Apple announced its new AirPods Pro 2 wireless headphones at its Far Out event in September, which was broadcast live from the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California.
Pricing has been announced at $249 / £249. Pre-orders start September 9, and the shipping date is September 23.
The new AirPods Pro feature the same “notch stick” design as the previous version, and white remains the only color option. The key upgrade is the capacitive touch control on the outside of the earbuds that allows volume adjustment by swiping your finger up or down – a feature the original lacked.
The new H2 chip allows advanced computational sound in the new AirPods Pro, with the benefits of twice the amount of noise canceling, according to Apple, along with an adaptive transparency mode that processes audio at 48,000 times per second, and will reduce sounds like heavy instruments even when Transparency mode is on. Employment.
As with AirPods 3 and AirPods Max, Spatial Audio is supported in the new AirPods Pro. There’s also support for a new Spatial Audio option in iOS 16 that uses the iPhone’s TrueDepth Camera feature to create a unique listener profile based on the shape of your head and ear, so the sound movement is more convincing.
Lightning wired charging, as well as Qi wireless charging and Apple MagSafe are options with the new AirPods Pro, but you can use the charger that came with your Apple Watch for the first time. For the new model, battery life has been upgraded to 6 hours on a single charge and 30 hours total listening time with case charges – this is up from 4.5 hours and 24 hours respectively on the original versions.
There are a few new features to be found in the new model that are included in our five upgrades we’ve come to expect from AirPods Pro 2, but one of them is an improved case, with a built-in speaker to provide feedback on pairing and low power and charging status. It’s also used to find accuracy, the speaker in the case beeps when you use the iOS Find My feature, as well as support for finding UWB direction with your iPhone, so you can point directly to your missing AirPods.
Finally, Apple also added a new low-distortion woofer and a dedicated woofer, so we’re assuming overall sound quality will be improved over the originals.
There was no mention of missing audio, but Apple said the H2 chip supports higher bandwidth connectivity, so we don’t know what that means just yet. We’ve previously written about how Apple can add lossless audio to AirPods over Bluetooth, so there may be more of these headphones in the future.