Apple’s first earbuds with in-ear heart rate tracking are the freshly refined Powerbeats Pro 2. They have a smaller design and are powered by the same H2 chip as Apple’s AirPods Pro 2. The tech is cool, and the sound quality is awesome. However, the more time I spend with the buds, the more it’s clear that Apple made these for people who spend a lot of time tracking fitness metrics and doing various workouts, but not for everyone.
Most people spending $349 on earbuds will likely gravitate towards AirPods Pros 2. However, if you live an active lifestyle and need a more secure bud, it’s going to be hard to beat the latest and greatest Powerbeats. They lack a few key features that AirPods users will miss if they transfer over, but they make up for it with a more direct focus on what athletes need from a pair of earbuds.
This leaves us with a tradeoff that’s answered by one easy question: how often do your current earbuds fall out of your ears? If the answer is “a lot,” the Powerbeats Pros are the best option for you.
First impressions
Compared to the previous Powerbeats Pro, the new buds and their case have been redesigned to be smaller and more comfortable. This allows the large case to be slightly more pocketable and makes the buds easier to wear with glasses on. My unit is the fun ‘Hyper Purple,’ but you can also pick them up in black, grey or a sporty orange hue. Notably, there’s no classic Beats red on any of the buds. When asked why, the company said that its team of designers are always looking for forward-looking, trendy and sporty colours, and this time, red didn’t make it to production.
While the case is smaller than its predecessor, it’s still much larger than most of its competitors. I understand that Beats wanted to tie this design to its other earbuds, but I would have loved to see a longer, flatter case like the Nothing Ear Open from 2024. That one is a lot easier to use and store, even though it’s above average in size. It would also have been nice for Beats to add a magnetic ring to the case’s wireless charging pad so it could offer MagSafe support. I’ll also mention that the case feels pretty cheap, and the lid feels fragile like you could snap it off.
In the ear, the buds fit really nicely and are more comfortable than you’d expect. They latch onto you very securely, and since they rarely move, you don’t notice them as much. But when you do notice and try to adjust them, you’re going to play/pause your music accidentally. Even wearing them with a toque was frustrating since I kept hitting them when adjusting my hat. Not that it matters to most people who are looking at these earbuds for being active, but you can’t really sleep in them since it’s so easy to trigger play/pause with an accidental press.
On the positive side, each bud has a volume rocker, making it super easy to change the volume. It would have been nice to give a simple tap on this button to play/pause instead of tapping on the pressure-sensitive Beats logo, but for athletes who like to modulate their tunes as they work out, this makes it simple.
The active noise-cancelling (ANC) could be a bit stronger overall, but it’s not something I’d complain about since it takes most of the background noise out of your music. The Powerbeats Pro 2 uses the same H2 chip as the AirPods Pro 2, but I find Apple’s earbuds to block more noise overall. Since they use the same chip, it’s a bit strange that Beats can’t use the ‘Adaptive Transparency’ feature that was added to Apple’s pro earbuds in 2023. When I’m jogging outside, I always use Adaptive Transparency to block out most of the noise while allowing me to hear new things when I get near them. I also use it almost every time I walk through the city with earbuds, so I’m a bit disheartened and perplexed by its absence on the Powerbeats Pro 2, especially considering they cost more than Air Pods Pros.
The H2 chipset does allow them to connect with minimal lag to the Apple Vision Pro, just like the modern AirPods Pros. It also allows for the rest of the features to be very similar to Apple’s own earbuds. You get quick connection and iCloud pairing, plus the ability to control the buds’ software from the iOS Control Center. There’s also Find My support, but there isn’t a speaker on the case to make it easy to locate, which I think all buds (especially at this price, and with cases this bulky) should have.
You shouldn’t need to charge these that often, though since the large case supplies 35 extra hours of battery on top of the existing 10 hours you get from the buds. This gives the Powerbeats Pro 2 better battery life than a lot of the competition. That said, you will lose a few hours total if you use these with ANC enabled.
Why you want these
These are a great option if you need ultra-stable earbuds and want a top-quality sound. They lock in your ears and come with five different ear tip sizes to fit in a majority of ears. The sound didn’t leave me with many complaints and had a really pleasing bass hit. However, I found that the mids didn’t hit as hard as I wanted. Overall, it’s fine and once the music starts playing, it’s easy to get lost in the detailed sound, but I wish I could tweak the EQ in the settings to dial these into my tastes.
While I think the ear hooks will move more units, the star of the show is the new tech that allows them to track your heart rate when you’re wearing them. It’s pretty cool, and as far as I can gather, works well. However, it’s not as straightforward to use as the Apple Watch, even though it’s based on the same tech. The earbud-based heart rate sensor only works in apps that are updated to work with Apple’s new earbud-heart-rate-tracking API. At launch, this didn’t even include Apple Fitness, so I needed to download the Nike Run Club and another app called Open to test the new feature.
Open is a meditation app that pumps calming sounds and instructions into your earbuds so it’s kind of cool to see your heartbeat change over a long meditation, but I didn’t feel like I got that much out of it. There’s another app called YaoYao that tracks you as you jump rope and takes things a step further by using the accelerometer in the earbuds to count your jumps. This is slick, but when I take a step back I’m not sure how many people really care about this and aren’t already wearing a wrist-based fitness tracker.
On Android, the earbuds interface with any app that supports third-party heart rate monitors, so they should be even more usable on Google’s mobile ecosystem at launch. However, I expect more apps will build in support on iOS as the year goes on, especially because this suggests that a future version of AirPods could also come with in-ear heart rate tracking.
On the Android front, these earbuds work with the Beats app to update the buds, and change noise modes among other settings. You can also use these with the Android Find My Device network, and they have Android quick pairing tech as well.
Pushing the budget
For most people, the latest AirPods Pro’s are the best choice. They have more useful software features like shaking your head to dismiss notifications and ‘Adaptive Transparency,’ which are two features I constantly use on my AirPods Pros 2, and I’m really disappointed Apple decided not to include them here. Especially considering the price and the fact that the Beats have the same internal H2 chip, which should allow for more parity between the two top-end Apple earbuds.
While the heartbeat sensor in the new Powerbeats Pros is really cool, I’m not sure how many people it will tempt over. It seems niche, and I’d expect most people who care about tracking their metrics when they workout are already wearing some kind of fitness tracker and probably would rather have the variety of metrics derived from that, as opposed to the single heartbeat counter in these earbuds.
That means the main standout feature is the ear hooks. The simple design that makes earbuds lock in is needed by some users, and considering how good these buds are, they won’t be disappointed paying for it. For instance, my mom had ear surgery when she was a kid and has never been able to wear traditional earbuds comfortably. So someone like her needs these ear hooks to wear buds. I’m sure there are others with unorthodox ear shapes or who participate in a lot of extreme sports who will need the same. For the rest of us, AirPods exist.
Sure, there are a million sound features on the Powerbeats Pro 2 website but when it comes down to it, if you’re going to spend this much money on a pair of wireless earbuds, you might as well get the more feature-rich AirPods Pro’s 2, unless you really need the hooks, the in-ear heart rate sensor or the longer battery life.
In the future, I think it would make a lot more sense for Apple to keep the same features on the top-end AirPods and Powerbeats. It feels awkward having these two earbuds compete against each other on anything other than fit and comfort. Having arbitrary software lines drawn between the Powerbeats Pro 2 and the AirPods Pro 2 feels out of place, considering they’re priced so similarly, and that price represents the top end of the wireless earbud spectrum.
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