Apple AirPods 4/ AirPods 4 Active Noise Cancellation Review: Incredible Engineering, Less Than Incredible Comfort

Apple’s AirPods 4 produce good quality audio and surprisingly adept active noise cancellation considering their open design — but pricing issues and comfort concerns still remain.

Pros	Cons
Active noise cancelling works better than you might think	You can get better ANC for less
Good battery life	May be uncomfortable for some ears after a while
Smaller battery case fits nicely in pockets	You can have any colour you’d like… as long as it’s (still) white

Score: 3/5

	Buy The Apple AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation!	Buy On Amazon

In this review

Apple AirPods 4 ANC Specifications
Apple AirPods 4 ANC Design
Apple AirPods 4 ANC Performance
Apple AirPods 4 ANC Battery
Apple AirPods 4 ANC Conclusion

It has, I must be honest, been a while since I’ve tested out a pair of AirPods, Apple’s entry-level true wireless earbuds.

The third generation set was reviewed by others at the publication I was working at when they launched back in 2021, which was (in technology terms) some time ago.

As such, I had to come fresh at the Airpods 4 (and AirPods 4 Active Noise Cancellation, because Apple sent me both pairs to test out), considering their price point, comfort and feature set.

For the Apple faithful they’re a decent purchasing option, though the reality for the noise cancelling set is that you can get slightly better active noise cancelling from cheaper non-Apple pairs, and the open design won’t suit every pair of ears — they certainly don’t do so for mine.

Design

While Apple has made some changes to the shape of the inner bud part of the Airpods with the AirPods 4, you’d almost certainly not pick that while they’re actually in your ears, because the style remains, as it has done since their inception, built around having little white stalks sticking out of your ears.

Are they an iconic throwback all the way back to those classic silhouette iPod advertisements that you recall only if you’re truly ancient like I am? Without a shadow of a doubt, but I’ve got to be honest here… they’re also kind of boring.

Really, Apple, you do all kinds of interesting colours for iPhones, MacBooks, even Beats products… but AirPods feel like they’re stuck in a design/colour vacuum that hasn’t changed since 2001!

Where Apple has made a design change for the AirPods 4 is in the charging case, which is smaller than prior generations. That’s a nice touch, simply because it makes them more comfortable in a pocket… but there’s a design price to pay here that I’m much less a fan of, and that’s the shift from having a physical, clickable pairing button to using an inductive surface that you have to long press on the face of the case.

While that’s a little easier to use than the “tap both bud touch areas” pairing malarkey that some buds use, it’s still no substitute for an actual physical button.

Yes, this is a hill that I will very much die on.

Performance

Back when the AirPods were brand new, they really did define a category, and with it some expectations around audio quality at the price Apple wanted to charge for them. In 2024, though, the AirPods have plenty of competition, and that makes it harder, I think, to fully justify the AirPods price on audio quality grounds alone.

Don’t get me wrong; the AirPods certainly aren’t bad quality headphones, arguably one of the better options if you really don't like having rubber tips inside your ears... but once you get up into the $299 price bracket where the Airpods 4 Active Noise Cancellation sit, you do start to have a range of more powerful audio choices.

Even if you wanted to keep matters within the Apple ecosystem, AirPods 2 are only $100 more for a much better audio experience. That observation clearly is less of an issue if you just want “in” the AirPods world for the regular, non-active noise cancelling type.

Adding active noise cancellation to the AirPods 4 ANC – and to be crystal clear, there are two distinct products here, the base level $219 AirPods 4 and then the clunkily named $299 AirPods 4 Active Noise Cancellation (yes, that’s their real name) – will undoubtedly make many prospective buyers ponder if they should opt for these or Apple’s even more premium priced Airpods Pro 2. ANC is ANC, and so it’s all the same, right?

Nope.

While much of the same underlying technology, including Apple’s H2 chip is present in the AirPods 4 ANC, the simple physical reality of shifting from a set with rubber tips that seal noise not only into but away from your ears versus the more open ear tip design of the AirPods 4 means that their ANC is more limited.

It is remarkable engineering that it works as well as it does, and I can see a market for those who want ANC but can't deal with using rubber tipped headphones to make that happen. Still, switching between the AirPods 4 ANC and the AirPods Pro 2 and (for comparison) the Pixel Buds Pro 2, the differences in ANC noise reduction were stark.

On Sydney Trains with full ANC enabled, the AirPods 4 let more audio through than either competing pair, especially the higher speech frequencies of people talking too loud in quiet carriages. There’s definitely ANC at work here, but the physical nature of the way the AirPods 4 Active Noise Cancellation are built limits its approach in use.

Having active noise cancelling on board also means that the pricier AirPods 4 Active Noise Cancellation offer up transparency modes for hearing the world around you, as well as adaptive audio modes, something that can't be managed via the regular AirPods. Here the slightly more open design does help get more audio through, as you'd expect.

The Active Noise Cancellation pair can also optionally be toggled to support Conversation Awareness, dipping the volume if they detect that you're speaking in a conversation. This works well enough for quick chats, though also tends to kick in if I'm muttering to myself in my home office. Maybe that's just a "me" problem, though.

Googly eyes test passed, though they sure do look guilty of... something.

Then there’s the physical nature of the buds themselves, and here I do have to get almost entirely subjective in my evaluation, because everyone’s ears are different.

For shorter wearing periods they’re fine, but I do find I struggle with any set of solid plastic buds in my ears from a comfort standpoint over a shorter period of time than if I had actual rubber buds in place.

The AirPods 4 might have a slightly different shape, but it’s not one that my ears find all that comfortable over longer periods of wear. That is 100% subjective; if you’ve found prior AirPods styles fine for your ears then I’m sure you’ll have no problems with the AirPods 4, but I can’t ignore that I found them less than ideal in this respect.

The AirPods 4 Active Noise Cancellation also get slightly smarter access to Apple's Find My network, with a speaker built into the charging case that can chirp to aid in finding in the same way that the AirPods Pro 2 case does. You don't get that on the regular AirPods 4, just the ability to find individual buds, or make them chirp within the case with much less audible impact.

The inclusion of the H2 chip also allows for a range of Siri interactions, whether that’s for voice or by using specific head nod/shake gestures to accept or decline calls or notifications when they come in. This has to be specifically enabled, and while it works it’s limited to just those two function sets; it might be nice to be able to define a few more actions – say, track skipping for example – but that’s not the case, or at least it’s not the case just yet. That’s a software function, so maybe Apple might build it in later… but I’d never advise you to buy a product based on a maybe.

While I’d usually test out any set of buds for run fitness to see how well they stayed in place, as well as whether my sweat could make them fail – which really shouldn’t happen with a set of IP54 headphones – I’ve not been able to test that out for the AirPods 4 due to a leg injury that’s seen me pause all running activity for the meantime. My currently limited hobbling around hasn’t seen them fall out, if that’s of any help.

Battery

The AirPods 4 are rated for up to 5 hours of battery life, and the same is true for the AirPods Pro 4 Active Noise Cancellation set, but only if you're using them with ANC disabled, and I've no idea why you'd bother spending the extra on an ANC set specifically like this if you weren't going to use them. Using ANC drops the rated battery life to just 4 hours. For the charging cases, you'll get up to 30 hours of total playback time for non-ANC purposes -- so an additional five charges - but only 20 hours for ANC, giving you four additional top-ups.

Those figures largely hold true for my testing, which has mostly been pairing up to the iPhone 16 Pro Max during my review period, though aspects such as Bluetooth distance and volume could cut into matters there. Recharging is nicely handled, with support for wired USB -- Lightning isn't a topic Apple wants to talk about any more at all - wireless Qi charging and Apple Watch charger charging, depending on what you've got to hand. As is typical of wireless charging, the case will become a little warm if you leave it on a Qi or Apple Watch charger, though not horribly so.

Apple AirPods 4/AirPods 4 Active Noise Cancellation: Alex’s Verdict

While you can pair AirPods 4 with just about anything Bluetooth-compatible, there's a clear market here for Apple enthusiasts primarily because of their tighter integration with the wider iOS/macOS ecosystems, and the fact that you can't really tweak any settings without at least one Apple device to do so with.

But should you? The regular model AirPods 4 do appear to be a decent enough upgrade from prior AirPods generations, and there's enough of a gulf in price terms between them and the AirPods Pro and AirPods Max to suit slightly different kinds of buyers. However I'm not in love with the comfort, and at $219 they're on the pricier side for what they're offering.

Then there's the fancier AirPods 4 Active Noise Cancellation. These are better overall, but they're also $299 outright, a price point where you can often score some of the better mid-range ANC buds on special that offer ANC that works a whole lot better than these do. What Apple's managed in an engineering sense here is fascinating for sure, but even if you did want to stay in-house, the jump up to the AirPods Pro 2 isn't that much more -- but the leap in ANC quality definitely is marked.