Apple’s AirPods Pro 3 deliver top quality sound and some of the best ANC on the market, although they’re predictably not inexpensive.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Utterly superb ANC | Expensive |
| Good battery life | Redesigned fit might not suit all ears |
| Great audio presentation | Live translation buggy and awkward to use |
Score: 4/5
 |
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In this review
Apple AirPods Pro 3 Specifications
Apple AirPods Pro 3 Design
Apple AirPods Pro 3 Performance
Apple AirPods Pro 3 Battery
Apple AirPods Pro 3 Verdict
Ethical disclaimer:
The set of Apple AirPods Pro 3 used in this review were supplied to me by Apple and I don’t expect they’re going to ask for them back, because the hygiene implications of using second-hand in-ear buds are, well… eww.
So in effect, free pair of premium headphones, so in return I’ll give them input into the review, or a softer review?
Hell no.
I put this disclaimer in front of every review because it’s very clear that the online reviewing space is utterly polluted with ethically compromised reviews, AI-written slop and just so much content that erodes faith in any review you might happen to read.
That’s not what I do at ART. Whether a product comes or goes back makes no difference to the content of the review, and no brand gets early access to or oversight over a review. Period.
For more on ART’s Ethics position, see here.
Design
From the outside, I reckon most people would have an incredibly hard time picking the Apple AirPods Pro 3 from their predecessors in a design sense.
Can you guess which is which? (Spoiler: Left to right, AirPods Pro, AirPods Pro 2, AirPods Pro 3.) Fun fact: The OG AirPods Pro here survived a trip through my washing machine and still work to this day.
There’s really only a couple of clues that you can work from, because the AirPods Pro 3’s case is the same colour and basic design as the older AirPods Pro 2 or original AirPods Pro; the differences lie in the ever-so-slightly larger dimensions of the newer case, the change in front light style and the fact that the AirPods Pro 3 case lacks a physical pairing button.
Like the AirPods 4, Apple has instead opted here for a pairing mechanism that involves opening the case and double tapping on the front of the case to engage Bluetooth pairing mode.
I am always in favour of physical buttons for this kind of task, because there’s an absolute line where they work while touch panels can be finicky, or prone to not working if damp or similar. In this aspect, I feel like Apple’s slightly downgraded the AirPods Pro experience here, though I do admit this is a finicky point for many.
Also read:
AirPods 4 Review
Pop the AirPods Pro buds out of their box and you’re greeted with buds that ostensibly also look pretty similar to the prior generations, available in white and… that’s it.
Do you like white bud headphones? Apple certainly does.
For a company that comes out with new iPhone colours every single year, it’s astonishing to me that Apple has stuck to its iconic, by now so old-school-they-may-as-well-be-using-a-chalkboard iPod design style of white and white only, but that’s your sole choice.
Pop them in your ears, however, and the design changes become apparent if you’ve ever used the AirPods Pro or AirPods Pro 2 before.
The shape of the buds has been redesigned – this is why the case is bigger, apparently – for what’s meant to be a more comfortable fit with a design that ever so slightly twists into your ears more than the older AirPods Pro sets did.
Comfort is naturally incredibly subjective, but what struck me first about the AirPods Pro 3 was how much more of a seal the default bud sizings made in my ears.
That’s a huge aid to active noise cancellation by way of isolation (more on that below), but it’s also something that did concern me might become an issue for longer-term comfort. Often I’ve found that buds that fill my ear cavities are good at isolation but the added pressure of their presence becomes irritating, sometimes downright painful.
So I went for a run with the AirPods Pro 3, to see how good they might feel after I’d bumped them around in my ears and sweated all over them.
To my ears — subjective, for sure — they felt fine after that run, and they continue to feel fine, but if you do need smaller or larger tips to get the sizing right, they do come in the box, ready for application if needed.
Speaking of sweat, the AirPods Pro 3 should be able to handle all of my running sweat and then some, as they’re rated at IP57.
That doesn’t make them scuba suitable, but then they’re Bluetooth headphones, and Bluetooth just plain doesn’t like trying to transmit through water. If you’re after something suitable for the pool or beach, consider more swim-centric options such as the Shokz OpenSwim Pro or Suunto Aqua.
Also read:
Shokz OpenSwim Pro Review
The reality for the AirPods Pro 3 is that they remain comfortable, even after exercise or wearing them for considerable lengths of time.
There’s a very slight learning curve here if you’re coming from the older AirPods Pro models because the newer AirPods Pro 3 more twist into your ears rather than simply being placed into them, but the benefits in terms of comfort and fit are pretty undeniable.
Performance
I sweat every review. Often literally.
The AirPods Pro 3 are Bluetooth compatible, which means that they will work with just about any Bluetooth compatible device, but being Apple, they’ll show up first and automatically if you happen to have an iPhone, iPad or Mac nearby when you first open them up.
As mentioned above, if you do need to pair them to a new device, a firm double tap on the front of the case (just below the power button) will get that process rolling.
While they will work with other devices, if you want to customise the AirPods Pro 3 at all, you’ll need some kind of Apple device to do so.
Apple does not use any kind of separate app for its own in-house audio devices, instead storing their details within the Settings app for iOS, iPadOS or MacOS, not that (outside potential firmware updates) that there’s all that much that you need to configure. In very typical Apple style, most settings are tuned the way Apple likes them, and you either accept that or buy a different pair.
Apple’s default tuning is very good, however.
On my standard test tracks, the vocal presentation on Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” sounds excellent, as does Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner”. Adding in a little 90s flavour, 4 Non Blonde’s “What’s Up” keeps its guitar twang nicely separate from the vocals, while the Beastie Boys “Sabotage” presented its own iconic distortion well.
Me being me, I also tested with a lot of Prince, and tracks like “Thieves In The Temple” sound great with a nice focus on the intro drums coming through clearly, as does the deeper mix in “Musicology” or the more playful sounds of “Starfish and Coffee” or even the deeper guitar push of “Dolphin”. One of these days, I’ll come up with a Prince-only review test track list, because an artist that prolific really does have a little bit of something in just about any style… but once again, I digress.
Apple was already coming from a very high standard with the AirPods Pro 2, and while I wouldn’t say that I’d drop those in favour of these immediately, they do sound good for most purposes.
Onboard ANC is toggled (by default) with a long press and hold on just one of the AirPod Pro headphones, and it’s excellent, with very clear audio coming through in transparency and some of the very best noise cancellation I’ve hit on any set of buds to date.
Apple’s claim here is that it has 2x more active noise cancellation than the AirPods Pro 2 set, which did make me wonder about how that had been measured. For those who (like me) like going down slight rabbit holes, there’s a full IEC standard for active noise cancelling which I’m sure must make thrilling bedtime reading… but I’ll stop digressing here.
Honestly, I do feel (and this is subjective, I couldn’t afford to get a full copy of the IEC standard in time) that Apple’s “2x” claim is maybe over-egging it, but only because the ANC on the AirPods Pro 2 was already pretty good. If you’re rocking a pair of those, while the AirPods Pro 3 are better, I wouldn’t throw them in the trash immediately if I were you.
For a start, please responsibly recycle them, but equally, it’s much smarter to make the most out of the tech you’ve got rather than spending serious sums of money on tech that’s better, but only incrementally so.
Testing the Apple AirPods Pro 3 out in a variety of scenarios including trains, while out shopping and numerous running scenarios, I can attest that the ANC works very nicely at reducing everyday noise and allowing me to focus on music, podcasts or live radio as suits my mood. For runners, ANC this good can be slightly risky, because it will cut out most vehicle noise, but that’s what transparency mode is for.
Speaking of runners, the AirPods Pro 3 also integrate a heart rate sensor, so you can exercise with just them in and not have to necessarily fuss with having a fitness tracker – something tells me Apple would be happiest if it was an Apple Watch, call it a hunch if you must – when out and about. This works well enough and seems to track my heart rate to the same level as an Apple Watch Series 11 (review coming soon!) did on my own runs.
The AirPods Pro 3 when paired to an iPhone running up-to-date iOS also supports a feature that Apple calls “Live Translation”.
I grew up in a house surrounded by language teachers, so this kind of technology is like catnip to me, at least at a theoretical level.
Live translation is a neat feature in theory, but at launch it’s rather limited, to put it politely. Sure, Apple does note that it’s in “beta”, but that’s not a great excuse for releasing a product that’s quite this limited, or often outright broken.
Using the AirPods Pro 3 for live translation, when I first started testing the suite of supported languages only included English (US or UK), French, Brazillian Portuguese and Spanish.
A later iOS update while testing added just a handful, with Italian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional Mandarin) joining the fray. It’s a start, but it’s worth pointing out that Apple’s well behind the pace of the kinds of things that Google’s trying to do with its own Google Translate service in this regard.
Of course, that could be moot if Apple can beat Google to the punch in terms of actual live translation… and here I hit a whole host of problems.
Using any language to translate from or to requires the download of some hefty language packs — what I’ve tested with ranged from 600GB up to 1.6GB in size, which takes time to finish downloading.
Even once downloaded they seemed to not work at first, with the AirPods Pro 3 informing me every I tried to use Live Translate (or, as Siri for some reason calls it, “Liv Translate”) that I’d need to download languages to the iPhone to do so. Despite the fact that – and linguists, correct me if I’m wrong here – English, French and Japanese are what we tend to call “languages” and I’d already downloaded those ones.
Eventually the AirPods Pro 3 came around; my best guess is that post-download Apple Intelligence wants a little time to parse each language in turn, which does mean if you’re keen on the idea, it would be effectively essential to download them prior to travel, because doing so when you need language help on the fly is not going to cut it.
The problem here is really with the word “live”, because that makes you think of Hitchhiker’s-esque Babel Fish style interactive conversational translation, and that’s not what’s on offer here.
Testing with French (with apologies to my parents, my French skills are super-rusty) and Japanese (much better, but I need to 日本語を勉強する more often, really) showed the issue to me rather succinctly, whether testing with my own pre-recorded comments, or trying to use the AirPods Pro 3 to keep up with live TV where languages are spoken at what is (to native speakers) quite a natural pace.
There’s always a distinct pause between speech and translation that’s not great for keeping any kind of flow of conversation alive, and as for more rapid pace – which is to say, real world spoken pace – language, Live Translate got muddled quite a lot with missed phrases and some very odd translations at times.
That’s very much par for the course for much of this kind of AI-led translation right now.
Live translation might get you out of a shorter and smaller language pickle but it’s got a long way to go before it’s really going to have that much appeal, and it does feel like Apple’s playing catchup here against something Google’s already working on across more languages already.
Battery
For the AirPods Pro 3, Apple does something that I don’t think I’ve seen any other ANC headphone manufacturer do.
They don’t bullshit their audience with a battery life figure that relates only to non-ANC usage, because realistically, why would you spend $429 on a set of ANC-ready headphones if you weren’t thinking of using ANC a fair amount of the time, if not all the time?
You can turn ANC off on the AirPods Pro 3, but it’s such an afterthought that’s it’s not even the default action for long presses on the AirPods Pro 3 stalks unless you actively choose to add it.
Apple’s claim here is for up to 8 hours with ANC enabled, a pretty solid figure for a set with such good actual ANC. My own testing suggests that you won’t likely see that entire battery life figure – I wavered between 6-7 hours of listening time in my own tests – but that’s still quite a decent figure for true wireless buds generally speaking.
Could you get even more with ANC completely disabled? Probably, but honestly, I’m not that inclined to find out quite how much, and Apple isn’t saying.
The battery case for the AirPods Pro 3 is good for an additional 3 charges, bringing up a theoretical total of 24 hours, although once you bring recharging time into account it would take you slightly more than a day (in theory) to get through all of their power.
The case can be charged up via USB-C (Apple doesn’t admit Lightning exists at all any more) or via Magsafe Qi charging, though it’s only regular Qi, not the faster Qi2 charging standard you’ll find in new iPhone models.
Apple AirPods Pro 3: Alex’s Verdict
As their Pro suffix suggests, the AirPods Pro 3 are Apple’s premium play in the buds space; the AirPods Max do still exist if you prefer that over-ear look for your audio, though running in a set of those is a kind of brutal challenge… but I digress once more.
Being premium and being Apple means that they do command a premium price, but I do think they live up to it for the core reason that you buy a set of headphones for.
Audio presentation is generally superb, if rather constrained by Apple’s reluctance to build any kind of equaliser into its settings app to let you fine-tune the audio presentation. My own ears are quite happy with Apple’s default output, but not everyone will be.
Other new features are a little mixed; Live Translation still needs a lot of work before it should be called “Live” in any real way and is prone to the same kinds of translation gaps and blunders as most AI-led approaches.
The heart rate reading of the AirPods Pro is fine, but I suspect anyone wanting to track that kind of feature probably does have an Apple Watch or iOS-suitable fitness band doing the same job and more on their wrist any time they’re working out.
While they do work on alternative platforms, most of the extra features are iOS specific, because that’s very much the way that Apple works within its walled garden ecosystem approach.
If you’re within that ecosystem in any way at all, even partially though, these are excellent, if slightly pricey headphones.
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Apple AirPods Pro 3: Pricing and availability
The Apple AirPods Pro 3 retail in Australia for $429
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