The AirPods 3 have been released and offer consumers yet another option when considering a pair of AirPods today I have the second generation the pros and the new third-generation AirPods to compare to each other and hopefully help you decide whether you should upgrade or which one you should get.
Let's get into it first off let's go over some features that they all share in common they all come in a sleek case that charges the AirPods inside of them and hold them in place with magnets they also close magnetically and charge via a lightning port at the bottom you will find that the AirPods second-gen and third-gen cases are roughly the same sizes just sort of flipped while the AirPods pros case is slightly larger these cases do scratch pretty easily as they're white plastics so if you want to put them in a case I'd highly recommend the Nomad leather case now this isn't sponsored by a nomad or anything but I just think that they do a great job of making your AirPods look classy and stand out and look different while still protecting them from those tiny little scratches all AirPods also have sensors to detect whether the AirPods are in or out of your ears and automatically play or pause your music they also all support hey Siri use the h1 chip and have Bluetooth 5.0.
Pretty basic stuff but here's where things start to differ for starters the pros use silicone tips while the twos and the threes don't this means that the pros are the only ones to get active noise cancelling and transparency mode another notable feature on the outside of the device is the way that you interact with them the airpods do have a longer stem and uses taps for multimedia controls and you can only choose between two actions which is a double tap on either earbud i personally assign one of them to play and pause and the other one to skip track on the new airpod 3s and the pros the stem is also shorter and it uses a force sensor so instead of tapping which can sometimes be finicky and really annoying for your ears you can just pinch the stem you can pinch once to play and pause twice to skip and three times to go back you can also press and hold to toggle between transparency mode and active noise cancellation or activate siri some other things that you'll only find on the airpods 3s and pros are sweat and water resistance a wireless charging case which you'll have to pay extra for on the twos adaptive eq and spatial audio now sweat and water resistance is pretty self-explanatory the airpods 3s and pros have an ipx4 rating which means that you can worry less when you're sweating with these on or in the rain while you may want to be a little more careful around water with the airpods twos as far as wireless charging goes i do find this feature to be pretty sweet on the airpod cases it's nice just to plop your airpods onto a charging pad to top it off if you do want this wireless charging case for your existing airpods second gen you'll have to pay 65 for just the case or if you're buying a brand new pair of second generation airpods it'll bring the cost up from 120 to 160 all right.
Two more things that only the threes and the pros have the first one is adaptive eq so the threes and the pros have an inward facing microphone this allows the earbuds to listen to how the sound is being produced inside of your ears then adapts the eq to make it sound the best it's one of those features that you don't really notice because it works in the background and you can't really turn it on and off but yeah it does sound pretty nice and i'm sure it allows apple to make sure that the sound coming from the threes and the pros are consistent across all of their devices alright wrapping it up this is the final feature that the threes and the pros have and that's spatial audio this is a relatively new feature that sort of is like surround sound on steroids because it tracks your head movements with the earbuds themselves so on the airpod 3s and pros for example if you're watching a movie and there's an explosion on the left side of the screen normally you just hear it more out of the left side of your earphones right but with spatial audio if you turn your head to the left toward the explosion it'll almost sound like the explosion is right in front of you if you haven't tried it out it's pretty crazy and immersive but in my opinion i don't really find myself using it that much because when i'm watching a movie i don't really find myself turning my head that much i just find my head locked onto the screen and so while it is a pretty cool feature i don't think it's a deal breaker for the airpods twos.
Let's talk about sound quality which one sounds the best and are the threes comparable to the pros so in my testing the threes actually sound identical to the pros now keep in mind this is just me listening back and forth with each set of headphones it's not very scientific but yeah just in my testing they sounded pretty much the same from what i could find on the apple website they both have the same drivers amplifiers and feature adaptive eq which we talked about which leads me to believe that even though the airpods pros have a different type of seal with the silicone tip with adaptive eq with the inward facing microphones they're able to keep the experience between these two headphones pretty much the same now the airpod 2s on the other hand also sound very very good and only are lacking in one department and that is base so for genres like edm the airpods 2s definitely lack that rumble and that thumping bass and that deepness that sometimes is what makes those songs enjoyable another difference with the airpods twos versus the threes and the pros is that they accentuate the highs a little bit more for example in the song gravity by john mayer i was able to more clearly hear the drummer gently brushing his drumstick on the cymbals whereas on the threesome pros it was a little less noticeable.
Battery life here is what you'll be getting on each device as you can see the AirPods 3's come out on top in terms of battery life while the pros suffer just a little bit due to active noise canceling.
The final thing we'll talk about is the price so here are the latest prices that I pulled from amazon the second-gen comes in at 120 dollars and for 55 dollars more you can upgrade to the third-gen then for an additional 25 you can pick up a pair of AirPods pros so not that much more.
Now what are my recommendations for upgrading or trying to pick between these three well if you want active noise cancelling it's pretty obviously you should go with the pros the ability to drown out background noise and even use these on a plane is just amazing i personally own these pros and i use them every time i go to the gym or just want some quiet time now if you don't care about active noise cancelling or maybe you don't like the silicone tips between the twos and threes i'd say the biggest differences are sound quality and the ipx4 rating so if you're somebody who really appreciates deep bass in their music i'd say definitely go with a threes the bass is nice and full and i really love the sound of them on top of that in my testing you can pretty much be guaranteed that you'll be getting the same sound quality as the pros which is awesome also the fact that the airpods 3s are ipx4 rated means that you can take them to the gym and worry less about sweat getting on them just don't take them in the shower or jump in the pool with them maybe you already own the airpods twos and are considering upgrading to the threes again if you like bass definitely do it it's a significant upgrade and if you don't care about any of those features like active noise cancelling or more bass or more water resistance then you can just stick with the regular airpods second gen nothing wrong with that and in fact i found these to be the most comfortable.
So let's talk about fit and honestly, it's pretty subjective now I've seen tons of Reddit posts or reviews on amazon saying that one of these fits better than the other and the other one sucks because it doesn't fit and the truth of it is that it all depends on your ear shape everybody's ear shapes are different and despite what you might read on a forum or a review it doesn't matter until you go into a store and try it out so back to that note about the AirPods 2s being the most comfortable for me again it's pretty subjective but one thing I will say is that these are the lightest earbuds so coming in at four grams you don't feel them in your ears so that's why maybe I felt that they were the most comfortable. I hope that it helped you make your purchase decision whether you're getting this for a gift or yourself.
THANKS FOR READING😇
