The AirPods Pro 3 Are Pretty Damn Cool

Up until this week, my everyday earbuds were the OG 2016 AirPods. I'm a diehard fan. Throughout my career, I’ve tested numerous top-of-the-line headphones and earbuds, so I knew there were more advanced models on the market with better sound, but I never really cared. My trusty old AirPods were easy, lightweight, and never failed me. (I do think I deserve some sort of brownie points for owning the same pair for nearly a decade without ever losing one or breaking them.)

When Apple announced its new suite of products last week, for the first time in a while I urgently felt the need to get “the new thing” aka the AirPods Pro 3. Live Translation is a game-changer on earbuds and something that will impact people’s lives, including mine. My husband speaks French, and I don’t. Our son, who is learning to talk, already speaks more French than I do. I know I’ll get there one day, but until then, having these will make travel, family trips and events so much easier for me when I want to feel tuned in.

Apple AirPods Pro 3

Before jumping into the tech specs, it’s worth mentioning that one of the reasons I stayed with the OG AirPods for so long was that I loved the hard plastic earpiece. It fits just right in my ears, but I know that isn’t the case for everyone. When the first Pro model first came out with the sticky earbud tips, people both loved and hated them. Apple listened to that feedback and now the AirPods Pro 3 comes with 5 cushions (previously there were only three), so you can find the perfect fit. For me, the medium that it came with works just fine.

Like its predecessors, the AirPods 4 and Pro 2 models, the new AirPods Pro 3 have transparency mode, active noise-cancellation mode, and adaptive mode (to switch in and out of both). When it comes to noise-cancelling earbuds, I can appreciate how far this technology has come but in the past, but it's another feature that was never for me. The stark contrast between the real and silent world can be too much at times. I hate that deafening silent sound that makes me feel like something is going to take me for a surprise walking down the street in New York City—where you want to be aware of your surroundings.

On an airplane… I don't really care. Sure, it’s nice to tune out cabin noise, but it’s not a deal breaker for me. That’s why I especially like adaptive mode. It’s slightly less noise cancelling and always tunes into my surroundings to turn things up or down accordingly. Most of the time I stay on transparency mode because I don’t like feeling too connected, but for the last week having more choice has been nice. For example, it comes in handy on mornings like today where my cab blasted the radio (90 percent commercials) for 20 minutes straight.

Transparency mode brings in one more important upgrade, Hearing Aid capability now features automatic Conversation Boost. For people like my dad who are hard of hearing, but not enough to get hearing aids, this is huge and something we should be talking about more in the earbud space.

For fitness folks, this is pretty major. Up until now, most fitness heart rate sensors came from sensing your wrist or fingers. The TL;DR on the AirPods Pro 3 is that you only track your heart rate with these during a “workout” with the new fitness app update. You go into your fitness app and have to start a workout to track your heart rate. You cannot just use it while sitting down listening to music, per say—you could technically, but it’s not made for that, yet. Another note, in the fitness app update you can add motivation talk to certain workouts—think cult-y Barry's bootcamp instructors screaming "You're fantastic! Keep grinding!" at you.

What I found most interesting about all this was how you combine this metric if you have an Apple Watch. Let’s say you take a run and then wear your watch and your AirPods, the tech was made to work together to get your best, more accurate heart rate. It will be pretty hard to compare which you get a better reading from since they work together to just improve its statistics. I can guess that anyone who is interested in using this feature, already has some sort of wearable. I do think it will be interesting to see how this kind of tech continues to evolve.

Now for the pièce de résistance (how's my French?) of the AirPods Pro 3. After receiving the Pro 3 in hand, I couldn’t wait to update my software and see how it all works. I was so excited, I attempted to pair them to my iPhone after a few glasses of wine in the car home from dinner. I drunkenly skipped through some of the prompts, and that made it harder for myself. The next morning, sober and rested, I realized where I messed up. I started over and setting up Live Translation and downloading the languages was easy in the end. My suggestion, forgo alcohol for installation. Maybe do it when you sit down with a Saturday morning green tea.

Armed and ready, I slapped the AirPod Pro 3 in and instructed my husband to start speaking in French to me. It worked. The translation came through, and I understood him. Translation models are becoming a tech standard, but having it work in real-time in your own home is pretty amazing, something that actually affects people's lives. After spending so much time around a foreign language and consistently having to ask for recaps, and now being able to receive context in live time, it’s priceless for me.

That said, there's still a lot of fine tuning to be done here. This isn't one of those Apple ideas that comes fully formed, ready to change the world. It's still in Beta, but I actually commend Apple for releasing it at this stage. It reminds me of the first iPhone—pretty unassuming by today's standards—but within three generations it had literally changed the game. Some initial hangups on Live Translation: the delay is longer than you want and right now there are only a handful of languages available (more will come later this year).

The delay I refer to can feel pretty substantial. Between my husband talking and getting the audio feed into my ear can be up to a four- or five-second delay. There is a valid reason for the delay though, the translation is running an AI model to try and contextualize what someone is saying before feeding it to you. This causes a slight delay, because in simple terms, the translation takes a second to think and make the most of what someone is saying.

As far as translation accuracy goes, there were a lot of missed words between both my husband and me when we tried it in both directions. As respective native speakers, we both use a lot of short and improper terms that require a lot of context. Similar to my son learning how to speak from scratch, AI technology is in the process of learning how real people speak. It's going to get better with time.

One example is when my husband asked our son to “eat the rest of his banana," it was translated to me as "sell the rest of the bananas." There were several instances like this where the translation was slightly off, but I because I have eyes and real context, I understood what he was trying to say. And to note, when translation is happening sound transparency comes into play. It slightly mutes the person speaking, so you can focus on the translation audio.

While there are plenty of kinks to be worked out in Live Translation and I’m excited to see how Heart Rate Sensor evolves, these are just plain fun to use. The concept of getting more than just listening from earbuds is exciting. Along with all the other AirPods Pro 3 updated technology and new features, it’s pretty hard to deny that these are all you need for your daily life, and pretty damn cool, too.

Apple AirPods Pro 3