AirPods Pro 3 Sports In-Depth Review: Heart Rate Redemption?

Here's everything you need to know about the AirPods Pro 3, from heart rate accuracy to sports usage and more! When Apple surprises me, it doesn’t tend to be some flashy feature that blows the rest of the world away. Instead, it tends to be them doing something slightly out of their usual swim lane, or their norms. For example, adding in running efficiency metrics a few years past. This year, that surprise goes to the AirPods Pro 3 team in delivering mind-bogglingly good heart rate accuracy. Like, I won’t beat around the bush: After the dismal accuracy in the PowerBeats 2 Pro earlier this year, this is an astonishing turnaround. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The AirPods Pro 3 have plenty of new features when it comes to sound quality, noise reduction, and more. But more importantly to this site, are all of the sports and fitness features they’ve added. This includes adding heart rate sensing to the tiny little buds in order to measure your heart rate, along with a new feature in the Apple Fitness app to record your workout (including GPS data from your phone), as well as the ability to have Apple’s new Apple Intelligence-enabled Workout Buddy feature. At the same time, while they had the PowerBeats 2 Pro base to work from, much has changed here – and some features have even been removed. The choice might not be as clear-cut as you think. So, let’s dive into all the details. Note that Apple has provided a loaner set of AirPods Pro 3’s, though I’ve already ordered my own. Heck, setting aside any fitness aspects, I just want them for the vastly improved noise cancellation. At someone that spends a ton of time on airplanes, that alone is worth it for me. In any case, once I’m done with these, they’ll go back to Apple. With that, let’s dive into it!