AirPods Pro 3

Five years is a long time to own a pair of earphones. Most technology barely survives two.

My previous AirPods went everywhere with me. On the tube, on walks, on flights, in the office, in the gym. They were the first thing in my ears in the morning and often the last thing out at night. I listened to more music, more podcasts, more audiobooks than I ever had before, simply because the thing enabling me to do it was always there, always in my pocket, always thirty seconds away from being in use.

When they finally started to give out — battery life that had shrunk from fine to embarrassing, a left pod with a seal that no longer sealed properly — I replaced them without hesitation. The question was never whether to replace them. The question was what with.

In short: AirPods Pro 3. And they are not a marginal upgrade.

Noise cancellation as a superpower

The noise cancellation on the new ones is, genuinely, in a different category. My old AirPods had decent noise cancellation, the kind that makes a busy street more manageable. The Pro 3 has the kind that makes you forget you are on the street at all. On the tube, it is almost eerie. The carriages, the announcements, the friction of wheels on track, all of it drops away into a muffled nothing. It sounds like a small thing until you experience it, and then it becomes difficult to imagine commuting without it.

The heart-rate surprise

The heart rate monitoring is the part that surprised me most. I had not expected to care. I use a dedicated fitness tracker for that kind of data. But the AirPods Pro 3 measures your heart rate continuously and in context: during a walk, during a meeting, during the forty-five minutes you are trying to wind down before sleep. That granularity is genuinely different. It is not a snapshot; it is a running commentary on your day.

The best wearable is the one you forget

But here is what I actually want to say about them: AirPods are not the kind of technology that impresses you with their presence. They impress you with their absence. The best version of a wearable is the one you forget you are wearing, the one that gives you access to music or quiet or a phone call with zero friction and then disappears. The Pro 3 does this better than anything I have used. They connect instantly, they sit comfortably for hours, the transparency mode is so convincing it sounds artificial, and the noise cancellation is so complete it becomes a kind of superpower.

There are cheaper earphones. Some of them are very good. But I have used these things for multiple hours every day for five years running, and I expect to do the same with the new ones. At that level of daily use, the cost per hour of something this good becomes genuinely negligible. This is not a luxury. It is the technology that soundtracks your entire life.

Some tech punches above its weight. Some tech just is the weight.

AirPods Pro 3 are in the second category, and I would buy them again without a second thought.