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- Phenomenal noise cancellation
- Comfortable for long-term listening
- Heart rate monitoring that works
- Sound quality is good but not great
A good pair of headphones is an essential part of life in today’s connected world: essential for phone and video calls, listening to podcasts and music, and essential for shutting the outside world out when you need a little peace and quiet. You need your headphones to deliver convincingly on all these counts: and that’s precisely what the new Apple AirPods Pro 3 do.
After years of barely providing an update worth the name – the last time out the only thing added was USB-C – Apple has scored a slam dunk with the AirPods Pro 3, delivering better audio quality and hugely improved ANC at the same time as making the headphones more comfortable, more weather resistant and adding heart-rate monitoring. They are, quite simply, the best headphones Apple has ever made.
Apple AirPods Pro 3: What do you get for the money?
The question is, are these the best headphones you can buy, full stop? They certainly make a very good case for themselves, and that starts with the price, which at £219 is remarkably competitive given the company they keep.
In this price bracket, you’re looking at the Sony WF-1000XM5 (around £200), the Technics EAH-Z100 (£265) and the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Gen 2. The latter are our favourite true wireless earbuds after toppling the Technics earlier this year, and they remain the very best at noise cancellation, but they’re considerably more expensive than Apple’s latest earbuds and that puts the AirPods Pro 3 in a very strong position, especially for iPhone owners.
So what exactly is new? Well, Apple has improved the AirPods Pro 3 pretty much across the board, but perhaps the most significant update it has made is to the shape of the earbuds themselves and to the material the eartips are made from. In the case of the former, the overall shape is now more bulbous, with the driver pointing more directly down your ear canal and an enlarged bass vent; and in the case of the latter, Apple has added foam, reinforcing the seal between your ears and the outside world.
The overall effect is a vast improvement in both the security of fit and ANC – to the extent that these very nearly match Bose’s best – and a boost to sound quality, but I’ll get onto both of these aspects in more detail below. Elsewhere, there’s better battery life: the earbuds themselves now last eight hours with ANC enabled versus six hours for the AirPods Pro 2, the bulk of a transatlantic flight. And you have upgraded weather resistance at IP57 (up from IPX4), too.
There’s also better range for Nearby Find, allowing you to be even more careless with where you leave them at home, and a dramatic new addition: heart rate monitoring via a pair of optical sensors in each earbud.
Plus of course there’s all the good stuff that has made the Apple’s AirPods Pro such a great product since they were first introduced: great touch and squeeze controls, effective head tracking and spatial audio, the ability to answer phones calls and have your text messages read out with the nod of your head (or you can decline with a shake of the head), and absolutely rock solid call quality whether you’re sat at your desk or walking down the street.
And Apple is also bringing live translation courtesy of Apple Intelligence to the AirPods Pro 3, although when I tried it, I have to say I wasn’t hugely impressed when I gave it a try on a recent trip to Berlin, Germany. It coped okay with turning the relatively clear, scripted German of a newsreader into English, but it struggled with conversational German.
Now, I’ve no doubt it will be helpful to many people in emergencies, but it clearly still has some way to go, and I do think it’s a bit odd saying this is a feature of AirPods Pro 3 when all the processing is taking place on your iPhone anyway.
How accurate is the heart rate sensing?
It’s the heart rate tracking, however, that is perhaps the most interesting addition in this generation. It’s pretty straightforward stuff and works exactly like the sensor on a smartwatch like the Apple Watch Series 11: an LED light shines through your skin when you pop them in your ears, and a photosensor next to it captures the rhythm of the blood pulsing through the blood vessels in your ear.
So why take a measurement at the ear? Because, assuming you can achieve a good firm fit, an earbud is lighter and much less susceptible to movement than a wrist-mounted sensor in a heavier smartwatch. And a sensor in your ear is also less likely to suffer from interference from vibrations and tension generated while gripping the handlebars of your bike or the bar of a weights machine.
You can view the heart rate data generated by the AirPods Pro 3 by starting a workout in the Fitness app, or by firing up the Apple Health app and visiting Heart section and third-party app developers can also get access to the AirPods Pro 3’s heart rate monitor, so you don’t have to stick with Apple’s tools. You can’t, however, connect them directly to a fitness watch from Garmin, though, which is a bit of a disappointment.
As far as accuracy is concerned, I’ve been impressed with them so far. In my first few days with the AirPods 3, I’ve done a 7.9km run, a 14.4km bike ride and I’ve tracked my heart rate during a number of short walks. Compared with my go-to chest belt – the well-regarded Polar H10 – the average and max heart rate has tallied pretty much exactly, every single time, to within one or two beats per minute.
If you have an Apple Watch, it gets even better, though, as the AirPods Pro 3 are able to combine forces with its wrist-borne counterpart to deliver even more accurate results. If you like to wear headphones while you work out, these are a very good option – in fact, they may be the only heart rate monitor you’ll ever need.
What do the Apple AirPods Pro 3 sound like?
If you haven’t had any experience of high-end premium headphones like the Sony WH1000-XM6 or the Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2, then I suspect you’d be perfectly happy with how the AirPods Pro 3 sound. They don’t have the bite, the attack, the subtlety or the ability to capture the fine details in the music that headphones like these can, but most of the time you won’t miss not having the very finest personal hi-fi strapped to your head.
The sound created by the AirPods Pro 3 is very much an in-your-head type of sound. It doesn’t feel like it expands out from your ears or in front of you in the way it does with some headphones, but that doesn’t necessarily need to impinge on your enjoyment. They’re able to thump out the basslines with the best of them – Weval’s Movement was delivered with the bombastic sense of fun that the track really deserves – and the sound never gets muddled or distorted in any way.
If anything, the AirPods Pro 3 are a little too well-mannered. Sometimes you want your music to lift you up, make the hair prickle on the back of your neck, to excite the senses. I never quite experienced that feeling with Apple’s earbuds. On Julian Lage’s wondrous Hymnal, the AirPods Pro 3 couldn’t dig out the textures and resonances, the fine details of Lage’s guitar playing that the very best headphones can.
Stan Getz & Charlie Byrd’s rendition of Desafinado is, likewise, delivered with what can best be described as politeness. There’s nothing wrong with this. The balance is all there; there’s nothing out of whack. No shrill treble or overbearing bass. But I do find myself yearning for a little more thrill.
How good is the noise cancelling on the AirPods Pro 3?
Any concerns over sound quality, however, will likely disappear into the background when you experience the ANC on the Apple AirPods Pro 3. It is, quite simply, superb. With the help of those foam-infused eartips, they block out ambient noise almost entirely.
I tested them back-to-back against the Sony WH-1000XM6 on my favourite torture test ground – the Northern Line between Liverpool St and Old Street on the London Underground – and the AirPods Pro 3 won the contest, hands down. The key metric here is if I have to turn up the volume from a comfortable level in order to hear one of my regular podcasts; I had to do this with the XM6 – only a little – but not at all with the AirPods Pro 3.
I also had the chance to compare them with the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds (2nd Gen), and here the fight was a lot closer. You hear just a touch more of those high-pitched noises with the AirPods Pro 3 in your ears than you do wearing the Bose. In an office environment, the whoosh of air conditioning, chatting and keyboard tapping is all more audible, and on a busy street you can hear a bit more of the general hubbub while you’re walking along. The difference between the two headphones is small, but obvious.
Apple’s AirPods Pro 3 still can’t quite beat Bose’s best, then, but I would say the difference is so small as to be insignificant. Once you’ve got the music playing or a movie soundtrack running, you’ll be completely cut off from the outside world, wrapped in a cocoon of your own personal audio, an effect that’s accentuated all the more if you fire up a Dolby Atmos-enabled album or a film on Apple TV+.
The one area that Apple can’t quite match the competition is automation. While Sony’s headphones can detect when you’re walking, travelling, sitting, at home or in the office and adjust the level of noise cancelling to match the situation, the AirPods Pro 3 can only detect conversation (yes, the Sonys can do this too) or the general level of ambient noise.
I also think that the way Apple handles passing ambient audio in manually is clumsy. If you’re in an airport and you quickly want to mute your audio and listen in to a tannoy announcement, the quickest way is to grab an earbud and yank it out of your ear. Otherwise, you have to squeeze to pause and then squeeze and hold to toggle noise cancellation off, and by the time you’ve done that, you’ve missed the announcement completely. Surely the software bods at Apple can figure out a better way to achieve this.
Should you buy the Apple AirPods Pro 3?
So the Apple AirPods Pro 3 have weaknesses, but it feels a little unfair to criticise them too strongly in this instance. Sure, they can’t match the best-sounding cordless headphones on the market, but would you expect them to be at this price? And, yes, there are some things operationally that could be improved about the way passthrough audio is handled.
In all the most important areas, however, the Apple AirPods 3 do their work brilliantly. They may sound a little polite, but they’re still an immensely enjoyable listen. And the noise cancellation is nothing short of phenomenal, providing a near impenetrable wall against the noise and hubbub of everyday life.
They’re comfortable enough to wear for the entire duration of their eight-hour battery life and, even if you could compare them unfavourably with their rivals, none of them can offer all this and combine it with unerringly accurate heart rate monitoring.
The price, however, is the clincher for me. At £219, the Apple AirPods Pro 3 are an absolute steal in my opinion. If you have an iPhone, I urge you to go out and grab yourself a pair before they’re all sold out.
