So the AirPods 4 are finally official. Or, to be more precise, two new pairs of AirPods 4 are finally official. That’s right, at Apple’s recent iPhone 16 launch event, the tech giant chose to unveil two different flavours of its new wireless earbuds – one pair with noise-cancelling tech built-in and one without.
Now, the fact that Apple has launched a pair of open earbuds with ANC is obviously big news – I am particularly intrigued to hear how the noise-cancelling technology has been implemented. But, something else has happened in the aftermath of the cheaper, non-ANC pair being released.
You see, the AirPods 4 seem to have killed off, finally, the AirPods 2nd Generation which launched way back in 2019. Any trace of Apple’s previous cheap wireless earbuds has been removed from its website, with any external Apple links taking you straight to the AirPods 4 or to a page which says “The page you’re looking for can’t be found”. Which, for me, is good news.
You see the entry-level AirPods 4 are priced at $129/£129 which, coincidentally, is the price at which the AirPods 2 were sitting before the event kicked off. Obviously, there isn’t enough room on the planet for two cheap pairs of AirPods so one had to go.
I was beginning to feel as though the AirPods 2 were, quite frankly, getting in the way of the rest of Apple's AirPods range, especially following the launch of the new-look AirPods 3. Sound quality was, in the words of our AirPods (2019) review, “decent” but I could name several pairs of wireless earbuds that I would recommend over them. The fit also drove me slightly mad. Once again, you could get a better seal from buds costing a fraction of the price. Then there was the fact they didn’t have any on-bud controls, which is slightly crazy given what rivals offer at this kind of money.
Given the AirPods 4 seem heavily based on the AirPods 3, they should sound better, fit better (Apple claims they are “the most comfortable AirPods ever”) and be nicer to use, as they not only have on-bud controls but they also use Apple’s more advanced H2 chipset. Whether I will prefer them over a pair of AirPods Pro 2 remains to be seen, but I think they will be an interesting proposition, especially the noise-cancelling version.
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Apple's AirPods 4 launch with two model variants: one with noise-cancelling, one without
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