If you’ve been living under a rock – or just have more going on in your life than a fixation on the latest big Apple release – the iPhone 17 unveiling just happened at the 2025 Apple Event, and amongst a load of other stuff, the AirPods Pro 3 were finally unveiled.
That’s right, a new top-end AirPods! (Not you, AirPods Max 2). The AirPods Pro 2 have been Apple’s top offering for three years now, which is enough time to get sick of anything, and so a new pair of buds were overdue.
If you’re an AirPods fan (an Airoficionado, as it were) looking for a new pair of buds to buy, you might be wondering how the new AirPods Pro 3 compare to Apple’s other buds on the market. The most recent offerings from the company are the AirPods 4, unveiled exactly a year prior.
To help you understand the key differences between these two products, I’m going to whistle through some of the biggest ones.
1. The ‘Pro’ difference
I’m going to spend lots of this article reflecting on the upgrades of the AirPods Pro 3 and how they compare to what the AirPods 4 offers, but it’s worth first touching on those three letters of difference.
The AirPods Pro 3 is… well, a ‘Pro’ model, a suffix originally designated as a shortened version of ‘professional’ although “which Pro gadget is actually designed for professionals” would be a trivia night quiz question that’d stump even that old team of stalwarts that never gets a question wrong. But that means they’ll naturally have a few “more advanced” features, as well as a different design.
Most notably, the AirPods Pro 3 have eartips (now with five “foam infused” options, including an XXS size) while the standard ‘Pods have an open design, which means they perch in your ears more casually (and have no silicon to plug up your listeners). Apple made a point of how it’s redesigned the tips of the Pro 3 to block out more sound, and it offers more in the box (again, there are five now, instead of four like in the Pro 2 box).
Audio-wise… not so many differences.
2. Lasting power
If you ostracize the audiophiles in your life and then ask everybody you know what the most important feature of headphones are, half will say battery life – the other half are AirPods users and they know you’re setting them up with a trick question.
Yes, AirPods have famously always had poor battery lives (you can swap ‘AirPods’ with any other Apple product there) but that might change with the AirPods Pro 3, if Apple’s figures are to be believed.
Apparently, the new earbuds offer 8 hours of listening between charges with ANC deployed (or 10 with just Transparency on – four hours up on the previous model). Eight hours is my unofficial mark of the ‘average’ earbud lasting power, so Apple now matches at least 50% of rivals in how long its buds last, and can take its buds off my blacklist.
The AirPods 4 weren’t far off, with 7 hours of juice in the tank, but that extra hour the Pro brings is a lovely symbolic addition.
3. IP healthily
As someone who regularly exercises with earbuds (and not Apple’s standard marketing-style ‘exercise’, which consists of a 100m walk before buying a flat white), I consider IP rating important. This, if you don’t know, is a certified measure of how well a device stands up to fine particles (that’s the first number) and liquids (that’s the second number).
Both the AirPods and the AirPods Pro count their first number as 5, which means that while they’re not totally protected against the ‘ingress’ of fine particles, they block it out enough to ensure any dust or sand you let in there won’t damage them.
The second number is where the new AirPods Pro get an upgrade. The AirPods 4 have a pithy 4 which means that they’re only protected from splashes of water. They’ll survive you sneezing on them, in other words. However the Pro 3 are IP57 which means they’ll survive splashes of water, and powerful water jets, and immersion in water for 30 minutes of a depth of a meter or less.
That’s not to say that the AirPods Pro 3 are earbuds designed for swimming, but they’re guaranteed to survive whatever life throws at it a lot better than the AirPods 4. You can get caught in a rainstorm, go to a bar to weather said rainstorm and drop your earbuds in your whiskey, and then rinse them off under a tap without affecting their music playback. Neat.
4. Cancel the noise
Depending on the model you bought, the AirPods 4 either did or did not have noise cancellation. The original version of the buds didn’t have any Active Noise Cancellation (ANC), though a later model released by Apple did, which was a moot addition given that the lack of eartips mitigates any amount of PNC (passive noise cancellation).
A key selling point of the AirPods Pro 3 during Apple’s reveal presentation was noise cancellation. Apparently it’s “twice as good” as on the previous-gen AirPods Pro, which itself was twice as good as the original models (all Apple’s calculations, of course).
So between the new Pro and the newish standards, you’ve got a choice between ‘Apple’s best ANC’ and ‘technically has ANC’. I know which I’d pick.
5. Those Pro features
While Pro and standard AirPods aren’t as distinct as apples and oranges, the top-end models always get a few extra features to justify the higher cost, and that’s no different with the AirPods Pro 3.
The new buds have an automatic translation mode, which “hears” when people speak to you in different languages and translates it for you. The Pro 3s also have a built-in heart rate sensor which lets you track certain kinds of exercise activity without a fitness tracker. And when doing so, they have a digital assistant, akin to Spotify’s ‘popular’ DJ mode, to egg you on. Oh, and they’re slightly smaller too.
Are these AirPods Pro 3 game-changing features? Will they even work in all regions and across your device? It’s hard to say given that we haven’t tested the new earbuds yet (and Apple’s terms and conditions are only just rolling in after the event), but they’re arguably the key features, and so should be your key points of consideration if you’re considering which AirPods to buy.
6. Price
Going through all these features, you’ve surely noticed that the AirPods Pro 3 are just better than the AirPods 4. Well ‘duh’, because of the one detail I haven’t shared yet: the price.
The AirPods 4 cost $129 / £129 / AU$219. That’s before deals, or vouchers you have for your chosen retailer, or the puppy eyes you give to the cashier at your chosen store (disclaimer: I’ve never tried this and I don’t know if it works).
What about the AirPods Pro 3? Nearly twice as much, at $249 / £229 / AU$399. They’re dramatically more expensive (though they are the same price as the Pro 2, which is something to be grateful for) and if you don’t care about the new features enough to pay that much more, I can certainly relate to that.
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tom.bedford@futurenet.com (Tom Bedford)
