I have had my AirPods Pro 3 for exactly two weeks, which is not really enough time for a long-term review. This is not going to be an especially scientific short-term one either. I do not own measurement equipment, I cannot tell you what a frequency-response graph means beyond the extremely obvious, and I am not going to play the same thirty seconds of a lossless jazz recording twenty times to tell you whether the cymbals sound 4% more cymbal-y.
I watch DankPods. That is about as close as my audio credentials get. The most "pro" thing I do is software development, which gives me approximately zero additional qualifications for reviewing earphones. I can spend an afternoon arguing with a compiler, but Wade could hand me a graph and I would mostly be looking at the wiggly line.
What I do have is a frankly ridiculous amount of listening history. I have been tracking my music since 9 September 2021, and after cleaning out duplicate scrobbles there are 99,282 plays in that history, covering 2,137 different artists and almost five years.
So when I call myself a normal listener, I do not mean that music is an occasional background thing for me. I mean I am not an audio professional. I want my earphones to sound good, be comfortable and work whenever I take them out of the case. As somebody who is neurodivergent, being able to control how much of the world I can hear also matters considerably more to me than being able to explain exactly what is happening around 4 kHz.
These are only the second pair of AirPods I have ever owned. My first were the AirPods 4, which I bought on 4 January 2025 and used every single day until 28 August 2026. They were not one pair in a rotation of headphones. They were just my AirPods, and I used them constantly for nearly twenty months.
There was nothing wrong with them when I upgraded. I gave them to my mum, who now has a perfectly good pair of AirPods 4 rather than them spending the next five years slowly discharging in a drawer. I liked them a lot; I just spent most of the time I owned them wishing I had bought the version with Active Noise Cancellation.
I Already Knew I Wanted ANC
When I bought my AirPods 4, I tested the ANC model in the Apple Store and liked it immediately. Then I bought the version without ANC because it was cheaper.
There was no principled objection to noise cancellation and I had not decided that I preferred hearing the full acoustic majesty of a bus engine. I was buying my first pair of AirPods, there were two versions in front of me, and saving the money mattered more at the time. Given that I used them every day for nearly twenty months, it was hardly a bad purchase.
I still missed ANC. Trying it first made that particularly obvious because I could not even tell myself I did not know what I was missing. I had stood in an Apple Store, put the ANC version in my ears, listened to the room get quieter and then deliberately bought the pair that could not do it.
I love the ANC on the Pro 3s. I could dress that up in more technical language, but it would not make it any more accurate to my experience. I put the AirPods in, turn noise cancellation on and there is suddenly less stuff happening around me. Fans, road noise and the general hum of a room are pushed far enough away that they stop asking for as much of my attention.
Being neurodivergent means I cannot always effortlessly sort sound into important and background. Sometimes noise is simply noise, and enough of it becomes exhausting. I have already found myself putting the AirPods in and switching ANC on without playing anything at all because I just want things to be quieter.
I Haven't Actually Torture-Tested It Yet
There is one fairly large qualification to all of that: I have not used these anywhere properly loud yet. The most demanding environment so far has probably been walking to the shop beside a main road.
They handled that nicely. Traffic was still there, obviously, but it became much less dominant. I am not going to turn cars drove past while I went to the shop into an authoritative judgement about planes, the London Underground or anything similarly noisy.
My first proper test should come on 22 September, when I am getting the train to go for some drinks with a friend. That is much closer to what I had in mind when I wanted ANC in the first place: track noise, announcements, people talking, stations and a fairly constant layer of sound for an extended period. I am genuinely curious to see how much of that disappears once I am sitting on the train.
The Fit Was... A Bit Weird
ANC was the part I knew I wanted. The silicone tips were the gamble.
I am aware that AirPods 5 were announced two days ago. If you prefer the normal open-ear AirPods shape, they probably make considerably more sense as a direct upgrade from AirPods 4.
I have discovered that I actually prefer silicone ear tips, provided they fit properly.
I have owned much cheaper silicone-tip earphones before where the fit was annoying enough that I was constantly aware of them loosening, sitting slightly wrong or needing to be pushed back into place. Spending £179 on another pair only to discover that my ears hated them would have been irritating.
Apple at least gives you a useful way to check. The Acoustic Seal Test checks the seal in each ear, so I could try a size and get something more useful back than well, I think that feels right. Actually changing the tips was mildly awkward for me, though.
I have virtually no dexterity in my right hand. Swapping a tip means holding a tiny, very smooth AirPod securely, pulling off a small piece of silicone and then lining up the replacement closely enough to press it into place. With two dextrous hands that is probably barely worth thinking about. With one hand doing nearly all of the useful manipulation, it took a little longer.
I eventually got through the different tips, ran the Acoustic Seal Test and found something that worked. It was fiddly, but I have had a very different kind of accessibility problem with technology before.
Sometime around 2019 — I am a bit hazy on the exact date — I saved up for a Nintendo Switch Lite. I had watched reviews, read about it and generally obsessed over the thing before buying it. I absolutely did not go into that purchase blind.
We bought the Switch Lite in a shop, got into the car and I immediately tried to set it up. Almost as quickly I realised that I physically could not play it. The size, grip and control placement did not work with the movement I have in my right hand, and because the controls are part of the console there was nothing for me to reposition.
Fortunately, my dad knew how excited I had been and relented on paying the difference so we could swap it for the then-current "Red Box" Nintendo Switch. Detachable Joy-Con changed the problem completely. Instead of working out how to force my hand around the console, I could put the right controller somewhere I could actually operate it.
It also changed how I think about reviews. I had watched them. They told me about the screen, battery, games, controls and whether the reviewer thought it was comfortable to hold. None of that could really answer the question I needed answering: can my particular hand physically use this thing?
Changing the AirPods tips was nowhere near that. "Try the other ear tips" takes a little more work when you have very little dexterity on one side, but I could do it. I bought these from Amazon on sale for £179, spent a bit longer than most people probably would working out how to grip them, and eventually got a fit that passed Apple's test.
The tips still feel like they are in my ears. That has not vanished after two weeks, and I do not think it is going to. They just no longer annoy me.
They feel present but secure, and I do not spend my time wondering whether one is slowly working its way loose. Cheaper silicone-tip earphones I have used in the past could make me constantly aware that something was in my ear because it felt irritating or unstable. With the Pro 3s, I can feel the seal without feeling any urge to fix it.
After nearly twenty months with open AirPods 4, that took a few days to get used to. I now prefer it.
It is also why the AirPods 5 announcement does not make me regret buying these two weeks earlier. Apple has stuck with an open-ear design on the AirPods 5. I have just discovered that, given the choice and a tip that actually fits, I would rather have the seal.
Conversation Awareness Is Fantastic
Conversation Awareness might be my favourite feature after ANC because it gets rid of a tiny annoyance I repeated thousands of times with my AirPods 4.
Somebody talking to me used to mean pausing whatever I was listening to or pulling one AirPod out. If it was a five-second interaction, I still had to do it; if the conversation turned into five minutes, I then had an AirPod sitting in my hand until it was over.
Now I can just start talking. The media volume drops, the person in front of me becomes easier to hear and, once the conversation is finished, the volume comes back. After two weeks I am already beginning to assume that is just what my earphones will do.
I do not particularly care how much processing is happening behind the scenes. I care that somebody can ask me a question and I no longer have to take the bloody thing out of my ear.
They Sound Good
Here is where I become particularly useless as an audio reviewer: the AirPods Pro 3 sound good. Really good, actually.
I prefer them to my AirPods 4. Music feels fuller, there is more bass and I find it easier to pick things out when a track has a lot happening at once. I have watched enough DankPods to know that there is an entire world of headphones, amps, measurements and increasingly specific vocabulary beyond that, but I am not about to build a headphone wall.
I am not judging these after listening to twelve songs in an Apple Store, though.
After removing duplicate scrobbles, my listening history contains 99,282 plays across 2,137 artists. More interestingly, 93.9% of those plays are tracks I have heard at least ten times.
I repeat things. A lot.
Powerwolf alone accounts for 7,152 plays, just over seven per cent of everything I have logged in the last five years. At one point I listened to them on 102 consecutive days. More than two thousand of those plays were immediate repeats, where the same Powerwolf track started again less than ten minutes after the previous play.
If I have heard a recording hundreds of times through different earphones, speakers, phones and computers, I know what I expect it to sound like. I might not be able to draw a frequency curve afterwards, but if the bass suddenly lands differently, something I had not noticed before becomes obvious or the whole thing turns into mud when it gets busy, I notice.
That is basically my reference point.
The range matters too. The same history jumps between Powerwolf, C418, AURORA, Dimension, Chicane, The Prodigy, game and musical soundtracks, acoustic music and long runs of sleep ambience. I am not using one narrow kind of music as a reference.
What I am listening to while writing this — mainly LOBOTOMY 2 by ythotkk and The Dark Triad 2 by Clarnex — is more extreme than most of that history, but not completely disconnected from it.
LOBOTOMY 2 is a short hardcore track that sits around hardtekk and much more extreme hardcore. The Dark Triad 2 lives in a similar hardtekk-adjacent electronic world. Both are busy and bass-heavy, which makes them more useful to me than finding some pristine acoustic recording purely because it is supposed to make expensive headphones sound impressive.
One of the things I notice with the Pro 3s is that busy music is easier to follow. There is more weight than I remember from the AirPods 4, but it does not feel as though the low end has swallowed everything else. When LOBOTOMY 2 gets ridiculous, it still sounds like several ridiculous things happening at once rather than one large blob of noise.
Then I can put something completely different on and care about something else entirely.
That is probably the closest I can get to a useful audio review without beginning a sentence with "the upper mids".
Sometimes I want hardtekk loud enough to make my brain rattle. Sometimes I want Powerwolf for the hundredth time. Sometimes it is C418 in the middle of the night, and sometimes I put ambient music on the Nest Hub and let it fill the room while I sleep.
The AirPods only cover the parts of that where I actually choose headphones, but when I do I want one pair that can move between all of it without making me think about the hardware.
The AirPods 4 managed that for nearly twenty months. The Pro 3s sound noticeably better to me.
Maybe Wade could put them on a proper rig and explain exactly why. I can tell you that LOBOTOMY 2 sounds good through them.
We each have our role.
The Build Quality Is Exactly What I Expected
The physical quality is similarly uncomplicated. They feel extremely well made, although for this sort of money I would be annoyed if they did not.
The case feels solid, the hinge feels good and the AirPods themselves have the usual Apple feeling of being properly finished. There are no rough edges, odd gaps or bits that make me wonder how they are going to survive living in a pocket.
My AirPods 4 managed nearly twenty months of being carried around and used every day, and were still in good enough condition when I replaced them that I could clean them up and give them to my mum. I am hoping the Pro 3s have a similarly boring lifespan.
I do not need my earphones to feel luxurious every time I touch them. I need to be able to throw the case in a pocket, use them constantly and not worry about them.
"Pro" Apparently Means Me Now
There is something funny about owning something called AirPods Pro when my relationship with audio is this ordinary.
I care enough about music to have tracked five years of it and to replay the same song dozens of times in a day. I just do not care about audio hardware in the same way. I know the recordings, I know what I enjoy and I know when a pair of earphones makes them more enjoyable. I do not need to pretend I understand a measurement graph because somebody has put a coloured line on it.
For me, the noise control is still at least as important as whether the Pro 3s are technically the most accurate earphones available for £179. There are times when being able to reduce the amount of sound around me makes existing in a noisy place easier, and that matters considerably more to me than having perfect frequency response.
The accessibility side is similarly practical. Changing the ear tips is awkward with limited dexterity, but awkward is manageable. I have had the experience of doing the research, spending the money and only discovering after opening the box that a device's physical design meant I could not use it. These AirPods did not do that.
After two weeks, they are doing what I hoped they would. I can still feel the silicone tips, but they fit securely. Conversation Awareness has already become something I would miss. They sound better than my old AirPods, the build quality is excellent and, after nearly twenty months of knowing I wanted ANC, I finally have it.
The train on the 22nd will be the first time I really find out what the noise cancellation can do somewhere properly noisy. Until then, this is about as technical as my verdict needs to be:
They're good earphones, and I like them.
Ask me again after the train journey and maybe I will have developed extremely strong opinions about British railway acoustics.