Apple finally gave the AirPods Pro a real update, and it feels like the company wants them to be something more than earbuds.
The new AirPods Pro 3 look familiar, but they’re hiding some ambitious upgrades: stronger noise cancellation, better battery life, live translation, and even a heart rate sensor.
The translation thing is wild. Put a pair in your ears, and Apple says you can have a conversation with someone who doesn’t speak your language.
The earbuds listen, translate, and play back the other person’s words in real time. It’s a clever demo, the kind of sci-fi feature that makes sense only when you see it running. But whether people actually use AirPods as a pocket translator? That’s an open question.
The heart rate monitor is another swing. Apple already tried this with the Powerbeats Pro, and reviews weren’t great.
Now it’s promising better accuracy thanks to machine learning. It could be useful for workouts, sure, but it also feels like Apple is pushing its earbuds closer to health gadget territory, a space it already dominates with the Apple Watch.
Battery life is finally less embarrassing. You’ll get eight hours with noise cancellation on and 10 hours in transparency mode. That’s a big improvement over the six hours we’ve been stuck with for years.
And Apple says these now have the best noise cancellation of any in-ear headphones, claiming four times the strength of the originals from 2019. That’s the kind of stat we’ll be eager to test.
The price, at least, is normal: $249, with preorders today and shipping September 19.
