- A few weeks ago, I dropped a huge wad of cash on these,
Apple's brand new fangled, fancy AirPod Pro.
They're relatively expensive earbuds
with noise cancellation that replaces
Apple's very popular AirPods
and I promised at that point there
when we did a quick little review of the AirPod Pro
that I would use them longer term
and come back to you with how they worked for me,
traveling, going on a flight,
using them as my everyday AirPods or earbuds.
So now, I have used them for maybe three or four weeks
and I'm ready to give you my review,
my long-term review of the AirPod Pro.
That's today on Dotto Tech.
(light music)
Steve Dotto here, how the heck you doing
this fine day
and we are going to take a bit of a longer term look
at Apple's AirPod Pro
which now I've been using as my main earbuds for
nearly a month and I gotta say that overall,
I do like them.
I'm gonna take you through traveling with them because
one of the big issues that I had
with the older AirPod Amateurs
was I found that they were too quite on airplanes.
I didn't use them on airplanes
so I only used them around the house when I was cooking
and I didn't wanna bother people
or when I was on walks.
I didn't typically use them a lot on the road.
Instead, I used a wired set of earbuds
when I was traveling,
Bose's QuietComfort, so that I could listen to
podcasts or music or audio books on the plane.
I was hoping that the AirPod Pros could replace
my old Bose noise cancelers when I was traveling,
thereby saving me one piece of hardware.
And the good news is,
they'd technically speaking,
they'd pretty much work that way
but there's bad news to it as well.
Here's, so I boarded the flight to Toronto
and here mid flight is my first reaction
to using the AirPod Pro on a flight.
So I'm halfway to Toronto here.
We're just passing Winnipeg.
So I've been using the AirPods Pro on the flight
for a little while now.
(clears throat) First of all good news is
they are capable of replacing wired earbuds
as far as being on a plane.
Now to be fair, this plane is a little bit more
of a quite plane.
It's the Dreamliner, the 787 I think
which is actually got a pretty quite cabin.
So it's not as noisy as some cabins when we...
But nevertheless, the AirPod Pros have been performing
exceptionally well.
The noise cancellation cancels out most.
I can still hear a little bit of a low end hum
but when I'm listening to a podcast
for Spoken Word, been exceptional.
For music, very good as well.
Very comfortable.
Now I did notice, I did discover kind of one
negative to using the wireless earbuds on the plane.
I thought the convenience would be so much better
but my old noise canceling headphones,
I had an RCA jack so I could plug them in
to the plane's entertainment system
if I was watching a movie or in television
and if they have a built-in entertainment system
whereas with the AirPod Pro,
of course you've gotta use,
either you have to bring along another set of headphones
or you gotta use the really, really crappy headphones
that they give you on the flight.
But overall, I'm gonna say that it's
a definitely a passing grade as far as travel goes.
The AirPod Pro, as soon as we took off,
I had them on listening to music.
Completely fell asleep, noise canceling was terrific
through the entire process.
So they've, I think it's kind of winner, winner,
chicken dinner as far as flying and using the AirPod Pros
on flights goes.
So as you can tell,
there was a unpleasant surprise.
The fact that I had to use the earbuds
which I haven't used for I don't know how long
that the airline supplies you
to listen to the in-flight entertainment system
on that long flight
and it sucked.
It was terrible.
The quality of sound from those airline delivered earbuds.
Wow, just brutal.
So I was disappointed.
The fact that I'd still have to carry some way to attach
to the entertainment system if indeed
I want to watch a movie or do something
with the entertainment system.
Now, to be fair, a lot of airlines,
allow you to bring your own devices now
in which case the AirPod Pro would be perfect
and they don't actually have seatback entertainment
but that particular flight I was on
had seatback entertainment.
So a new strategy has to be thought of.
Now there are some nice Bluetooth repeaters
or Bluetooth devices that you can plug in
and your AirPods will connect to
so you can actually plug a little dongle in
to the airline's in-flight system
and then listen to your Bluetooth speakers
but I would advise you to make sure you remember
to take that with you
'cause I imagine that would be an easy thing to forget.
So let us complete our AirPod Pro review.
Now on the flight as I mentioned
in the quick little video,
they work terrifically.
They didn't do quite as good a job of noise canceling
as over-the-ear, the full muff earphones
that we've used in the past
but they, for in-ear,
for the comfort level that they have,
they were just, they were everything that I hoped for.
They were, they served the purpose tremendously well.
Now let's talk about some of the other features.
Now as a set of earbuds
for when you're making phone calls et cetera,
the audio quality coming in is great
and we did have a question in the YouTube chat,
in the YouTube Comments,
asking about what the microphone quality was
when I'm calling others.
So I was on several phone calls today
asked each and every person whether or not
the call quality was good for them
'cause it was good for me with the earbuds in.
They felt that the microphone was crisp, clear
and so it is completely appropriate
to choose the AirPods Pro for a
for when you're making phone calls.
If you're doing a lot of time on the phone,
they're gonna serve very well.
Now one disappointment that I had
was when I was recording video,
I was unable to use the microphones in the AirPod Pros,
speaking of the microphone,
as a recording device on the iPhone.
So if you're using your iPhone
for recording any sort of video,
the AirPod Pro microphone, at least in the current version
with the current firmware and the current OS,
doesn't allow you to record on your iPhone
the audio from the microphone.
So that was a tad disappointing.
I was hoping that that would be working better.
Now one of things that I'm discovering
since I'm wearing them all the time now
is increasingly important
is using Siri as a assistant,
invoking it and by asking Siri to do different things
for you such as what's your next appointment,
what time is it, getting directions, et cetera.
So using the handsfree mode,
not actually going on, picking, taking your phone
out of your pocket and using it,
but instead using the Siri Assistant,
I think it's just gonna grow in importance.
So unless Apple improves the entire Siri interface,
you will benefit from that as we move along as well.
So the net result is,
overall, I like the AirPod Pro.
I don't know if they're worth the 250 or $325
that you end up paying for.
I'm not sure that that value is there
especially if you have an old set of AirPods.
But if you want, probably the best earbud experience
that you can get and you're an Apple user
and you want complete integration with the Apple ecosystem,
well then the AirPods are gonna probably gonna
AirPod Pros excuse me,
are probably gonna do it for you.
So that concludes our field test.
They are more than acceptable.
They're good in the field.
If you found this video to be useful,
you can do me a couple of favors.
First of all you can hit the Like button
and also share this video with anybody who you think
might benefit from the information that we shared.
Also, if you're not yet subscribed to Dotto Tech,
I encourage you to hit that Subscribe button
and ring the notification bell so you hear
when we upload new videos.
Until next time I'm Steve Dotto,
have fun storming the castle.