Apple announced its new AirPods Pro 2 wireless earbuds at the Far Out party in September, which was broadcast live from its headquarters in Cupertino, California.
Pricing was announced at $ 249 / £ 249 / $ 399, and the AirPods Pro 2 pre-order is now available prior to the September 23 shipment date.
The new AirPods Pro have the same stick-stick design as the previous version, with white remaining the only color option. A key improvement is the capacitive touch controls on the outer surface of the earbuds, which allows you to adjust the volume by swiping up or down – a feature that was missing from the original.
The new H2 chip allows for advanced computing audio in the new AirPods Pro, with the benefit of reducing noise twice, according to Apple, along with an adaptive transparency mode that processes sound at 48,000 times per second and reduces sounds like heavy machinery, even when transparency mode is turned on.
As with AirPods 3 and AirPods Max, the new AirPods Pro support surround sound. The new personalized surround sound option in iOS 16 is also supported, which uses the TrueDepth Camera feature on the iPhone to create a unique listener profile based on the shape of the head and ear, making the sound movement more convincing.
Wired Lightning Charging as well as Qi and Apple MagSafe Wireless Charging are options with the new AirPods Pro, but for the first time, you can use the charger that came with your Apple Watch. In the new model, the battery life has been increased to 6 hours on a single charge and 30 hours of total listening time with the case charging – that’s 4.5 hours and 24 hours respectively on the original versions.
In the new model, you can find some new features that were mentioned in our 5 updates that you can expect from the AirPods Pro 2, but one of them is an improved case with a built-in speaker that provides feedback during pairing and low power and charging status. It’s also used for precise searches, and the case’s speaker beeps when iOS Find My is used, and supports iPhone directional UWB location search so you can point directly to lost AirPods.
Finally, Apple has also added a new low distortion speaker and custom amplifier, so we assume overall sound quality will improve compared to the originals.
There was no mention of lossless audio, but Apple said the H2 chip supports high-bandwidth connectivity, so we don’t know what that means yet. We wrote earlier about how Apple could add lossless audio to AirPods over Bluetooth, so perhaps there will be more of these buds in the future.