It’s been three years since the AirPods Pro 2 and judging by recent reports, it seems to wait for the AirPods Pro 3 will continue on until early 2026.
All sorts of rumours have sprung up what they’d be – most are the same batch I’ve heard since I’ve been at Trusted Reviews. A complete (and novel) redesign, health-related features, infrared cameras – each time a new pair of AirPods earphones is expected, the rumour mill jumps into overdrive.
I must confess that I’ve not reviewed a pair of Apple headphones, so I can’t speak to how good they are from a personal perspective. By general consensus, they’re among the best wireless earbuds even a few years after they’ve launched.
Apple has consistently brought updates to the AirPods Pro 2, one of the most recent being a hearing aid feature that launched in 2024. These are no longer just your typical true wireless earbuds. As always with an Apple product, they aspire to be more. It’s better to shoot for the moon and if you fail, you’ll still be among the stars, right?
Limited Appeal
But a bugbear of any Apple product is that Apple want complete and utter control over how you use it. While that can make the product very good, it can also make it limited – siloed within Apple’s walled garden.
It’s unlikely to change with the AirPods Pro 3 and I can understand why Apple pursues this approach. It doesn’t want the user/listener to have to think about the experience – it wants it to just work.
But there are those of us who want some control, even if this is pretty much a pipe dream as far as Apple products are concerned.
Beats audio products are similar to Apple but have a slightly wider operating range in that there is some functionality with Android devices. That doesn’t mean they offer equal performance though.
All the best stuff (at least in Apple’s eyes) is reserved for iOS devices, while Android gets parity in a few areas. The new features rumoured for the AirPods Pro 3 will likely be glued to iOS devices. This is unlikely to ever change, so to even ask for features that work on multiple platforms is, again, a pipe dream.
So here’s not what Apple needs to do, because quite frankly a company of Apple’s size and influence don’t really take requests – but it’s what I’d like Apple to do.
More Power to the People
Let’s start with the obvious. Neither Apple nor Beats products allow for much customisation of the performance. Bose used to adhere to this notion, and now they’ve added a simple equaliser.
The idea that the way Apple presents audio is the best way to listen is something of a falsehood to me. The best sound is how I want to hear it. Apple’s interpretation is just an interpretation – there’s no one sound that covers all the artists and bands in the world, so why not offer listeners a way to tune the sound to how they like?
And that extends to the noise-cancellation, which is essentially on auto pilot with Apple headphones. I’ve never been convinced by adaptive noise-cancellation mainly because it’s never especially obvious the effect it’s having.
Sure, it could extend battery life by not being at full whack all the time, but it seems to have little effect on battery life (that’s an opinion for another time). Being able to dial in the noise-cancellation how I want it is a small thing, so small that it seems weird that Apple won’t cede control over it.
While for many Apple users, the platform-specific nature of the AirPods Pro 3 is arguably what it makes it the best headphones for them, what it means is that the AirPods headphones are accessories – extensions of your iPhones, iMacs, and iPads.
I don’t use AirPods so while more health-related features, infrared cameras, and spatial audio will be buzzwords that excite others, I can’t say these potential features are selling points to me.
They co-exist with what you already own but take those other devices away and the AirPods are less extraordinary and more ordinary. While customisation is not a big feature in the grand scheme of things, it will make some gains in untying the AirPods from the knot of the iOS platform and allow them to be viewed as a headphone and not an audio accessory.
Being able to tie AirPods to my preferred tastes, and not the homogenous sound Apple believes I want, would be more interesting than any mooted feature.
