Apple, with no doubt made Airpods as popular they’re now, though, it’s not the first company to produce true wireless earphones but it’s Airpods are really classy which matches the tastes of users.
For $249, these are actual earphones that seal off your ear canal, as opposed to resting against it like regular AirPods. The improvement on the Airpods Pro is a vast which includes a nice audio performance, with rich bass depth and sharp high-mid presence. It also delivers a strong active noise cancellation (ANC) in a certified splash proof build.
Design and Controls
The design on the Airpods Pro is glossy white which looks similar to the regular models, but has some slight changes. For starters, there are now black grilles on the outer panels for the ANC/ambient mics, and there’s a control panel strip on the front of each earpiece’s “stem.”
The Airpods Pro comes with an IPX4 rating which means the earphones are safe from plashes. Though, it isn’t as durable as the IPX7 rating on some gym-friendly, waterproof models, but is marked improved over the standard Airpods, which carry no official rating. They shouldn’t be exposed to too much of water or submerge them, and also, don’t get the case wet, as the IPX4 doesn’t apply to the case, only the Airpods.
The AirPods Pro ship with three pairs of silicone eartips in small, medium, and large sizes, all of which are slightly oval rather than perfectly circular. The in-ear fit is ideal—these should stay in place without issue and actually seal off the ear canal, unlike the regular AirPods.
The on-ear controls are fairly straightforward. Press either ear once to play or pause, double-tap to skip forward a track, and triple-tap to skip backward. There are thin strips on the front of the stems that you can lightly press for switching between ANC and Transparency modes. The only setback about the design is that there are still no physcial volume controls.
The earphones instantly sense when you put them in your ear or remove them, and will automatically play or pause accordingly. This feature can be contradicting if you’re not ready for music to start up, but you can disable it by turning off Automatic Ear Detection in your iPhone’s Bluetooth settings.
Active Noise cancellation
Switching between ANC and Transparency modes is active. For you to completely deactivate ANC, you have to go to the Bluetooth settings menu on your device and click on the paired AirPods Pro. This opens a menu that lets you press and hold the earpiece stem to activate Siri instead of ANC, or you can assign one ear to activate Siri and the other to activate ANC.
Battery
Apple estimates battery life to be a fairly average 4.5 hours per charge. With ANC in the mix, your results can vary greatly, and volume levels also play a key role. (Apple claims the battery life is 5 hours without ANC or Transparency mode use.) The charging case provides an additional 19 to 20 hours, but keep in mind that Apple’s battery estimates are based on listening at 50-percent volume levels.
Audio
Apple’s attempts to make the AirPods Pro a little more special led them to add in a feature that attempts to equalize your music based on the shape of your own ear. Because of this, all AirPods Pro will sound a lot more similar from person to person than they would with other headphones.
Additionally, with actual noise attenuation, the AirPods Pro sound much better than their predecessors by virtue of the fact that your music isn’t competing with bus engines, the airplane cabin, or noisy street.
Speaking of voices, the AirPods Pro do a good job at reproducing vocals as well, with a neutral frequency response all throughout the mids. 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 11kHz and above have some (green) peaks of extra emphasis
