The latest Apple AirPods Pro are back on sale for $199 at Amazon and Walmart. This is a deal we’ve seen for much of the past several months, but it’s still $50 less than the cost of buying from Apple directly. Typically, this is as low as we see the wireless earphones drop at major retailers.
Photo by Billy Steele / Engadget
This deal takes $50 off the list price for Apple’s top-end wireless earphones.
We gave the AirPods Pro a review score of 88 last September, and we currently list them as the “best for iOS” pick in our wireless earbuds buying guide. They continue to be the best true wireless model Apple sells, with a slightly bassy sound that plays well with most kinds of audio, effective active noise cancellation (ANC) and a top-notch transparency mode that blends outside noise with your music. Like all AirPods, they also come with a host of Apple-friendly features: fast pairing, automatic switching between active Apple devices, Find My tracking, spatial audio, audio sharing with other AirPods and Beats users, hands-free Siri and so on.
The six-hour battery life could be longer, there are better options for call quality and many of the other picks in our buying guide come with a richer feature set. There’s no way to manually adjust the EQ or ANC strength, for instance. If you want a pair for working out, the Beats Fit Pro offer many of the same Apple-centric perks in a more gym-friendly design. Nevertheless, if you solely use Apple devices, there’s still plenty to like here.
There is a caveat, though: Bloomberg reports that Apple will likely update the AirPods Pro with a new USB-C charging case as part of its iPhone event on September 12. (The current AirPods Pro case uses Lightning.) The new iPhones should switch to USB-C too, so if you’d prefer the updated port, it’s worth waiting. That said, no other changes to the actual AirPods Pro hardware are expected, and the USB-C model may cost more than this discounted price to start. The earphones will receive new features later this year, but those’ll be software-based, with iOS 17 adding a new “Adaptive Audio” mode and faster device switching, among other upgrades.
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