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Headphones · Apple AirPods

Apple AirPods 3

6owners with an opinion
40%of verdicts positive
2/3positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for sound; criticized for comfort and software.

What owners wrote

Likes it
I have extremely weird ear canals and no, I mean absolutely NO in-ear earbuds will stay in my ears for longer than 15 minutes, even with the christmas tree earplug-style tips on them. For that reason I am relegated to either my bulky but beloved Sennheiser WH1000XM4 headphones (or, even less practical: my wired planar magnetics) or... airpods 3. Somehow despite trying every brand of "not-in-ear-ear-bud" a-la Airpods/Earpods I have found absolutely nothing that has the frequency response of Apple's design. The fidelity is nothing to write home about but I'm not missing any of the music. Even well-regarded "flathead" earbuds, conversely, simply have no response whatsoever below 120hz.
Neutral
Been using it with my airpods 3 anc on a pixel with custom rom (what a curious setup thinking about it). And it's good enough but kinda annoying the airpods don't seem to save my configs and connection isn't really stable. Not complaining since they're not even supposed to be supported tho, thanks for the free stuff ! I wonder if I'd be able to contribute better support with my very limited knowledge of bluetooth analysis...
Doesn’t like it
This is needed even if you are IN the Apple ecosystem. I don't want to upgrade my phone to the latest half-baked iOS version, so Apple purposefully degrades the functionality of my new AirPods 3. Siri won't switch noise cancellation modes, I can't see the battery status, they get relegated to the "generic bluetooth device" section, and even the battery widget will display three identical headphone icons for headphones and the case. How do I know this is done purposefully and not just because AirPods 3 are so new and different from AirPods 2? Well, macOS has been neglected of late, and Apple didn't find the time to break things there, so Airpods 3 work with macOS just as well as Airpods 2 did — switching modes, battery status display, etc. It's very disappointing, and not a great customer experience.
Doesn’t like it
I got the 15 mostly for USB-C. I still have cable hell because my AirPods are lightning so sometimes I need USB-C -> lightning and sometimes I need USB-A -> lightning I might get an Airpod 4 for the USB-C though the Airpod 3 sucked and I'm suspecting the Airpod 4 is just as bad. Falls out (compared to Airpod 2). Pinch to play/pause/que sucks compared to Tap to play/pause/cue. Several friends had similar experiences including several friends that work at Apple. All of them returned their Airpod 3s.
Likes itHasn’t owned it
It has A19 Pro. A19 Pro has matmul acceleration in its GPU, the equivalent of Nvidia's Tensor cores. This would make future Macs extremely viable for local LLMs. Currently, Macs have high memory bandwidth and high VRAM capacity but low prompt processing speeds. Give it a large context and it'll take forever before the first token is generated. If the M5 generation gets this GPU upgrade, which I don't see why not, then the era of viable local LLM inferencing is upon us. That's the most exciting thing from this Apple's event in my opinion. PS. I also like the idea of the ultra thin iPhone Air, the 2x better noise cancellation and live translation of Airpods 3, high blood pressure detection of the new Watch, and the bold sexy orange color of the iPhone 17 Pro. Overall, this is as good as it gets for incremental updates in Apple's ecosystem in a while.