Apple Air Pods Pro review: Original Air Pods..

 

 

So I never liked the original air pods they look stupid they never fit my ears and let's be honest they sounded Terrible but that didn't stop them from being one of the most popular audio products of the last couple of years now Apple has released the air pods Pro and I have to say I'm a believer so we should start with the new design Apple has finally ditched the one-size-fits-all style of the ear pods and created a brand new revolutionary magical new way to get these to fit with everyone silicone ear tips okay jokes aside these are actually pretty cool and one of those clever little tweaks that a company does every once in a while that makes me go hmm why didn't no one do this before the air pods Pro come with three different sizes of ear tips and they snap in and out of the earbud really easily so no more wrestling with the nozzle to get a new ear tip to fit Apple also included a new fit test that will let you know if you're using the right sized ear tips or if you should swap them out for a different pair it's good to see Apple taking fit so seriously I'm not gonna say that we had a hand in it here at sound guys but that's what I like to tell myself before I go to sleep at night because we've been harping on this fit for ever of course the downside of the ear tips is that if you lose them you'll have to buy them directly from Apple but thankfully they're only like four dollars or something so surprisingly it won't cost you too much it's because of these tips that should enable more people to use them without a problem as someone that literally couldn't even tie my own shoe without the original ear pods falling out of my ears I haven't had a single problem like that with the air pods Pro I took two different flights with them and a few trips to the gym and had no issues with them falling out at all speaking of you can now take these to the gym thanks to the new ipx4 sweat proof certification so just like the power beats Pro you can take these for a run and not worry about damaging them then we get to the earbuds themselves which are completely redesigned I'm still of the opinion that they look utterly ridiculous but I'm able to forgive Apple here because the design is actually functional the earbud is slightly angled and curved so it now sits in my ears better and the stupid stem thing is way shorter now and also has a really handy squeezed input on the flat section of the stem now I should preface this by saying that I love squeezing things as an input that I think it's quirky and fun and  use it all the time on my pixel 3 to activate the Google assistant but I'm convinced that it's real purpose was for playback controls because these work perfectly and seamless every time it's way less error-prone than touch sensitive swipes and taps and it also doesn't have the suction problem that so many other true wireless earbuds have when you're pushing the earbuds into your ears and the force causes them to go in even further and it's just an uncomfortable experience these are just more comfortable and reliable and I'm here for it that said you can't control volume with these which is a bummer but you can still pause music and skip between tracks by squeezing each earbud has a mesh covered microphone along the outside with other sensors and another microphone on the inside that Apple uses for things like auto pause when you've removed one from your ears now keep in mind that's a feature that you'll only get with iOS devices so the charging case itself really isn't a big deal here it's pretty much the same exact thing just slightly bigger and now it also opens along the wide horizontal side instead but it's just as portable and easy to carry as ever so there's no real concerns here the air pods also both perfectly snap back into place magnetically just like the originals so no real changes in that aspect so if you've ever used a pair of headphones that have apple's h1 chip like the original air pods or any of the newer Beats products but there's really nothing new here it's the same process so as soon as you open the case near an iOS device a card will pop up that will allow you to click to connect automatically once you do so it will connect to all other devices on your iCloud I was able to listen to a podcast on my phone and then switch over to my iPad for a quick meeting and then switch back to my phone after all that with no issues again nothing new here if you've used any other h1 enabled devices but still just as seamless as always assuming you're in the Apple ecosystem Android and Windows users won't have a seamless a transition between devices and the initial pairing process does require you to enter Bluetooth settings but I'm still surprised at how well these worked even with Android devices of course you won't get some of the cooler features like auto pause or even the fit test but you'll still get great connection strength between the two earbuds playback controls and you'll even get the two best features which are the active noise-cancelling and the transparency alright so speaking of the noise cancelling in the transparency mode let's get into it because these are the two newest features of the air pots Pro offer and they work perfectly active noise-cancelling in particular is surprisingly good for a pair of ear buds and I think that's in no small part due to again these just having a better fit thanks to the ear tips but they do a solid job of canceling ambient outside noise I even wear these on a plane and while they obviously aren't ideal they get the job done for the most part what was even better for that particular situation was the transparency mode which you can activate by long squeezing the stem of the air pod this uses the microphones to let you hear what's going on around you and not only that it amplifies the sounds it's like you have the most boring superpower ever and you only had to pay a few hundred dollars to get it is genuinely useful though and I found myself using it constantly just because of how easy it is to switch to of course these aren't the only true wireless earbuds that have these features the SONY WF 1000x Mark threes also have active noise cancelling and transparency mode as well the active noise cancelling is actually better on those too so don't think that you're stuck buying air pods because there are other options out there just not a lot of them which is why it's so interesting to see Apple actually early to the party here and actually competing with some of these features considering how small the air pods Pro are and the fact that they now have active noise canceling I was expecting battery life to be shorter than the original air pods but that really isn't the case and I still managed to get 5 hours and 6 minutes of constant playback with active noise canceling turned on well this is far from being the best battery life we've seen with true wireless earbuds it's still way better than average which tends to be around 3 to 4 hours of constant playback these even beat out those Sony earbuds that we mentioned earlier by a solid 15 minutes once they do die you can just toss them back into case that charge them up again the case holds another 20 ISH hours of battery life and just 5 minutes in the case we'll quick charge them to give you about 1 hour of playback one thing that's worth mentioning here is that the air pods Pearl still charge via lightning Apple you were so freaking close on the bright side you can charge these with any qi wireless chargers so that's a plus so Apple claims that they gave the air pods pro and auto EQ feature and I hope you can hear the air quotes that measure up to 200 times a second in order to constantly adjust the active noise-cancelling and to test the fit of the earbuds in your ear just to make sure that your music sounds best of course this is borderline impossible to test since there's only one of me and my ears are gonna be the same every time but we did manage to get a pretty decent frequency response graph in our testing because of the ear tips and a relatively good isolation these sound obviously better than the previous version the low end of these still isn't going to be on par with the power beats pro by any means but they're significantly more powerful than the air pods - the fact that you can actually hear the bass with these highlights that it's fairly tight and controlled with just a slight bit of emphasis so give those tiny drivers inside a little bit of help low end and Gaia eat that by bad bunny which I hope I pronounced right made its presence felt without sounding forced or fake which is a trap that earbuds of the size tend to fall into in order to make the low-end heard don't get me wrong you're still gonna be missing out on some of your favourites sub bass synths but drum kicks and deep voices come through just fine speaking of voices the air pods Pro do a good job at reproducing vocals as well they have a somewhat neutral frequency response all throughout the MIDs even if it is a little bit bumpy this means that no one note in the mid-range will be made to sound louder than any other just because of the headphones that said you can see that this is exactly the case in the highs where notes around 11 kilohertz and above have some green peaks of extra emphasis this can be a bit of an issue when listening to songs like songbird by Corey Chazelle which I feel the strumming into guitar squeaks approach the point of harshness instead of clarity still it isn't an issue in most songs and I'll take this over the previous air pods frequency any day of the week so one aspect that can't be overlooked and talking about the air pods Pro is the microphone how is it so most human vocals tend to lie between 100 Hertz and 3 kilohertz somewhere in that range and MIDs and these do a pretty good job but not over emphasizing or de-emphasizing any one part of that range well they're not perfectly neutral you shouldn't have any problems when talking on the phone as you can probably tell by this video where I'm talking to you through the air pots so should you buy the air pods Pro well I think you already know the answer to that question but I'll make it easy for you yes because the air pods Pro are actually good now they sound better they fit better they actually have competitive features like active noise canceling and transparency mode they're still super portable and yes they still look kind of but if you were the kind of person that was gonna buy air pods anyway then you're not gonna regret buying these because like I said they're actually good now but if you wouldn't be caught dead wearing any kind of air pods and lucky for you there are other options as well such as the Sony W F 1000 X mark 3s that I mentioned of course the Sony buds aren't cheap at around two hundred and forty nine dollars but then again these new air pods Pro also cost two hundred and forty nine dollars just like the Sony's the air Potts Pro are definitely a splurge but at least they're finally a splurge worth considering like I said at the beginning I'm a believer now and that should pretty much do it for review of the air pods Pro thanks  if you want to know more about these headphones or any of the other products we review make sure to check out sound guys calm while you're here make sure to subscribe to the you tube channel if you haven't already and also we have a podcast so you should probably listen to that link down the description I'm Adam Alina happy listening I'm sorry what no I can't hear you I have the new air pods