This was inevitable. Since my foray into the Apple eco system which started with the purchase of iPad mini I have been slowly getting all the Apple products. The iPad mini, then iPhone 13 pro, Watch series 7 and sooner or later I will be replacing my Thinkpad with a Macbook Pro or Air( still deciding).
Getting the AirPods Pro sounded pretty much a no brainer at this point.
Review
First and foremost I really like the design. The stem was something I laughed at when I first saw them on the original Airpods but shorter stems on the air pods pro and looking at other earbuds in the market I am really liking this design. In my wireless earbuds journey I have tried and returned many earbuds for various reasons: the lack of comfort, their fit, just how they look when they are on my ears and the sound quality. But with AirPods Pro none of those seem to be an issue.
The AirPods Pro fit my ears well, they sound great, ANC is awesome, they are compact and comfortable in my ears when worn for longer periods of time.
One thing that I noticed was there were no physical controls and I wasn’t very happy about it. Butttt there is Siri!!!
In my review of iPhone 13 and watch I talked about how much I was impressed with Siri and because of that you will never want to have physical buttons on the AirPods Pro.
I am not exaggerating when I say that you wouldn’t want physical buttons on the Airpods pro, because the things that you can get done with Siri, there wouldn’t be enough buttons or gestures to achieve it.
During my walks where I listen to podcasts I had no issue instructing Siri to turn on/off the anc and transparency mode, increase/decrease the volume. I was able to ask Siri to rewind by x second or minutes , play next podcast, and even have it take notes to capture the thoughts in my mind or on the podcast I am listening to during the walks. And because of Siri, presence of touch gestures or physical buttons would just seem redundant to me.
Summoning Siri has never failed. For me this is the most critical thing about having voice control instead of physical controls. The execution is everything here, If I am going to be repeating “hey Siri” multiple times to get it to respond to me then I think i wouldn’t really be interested in using it but that hasn’t happened at all. And similarly none of the commands that I have given it has failed.
The AirPods Pro integrates well with other Apple products, I connected to my phone and am able to use it without having to go through pairing on my iPad and Apple watch. Apple ecosystem for the win!
Compared to all the earbuds that I have tried and returned I finally found a replacement for the Samsung Galaxy buds.
I haven’t been able to test the battery life because currently I am mostly using it during my walks(~1 hour) listening to podcasts. But if I can get the advertised 4.5 hours I think I would still be very happy.
Nitpicking
The foams give a good seal but every time I take airpods pro off my ears the foams get inverted which makes me anxious because I fear that one day it might just fall of the airpods when I take them off my ears. I am not suggesting that it would happen but I am just anxious, but that because of that I am more conscious when I remove them off my ears to ensure that they don’t fall off.
EDIT: (02/15/2022) Turns out there are physical buttons to pause/play:single click on the side of the stem, turn on/off transparency: long press, next song: double click.
I feel pretty dumb that it took me all this time to discover this.