Airpods Pro: final thoughts
A few weeks over five years ago, I wrote AirPods Pro: first impressions.
After five years of daily use, those first AirPods Pro have started to show their age. People complain of “hissing” during video conferences. Sometimes one airpod will have trouble connecting, or will generate its own hiss until I literally hit it. Hardware issues, from what I can tell.
Now we’ve hit the end of their life, it’s time to write some final thoughts.
I finished that previous piece with:
Time will tell how I end up settling long term, but Apple have hit a good balance with these headphones. I suspect the convenience of the true wireless, good-enough noise-cancelling and compact size may make these my go-to headphones most of the time.
So what ended up happening?
Overall, the Airpods Pro won decisively. The other headphones have remained in drawers or cupboards for almost the whole of the last five years.
In that original first impressions discussion I talked about three use-cases: commute, office and in flight. Let’s see what I did for each.
Home-working. Well… Covid hit soon after I got the Airpods Pro, and working from home became the norm. So let’s deal with that instead of Office.
I used the Airpods for every video conference. I used them to listen to music so as not to disturb the rest of the household. (And, of course, I used them to block out the rest of the household).
Commute. After things opened back up again, I continued using them for commuting, or, as it became, just having a walk in the morning before starting in my home office. They were perfect for this, and I ended up using the sound cancelling a lot more than I expected.
Flying. After 2022, flying started again, and I again used only the Airpods Pro. They worked just fine, although I never did test them against the Bose QuietComfort I’d previously used.
Over time I also learned to value the conveniences of their being plugged into the Apple ecosystem — automatically connecting to the device I was using at the time and also to new devices without the hassle of pairing — and the really small conveniences, like pausing when they are removed from the ears.
Exactly as I said, their convenience won out every time, and their performance was easily good enough. I’d say that the lifespan was less than I hoped, but they’ve had a lot of usage in that time.
And what’s their replacement? Why, Airpods Pro v2, of course.