Apple AirPods Pro 3 review: More is more

It says something that the AirPods Pro have held their own in the true wireless earbuds space, despite the relative rarity with which the company making the earbuds updates the line. Sony, Bose and others are constantly trying to move the category forward. However, for most consumers, the pitch of “AirPods with better noise cancelling” remains hard to beat.

Picking up where 2023’s minor update left off, the third-generation AirPods Pro offers a timely reprise of that formula. The form-factor might be familiar on the outside. However, on the inside, Apple’s latest set of earbuds have been re-engineered for even better noise cancellation plus a few new tricks.

The new AirPods Pro are more than a reminder that Apple sets the bar that the rest of the true wireless market strives to meet. They’re evidence that the company behind the iPhone is still capable of rising above those lofty expectations when it chooses to.

In Australia, the Apple AirPods Pro 3 are priced at $429. That's pretty pricey by the standards of in-ear headphones but not too far off what the competition is charging when it comes to the premium end of the market. For instance, Sennheiser's Momentum True Wireless 4 start at $499. 

Still, if you're looking to compare the price being paid here to rivals like Samsung or Sony, the AirPods Pro 3 do sit slightly higher than the Galaxy Buds3 Pro and the Sony WF-1000XM5 in terms of price. Fortunately, you can always save by shopping around. Check out the table below for a round-up of deals for the Apple AirPods Pro 3.

Although the overall aesthetic is a natural evolution of the clean white look that previous AirPods have embodied, the AirPods Pro 3 distinguish themselves with a more compact design that offers greater in-ear stability. In practice, they’re lighter on your ears but just as intuitive to use thanks to a familiar but reliable control scheme.

Out of the box, the AirPod Pro 3 come with five different ear-tips to choose from. That customisability comes complemented by durability, thanks to IP57 sweat and dust resistance on the outside. Then, on the inside, the AirPods 3 Pro incorporate an adaptive equaliser and multiport acoustic architecture designed to deliver improved spatial audio. Perhaps most importantly, there’s also a set of new ultra-low noise microphones that enable the earbuds to remove twice as much unwanted noise as their predecessors. 

In addition to these hardware enhancements, the AirPods Pro 3 come with a number of nifty new software features. 

The first of these is support for heart-rate and workout tracking, which is supported via integration with Apple's Workout Buddy virtual fitness coach. This is as cool in concept as it is in execution, though it does feel a bit unnecessary if you’re already using an Apple Watch or another wearable. This feature is also locked to Apple hardware, which means you can’t take advantage of it should you pair the earbuds up with an Android device.

The other big new feature here is support for Live Translation, which uses Apple Intelligence to offer language translation in real-time, akin to what you can find in the latest Samsung and Google smartphones. It’s a little slow, but mostly does the trick. As someone who has dabbled with this kind of AI-powered tech, I wasn’t blown away, but your mileage may vary based on how many tech companies have bombarded you about this kind of thing before - as well as the specific languages you’re looking to translate. 

At the time of writing, the AirPods Pro 3 support real translation for English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish. According to Apple, additional languages including Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Italian will be arriving via software update later this year.

Looking past these party tricks, the AirPods Pro 3 also offers more meaningful gains when it comes to battery life. 

Where the last generation AirPods Pro offered about six hours of playback per charge, the latest one bumps that figure up to eight hours. That’s a fairly generous bump that puts the new AirPods in line with the best the category has to offer, but it does come with a caveat. A fully-charged case for the AirPods Pro 3 will get you 24 hours of playback. That's six hours less than what you could get from the previous generation. 

The improvements when it comes to noise cancellation are more notable. Although Apple’s claim that the new ultra-low-noise microphones on the AirPods Pro 3 can double the amount of noise removal sounds like a big claim, the reality held up surprisingly well. Compared to some of the other true wireless earbuds I’ve recently tested, the difference was night and day. It honestly felt like the AirPods Pro 3 delivered the kind of in-ear noise cancelling that you usually can only get through a set of over-ear headphones like the Sonos Ace.

The sound quality was similarly impressive. Subject to our usual testing playlist, the Apple AirPods Pro 3 delivered some of the best results we’ve seen from a set of true wireless earbuds to date. Whether it was the vibrant vocals of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “I Didn’t Just Come Here to Dance” or the bubbling bass of Childish Gambino’s “3005”, they delivered the goods. 

The microphone on the AirPods 3 Pro wasn’t as much of a highlight, but nor was it a weak link in the overall experience. There was a crispness to the call quality these earbuds offered that set it apart from what other earbuds like the Nothing Ear 3 or even the standard AirPods 4 can offer.