I still recommend AirPods Pro 2 as a great buy today – especially when they’re getting more new features every year, including two useful new ones when iOS 26 launches later this year – so it’s easy to forget that they’re coming up on three years old.
If you’ve had yours for a few years and you use them every day, you might have had a feeling the same as I did after using mine for a little over two years – that sometimes you were struggling to get a totally satisfying fit, and maybe even that the noise cancellation wasn’t quite what it used to be.
Turned out, these problems stemmed from the same source and had an easy fix: new in-ear tips.
After being flexed in and out of my ear thousands of times, the silicone tips had lost their integrity – in fact, one of them had developed a tiny tear that was barely visible in normal use.
This meant that they weren’t holding their shape as stiffly in the ear, so I wasn’t as satisfied with the comfort and how well they were holding, but it also must have affected the noise-blocking seal they’re supposed to form.
I decided I was going to try replacing them, and this is when I realized that one had a tear – because the ear tip fully tore apart in my fingers instead of coming away from the earbud has intended, which has never happened to be with AirPods eartips before (I’ve removed them for cleaning, and I had the previous model for years).
A replacement pack of official in-ear tips is £12 for all four sizes, or you can pay £9 for two sets of one particular size. The math isn’t really mathing for those prices, but whatever – I think it’s still well worth paying for the official ones, because it was an instant change.
2-pack of tips in one size:
4-pack of tips in all sizes:
It’s not like the difference after adding the new ear tips was night and day, but there was a noticeable difference – it suddenly felt like my AirPods Pro 2 were ‘right’ again.
Noise cancellation was as good I’d ever remembered, and I found they once I had them in my ear, I didn’t need to fiddle with them any more – it had got to the point where I was getting very meticulous when putting them on, and I was doing a lot of adjusting.
They didn’t look like there was anything wrong, and unlike foam in-ear tips, there’s no reason to replace silicone ones for hygiene reasons as long as you’re cleaning them fairly regularly – we have a guide on how to clean AirPods for tips on that – so it took a long time to occur to me that the tips might be the problem.
As much as I think $9.99 is pretty high for a few in-ear tips – “I mean, it’s four pieces of silicone, Tim. What could it cost? 10 dollars?” – I’m actually fine with the cost having done it. It completely fixed the feeling that my AirPods Pro 2 were slipping in quality, and I’ve got a spare for if it happens again.
Although I’ll probably have to hope that the tips still work with the AirPods Pro 3, because odds are I’ll have moved on my the time I need a replacement again…
