very clear signal they need replacing. Similarly, if a software bug or drain is happening, resetting them and the device or a software patch usually resolves low duration and efficiency when the hardware wasn’t the problem.