AirPods (2nd Generation) | $99 | Amazon
AirPods (3rd Generation) | $169 | Amazon
AirPods Pro | $175 | Amazon
Apple’s AirPods Pro have been among the best true wireless earbuds on the market for over two years now, thanks to their top tier sound, great noise cancelation, and continued updates providing compelling features like spatial audio with head tracking, which approximates theater surround sound surprisingly well by creating the illusion, using head tracking, of sound that stays in place even if you move your head around. It also adds new texture to music, which is more of a divisive feature, perhaps, but still pretty cool to check out, particularly when recordings are actually made to take advantage of it. The AirPods Pro are controllable either via squeezes of the stalks or voice control, they offer up to 4.5 hours of listening time before they need to go back in their case to recharge, making them perfect companions for your commute. Since last year, these have come with a MagSafe case, so you can take the guesswork out of wirelessly charging them when you place them on a MagSafe charger and they snap right into place. Oh yeah, and they’re currently $74 off at Amazon, right now.
If you’re not into the in-ear thing, the other two models of earbuds currently produced by Apple are also on sale. The AirPods (3rd Generation), on sale for $10 off, are the newest edition, having just released last year, and they feature many of the improvements offered by the Pro models, including head-tracking spatial audio, but of course lack any sort of noise cancellation. AirPods (2nd Generation), which are currently marked down by $60, can offer spatial audio when listening to music, but without the fancy head tracking.
All three models pair effortlessly with your iPhone, and do fancy device switching, automatically (people like to say automagically, but that term makes me nauseous) moving audio output to whatever (Apple) device you’re using at the moment, so you can go from listening to music on your MacBook Air (which, wouldn’t you know it, is on sale for $50 off right now) to listening to a podcast on your phone, to watching YouTube on your iPad, all without ever manually connecting to the AirPods on any of those devices. It’s obviously not perfect, and there are times when it switches and you get mad at it for doing so, but I tried turning it off recently, and I felt like a caveman, having to click on a dropdown menu and select the AirPods manually.
This article was originally published by Wes Davis on 2/15/2022, and was updated on 2/18/2022 with new information.