With even better audio performance and battery life compared to their forerunners, as well as entirely new heart rate monitoring, hearing aid, and yes, USB-C technology, these bad boys sound perfectly equipped to leave Samsung's fast-approaching Galaxy Buds Pro 2 in the dust and easily become the overall best wireless earbuds in the world relatively soon... if everything (or at least almost everything) pans out as rumored.
More than just your everyday noise-cancelling buds
Because (nearly) every tech company out there sells true wireless earbuds with active noise cancellation... at a fraction of the AirPods Pro's list price, it's clearly not enough for Apple to upgrade that feature in order to stand out from the pack and charge $250 (or more) for the next-gen Pros.
Don't get us wrong, everyone is expecting a notable improvement on the ANC front, with "self-adaptive" technology likely to be added to the equation, but something tells us the main selling points will lie in another department this time around.
Those holes on the right might house microphones for the hearing aid feature.
Specifically, the health and, let's say, the life improvement department. For one thing, we're hearing (yet again) that Apple is planning to adopt a functionality long abandoned by Samsung with the help of a built-in heart rate sensor.
That's right, the AirPods Pro 2 should be able to keep a proverbial eye on one of your most important health indicators directly from your ears. Of course, if Samsung's experiments in this field are anything to go by, your Apple Watch will remain far more reliable at monitoring your heart rate.
Then again, Apple is known for testing these types of potentially game-changing features way more rigorously than the competition, which explains why no one's certain if the AirPods Pro 2 will also be able to monitor the temperature of their users and thus provide an even closer look at their well-being.
Meanwhile, a first-of-its-kind hearing aid functionality is today rumored for the very first time, purportedly aiming to help users who are hard of hearing get a sense of their surroundings by leveraging both the charging case and the earbuds themselves. That sounds pretty exciting (to say the least), but it's far from etched in stone for this year's AirPods Pro 2 and could definitely be pushed back to a later edition.
So many other things to get excited about
Even in the (unlikely) case that both those all-new health features get delayed or prove less helpful in real life than they sound in theory, the second-gen AirPods Pro will still have enough upgrades going for them to (easily) consolidate Apple's global market supremacy.
Wait, are these the AirPods Pro 2 or the AirPods 3?
We're talking more raw power with a "new" H1 chip under the hood that may or may not get a new name, "improved power consumption" likely to translate into better battery life, a redesigned MagSafe charging case with a USB Type-C port to make the European Union (and a number of US senators) happy, and an "improved" Find My function.
Yes, you'll apparently be able to easily locate your AirPods Pro 2 when you inevitably misplace one or both upgraded earbuds, which by the way look almost identical to the non-Pro AirPods 3 in a set of images put together by the sometimes reliable and sometimes not folks at 52audio based on their purported inside information.
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Adrian, a mobile technology enthusiast since the Nokia 3310 era, has been a dynamic presence in the tech journalism field, contributing to Android Authority, Digital Trends, and Pocketnow before joining PhoneArena in 2018. His expertise spans across various platforms, with a particular fondness for the diversity of the Android ecosystem. Despite the challenges of balancing full-time parenthood with his work, Adrian's passion for tech trends, running, and movies keeps him energized. His commitment to mid-range smartphones has led to an eclectic collection of devices, saved from personal bankruptcy by his preference for 'adequate' over 'overpriced'.
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