First impressions of AirPods Pro

I picked up some AirPods Pro—AirPod Pros? ProPods?—yesterday and having spent some time with them I’m very pleased. They’re steep in price but sound great.

Firstly, the flagship feature, noise cancellation, works really nicely. It’s never going to rival the Boses, Beats, or Sonys of the headphone world, but they were never meant to. For small in-ear buds, the noise cancellation works really well and is impressive for such small earbuds.

Next, the second new mode for AirPods Pro, transparency mode, takes a little getting used to. The best way I can describe it is that you’re hearing everything in your immediate surroundings but EQed to boost the high end of sounds. It uses the microphones at the side of the earbuds and essentially just passes sound through.

That said, while I was walking the dog on a main road having the AirPods Pro set to transparency really helped keep me aware of my surroundings without compromising what you’re listening to, which in my case was The West Wing Weekly.

One final point that I appreciate is being able to set a physical button to invoke Siri. It just saves me from yelling “Hey Siri” like a mad person when I’m running or exercising.