Apple’s second-gen AirPods Pro drop to their lowest price ever for Prime Day

Apple’s second-gen AirPods Pro haven’t even been available for a month and you can still already find a deal on them. The price has dropped a bit as part of Amazon’s major Prime Day sale. You’ll be able to pick up a pair of the new AirPods Pro for $235, which is $14 off the regular price. Sure, that’s not the steepest discount ever, but it’s the lowest price we’ve seen for the earbuds to date.

Buy Apple AirPods (2nd-gen) at Amazon – $235

We gave the latest AirPods Pro a score of 88 in our review, an improvement over the 87 we gave to the first-gen set. While the design is ostensibly the same, Apple made some upgrades to the internals (including the introduction of an H2 chip), as well as one on the outside. Its latest higher-end earbuds have swipe controls. However, we found them somewhat finicky and had to steady the stem with a thumb in order to control the volume by swiping. The second-gen AirPods Pro also offer so-so battery life (six hours with active noise cancellation enabled and seven hours with it off) and we had mixed results with the Personalized Spatial Audio feature, with a sound profile that was too treble-focused.

Overall, though, we felt that the second-gen AirPods Pro are a solid upgrade over the first-edition earbuds. Apple has improved the sound quality (including for SharePlay audio) and it offers the best transparency mode in any earbuds. The new AirPods Pro deliver solid ANC performance as well. On top of that, the ability to seamlessly switch from one Apple device to another is handy for those who are entrenched in the company’s ecosystem.

As for the charging case, that now has a speaker, which should make it easier for people to pinpoint its location if they’ve misplaced it (having a U1 chip to locate it with Find My helps too). The case is IPX4 rated, like the earbuds, and it has a lanyard loop — though you’ll need to buy a lanyard separately.

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Waymo’s cafeteria workers are forming a union

The cafeteria workers at Waymo’s offices are forming a union, according to NBC News. As the news organization notes, that makes them the latest group of people to organize at one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent companies. Waymo’s food service personnel are also following in the footsteps of the 4,000 Google cafeteria workers who quietly unionized during the COVID-19 pandemic. The autonomous driving tech company used to be an experimental unit under Google before it became an Alphabet subsidiary. 

Like Google’s other food service workers, Waymo’s are employed by contracting firm Sodexo. Workers cited the high cost of living in the Bay Area where Alphabet’s offices are located as the reason why they want to unionize. They said their $24-per-hour pay isn’t enough to live adequately in the city, where rents are astronomical, and that their health plan is prohibitively expensive. The workers are also asking for better treatment and benefits, since they don’t enjoy the same perks as full-time Alphabet employees. 

Organizers for the unionization efforts at Waymo told NBC News that they’ve already gathered signatures from majority of the workers. Sodexo said that it “respects the rights of [its] employees to unionize or not to unionize” but didn’t say whether it will voluntarily recognize the union. If it does, the workers will have to file for an NLRB election to be able to join the other Alphabet cafeteria workers at Unite Here.