If you’ve been holding out for the best possible deal on the latest AirPods Pro, today might be the day to take the plunge. Apple’s newest earbuds have dropped to $200 ahead of Black Friday proper, and that’s $50 off their usual price and the best we’ve seen. They join the second-generation, standard AirPods, which have been on discount for a few days at $90 a pair. Some colors of the AirPods Max are also on sale for $450, which is $100 less than usual.
The second-gen AirPods Pro may not look very different from their predecessor, but that’s because most of the changes lie on the inside. They include Apple’s new H2 chip, which enables things like hands-free Siri, but also improvements like better sound quality and ANC, along with new features like Adaptive Transparency. In our testing, we found the new Pros to have significantly improved active noise cancellation and better sound than the model that came before it. The improved Transparency Mode is also the best we’ve tried on any wireless earbuds — it almost sounds like you’re not wearing them at all when you enable this feature. That means you can more easily jump in and out of conversations, or just keep your AirPods in your ears for longer periods of time in between actively listening to music.
Otherwise, the new Pros are much the same as the previous models. You get deep integration with the Apple ecosystem, which is a big reason why some will choose these buds over others. Quick pairing and switching allows you to use them in between Apple devices seamlessly, and they have a decent, six-hour battery life. Their wireless charging case is both Qi-certified and MagSafe-compatible, so you have a lot of options when it comes to picking a charger for these buds. Overall, they’re some of our favorite wireless earbuds at the moment, and they’ll be hard to beat for Apple fanatics.
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