We tried refurbed.co.uk Apple AirPods Pro 2, and honestly? We can’t tell they’re refurbished

We’ve always been sceptical of refurbished tech marketplaces. Then we did the maths on where a new pair of earbuds actually comes from, and where an old one ends up, and put refurbed.co.uk to the test.

We tried a refurbished pair of Apple AirPods Pro 2 from refurbed.co.uk, listed at £148 against a comparison price of £239.03 and £229 for the same USB-C model new from Apple’s own UK store. Aside from a couple of light scuffs on the retail box, the earbuds, case and tips arrived looking and sounding exactly like a new pair. Sound quality, active noise cancelling and battery life all matched what we’d expect straight out of an Apple Store bag. The only real trade-off is a 12-month warranty rather than Apple’s own cover, and the loss of official water-resistance protection once a unit has been refurbished. For anyone who wants AirPods Pro 2 without paying full price, that’s a small price to pay.

Pros

• Arrived indistinguishable from new, aside from minor wear on the box itself
• £81 to £91 cheaper than buying the same USB-C model new
• 12-month warranty and a free 30-day return window on every grade
• Full accessory set included: case, cable.

Cons

• Official IP54 water resistance is excluded from the warranty once a unit’s been refurbished
• Condition grading is somewhat subjective, and listing photos aren’t of your actual unit
  

Quick specs

Listed price	£148 (Excellent/Premium grade)
refurbed comparison price	£239.03
Apple UK RRP (new, USB-C)	£229
Saving vs Apple	38%
Condition grades offered	Premium, Excellent, Very Good, Good
Warranty	12 months, refurbed’s own commercial warranty
Returns	30 days, free
In the box	Earbuds, MagSafe charging case (USB-C), 3 sizes of silicone tips, USB-C cable
Chip	Apple H2
Connectivity	Bluetooth 5.3
Battery	Up to 6 hours per charge, up to 30 hours with the case
Released	2022 (USB-C case added 2023)
Shipped from	United Kingdom

Why we finally gave refurbished tech a chance

We’ll be honest: refurbished tech has never been our first instinct. There’s a lingering assumption that “used” means risk, a scratched case, a battery that’s already had its best years, a device someone else decided to give up on. That scepticism isn’t irrational. It’s just increasingly hard to justify once you look at what buying new actually costs, and we don’t mean the price tag.

The UN’s most recent Global E-waste Monitor put the world’s annual e-waste at 62 million tonnes in 2022, up 82% since 2010 and on track to hit 82 million tonnes by 2030. Less than a quarter of that is properly collected and recycled. The rest ends up in landfill, or gets stripped for parts informally, exposing workers and local water supplies to toxic material.

Then there’s what goes into building the thing in the first place. Lithium-ion batteries, the kind in every pair of wireless earbuds, phone and laptop, depend on cobalt, and more than 70% of the world’s cobalt comes out of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where an estimated 40,000 children work in mining conditions that campaigners including Amnesty International have been documenting for years. None of that means new technology should never be bought again. It does mean it’s worth asking, before you buy, whether the device in front of you needs to come from freshly mined material at all, or whether a working one already exists somewhere.

The maths works two ways at once here, which is what finally persuaded us to give refurbed.co.uk a go. A cheaper pair of earbuds is still a cheaper pair of earbuds. But it’s also one fewer set of components pulled straight out of the ground, and one fewer old pair that never gets a second life. The only question left was whether refurbished could actually hold up, or whether the saving was just compensation for a worse product.

What is refurbed.co.uk?

refurbed.co.uk is one of a handful of refurbished tech marketplaces trying to make second-hand feel like a normal way to buy electronics, rather than a fallback option. The company was founded in Vienna in 2017 by Peter Windischhofer, Kilian Kaminski and Jürgen Riedl, and has grown into one of Europe’s larger refurbished platforms, operating across more than a dozen markets with over 250 staff.

refurbed doesn’t refurbish anything itself. It’s a marketplace that vets and lists professional refurbishing partners, all based within the EU, who buy up used and returned stock (much of it ex-corporate or ex-display units), replace faulty parts, clean and test everything, then resell it through the platform with a shared 12-month warranty and 30-day return policy attached, regardless of which partner fulfils the order.

The company is a certified B Corp, and says it has planted over 6.6 million trees since launching, alongside funding landscape restoration and e-waste recycling projects. On Trustpilot, it currently holds a 4.6 out of 5 rating from more than 207,000 reviews, a genuinely large sample size for a retailer in this space. None of that guarantees your specific unit will be perfect, but it’s a reasonable baseline of trust before you hand over your card details.

Ordering and unboxing

Ordering was straightforward: pick the cosmetic grade, choose a colour (white was the only option for the AirPods Pro 2), and check out like any other online order, with Apple Pay, Klarna and standard card options all available. Delivery was quoted within a few days and arrived on schedule from a UK-based seller.

The box itself carried the only real evidence these weren’t fresh off an Apple production line: a handful of light scuff marks on the cardboard, the kind you’d get from something that’s been picked, packed and shipped once already rather than sealed straight from a factory. Once we opened it, that’s where the used part of the story ended. The case, the earbuds, the silicone tips, all of it looked exactly like a brand new pair, with no visible wear and no scratches on the case’s glossy finish. What’s actually surprising is how little gave away that these had lived a previous life before being cleaned, tested and resold.

Does refurbished actually compromise on quality?

Performance-wise, there’s nothing to report here that wouldn’t apply to a brand new pair. The H2 chip still drives excellent active noise cancelling, strong enough to flatten most background office chatter and train noise without needing to push the volume up to compensate. Transparency mode switches in convincingly, letting outside sound back in for a conversation or a road crossing without needing to pull an earbud out.

Audio itself is full and well balanced for a pair of buds this size, with the bass response and spatial audio effect that made the original AirPods Pro worth the premium over standard AirPods in the first place. Battery life tracked close to Apple’s own claims too: around six hours per charge with ANC running, and the case comfortably stretched that out to somewhere near the advertised 30 hours across a full week of commuting and gym use.

The one place a refurbished pair genuinely differs from new is something you can’t see or hear. refurbed‘s own listing states plainly that once a device has been through refurbishment, its original IPxx water and sweat resistance rating can no longer be guaranteed, and water damage is excluded from the warranty as a result. AirPods Pro 2 normally carry an IP54 rating against sweat and light splashes. That hasn’t changed how we actually use them day to day, but the safety net most people never think about until they need it isn’t quite the one you’d get from a sealed retail box.

Everything else, the parts that actually determine whether these are good earbuds, held up completely.

The price maths

At the time of writing, refurbed.co.uk lists the AirPods Pro 2 (White, MagSafe, USB-C) at £148, against its own reference price of £239.03, a 38% saving. Apple’s own UK store currently prices the same USB-C model at £229 new, which puts the real-world saving closer to £81, still substantial for a product that performed identically to new in our experience.

Apple does sell its own refurbished AirPods, but discounts there top out at around 15%, roughly £35 off in this case. Set against that, refurbed’s saving is more than double for what amounted to the same practical outcome: a complete, working, warrantied pair of AirPods Pro 2.

What to check before you buy refurbished tech

Buying refurbished isn’t riskier than buying new, but it does reward paying attention to a few things a normal retail site’s “buy now” button won’t ask you to think about.

Understand what the grade actually means. Most refurbished retailers, refurbed included, grade devices on cosmetic condition rather than function: Premium (visually identical to new), Excellent (no visible wear from arm’s length), Very Good (minor scuffs visible up close) and Good (visible signs of use). All grades are supposed to be functionally complete regardless, so decide how much cosmetic perfection actually matters to you before paying extra for the top tier.

Check the warranty length, and what it covers. Twelve months is close to becoming the standard among reputable retailers, but some cheaper sites still offer only 90 days or six. Battery performance, not just whether the thing switches on, is the part worth confirming in writing.

Read the return policy properly. A 30-day, no-questions-asked window gives you time to actually live with a device before deciding. Some sites offer as little as 14 days, or attach restocking fees, which matters far more with a laptop than with a pair of earbuds.

Ask about battery health, especially on phones and laptops. A pair of AirPods won’t tell you this, but a refurbished iPhone or MacBook listing should state the battery’s maximum capacity as a percentage. Anything below 85% is worth negotiating on, or avoiding.

Look at who’s actually doing the refurbishing. Marketplaces work with vetted third-party partners rather than refurbishing stock themselves, so check where the seller is based (UK or EU sellers are easier to deal with for returns) and whether the platform audits its partners.

Don’t skip the fine print on certifications like water resistance. As with the IP rating on these AirPods, refurbishment can quietly void protections you’d otherwise assume still apply. Check the actual listing, not just the product’s original spec sheet.

Weigh review volume, not just review score. A 4.8 rating from 40 reviews tells you far less than a 4.6 from 200,000. A large, hard-to-fake sample size is worth more than a slightly higher headline number.

Check what’s actually in the box. Cables, tips, chargers and cases should be listed explicitly. If a listing is vague about accessories, assume you’re getting the bare unit and price accordingly.

Verdict

We went into this expecting to find the catch. A scuffed corner on the case, a battery that didn’t quite hold up, something to justify the scepticism that’s kept plenty of people, us included, away from refurbished tech for years. It didn’t turn up. What arrived was a fully working, cosmetically excellent pair of AirPods Pro 2 for £81 to £91 less than buying new, backed by a year’s warranty and a month to send them back if anything had been wrong.

The environmental argument was really what convinced us to give refurbed.co.uk a try in the first place, and it held up in practice too. refurbed says its process saves up to 83% of the CO2 and 89% of the e-waste that producing a new device would generate. Whatever the precise figure, choosing refurbished over new is straightforwardly one less product pulled from newly mined material.

If you want the latest AirPods Pro 3, with its improved water resistance and heart rate sensor, buy new. But if AirPods Pro 2 already do what you need, and for most people they still will, there’s very little reason left to pay full price for them. We’d try refurbished again without hesitating.