Announced alongside the removal of the headphone jack from the iPhone 7, the Apple AirPods declared out and out war on wires, removing it not only between the earbuds and the phone, but also between the earbuds themselves.
Apple didn’t invent this ‘true wireless’ form-factor, but, in typical Apple fashion, the company’s entry into the area has prompted a flurry of interest from other headphone brands.
Now the segment has gotten increasingly crowded, Apple will have to up its game if it wants to follow-up the AirPods. The wireless connectivity and audio quality might have been solid, but we otherwise had some reservations about reliance on Siri and overall fit.
Read on below for everything rumored to be coming with the next version of Apple’s true wireless earbuds, along with everything we’d like to see from them.
- Want some alternatives? These are the best true wireless earbuds around
Cut to the chase
- What are they? The follow-up to Apple's true wireless earbuds, the AirPods
- When are they out? We're hoping to see an announcement at Apple's September 12 event, with a release soon after
- How much will they cost? Expect them to be similar to the existing AirPods at $159/£159/AU$229
Apple AirPods 2 rumors
Fitness tracking
Back in July Apple filed a patent for biometric sensors which would allow the AirPods 2 to take on fitness tracking capabilities like those seen in the Jabra Elite Wireless. This followed another patent filed in March.
Perhaps more interestingly than heart rate sensing, the sensors would also allow the AirPods 2 to measure stroke volume, which combined with heart rate would allow it to calculate your cardiac output.
Essentially this means the AirPods 2 would theoretically be much better at establishing how fit you are overall rather than just measuring your heart rate.
Better ambient sound handling
Another patent from July suggested that Apple is working on some pretty nifty tech for how the earbuds handle outside noise as well as dissipating pressure from inside the ear canal.
The patent outlines a valve system that would allow sound to escape your ear canal to avoid that weird reverberating effect that occurs when you speak with earbuds in your ears.
The patent then goes on to describe how the earbuds would handle ambient noise, using a microphone to filter in noise from the outside world so that you can remain aware of your surroundings while still hearing your music.
What we want to see
Noise-cancellation
Only a couple of years ago, companies were struggling just to get true wireless earbuds working, but now the goalposts have already shifted to packing more and more functionality into their shells.
The Sony WF-1000X manage to include noise-cancellation technology inside their diminutive shells, and we’d love to see similar functionality make it to the second generation of AirPods.
Apple’s fancy ambient noise technology outlined above suggests the company is thinking along these lines, but we’ve still got our fingers crossed.
Physical controls
We get that Apple isn’t much of a fan of buttons, but there are some cases where they save you a lot of time and effort, and headphones are one of these instances.
On-board controls have become an almost essential feature in headphones in recent years, allowing us to control music playback and volume without having to struggle to get our phones out of our pockets.
Now the AirPods did allow you to control music in a sense, but they relied entirely on Siri, Apple’s voice assistant.
On the one hand Siri is much more powerful than the usual button controls by allowing you to request specific songs, for example.
But on the other hand, Siri comes with some pretty big limitations. It doesn’t work without a Wi-Fi connection, it can only play music from Apple Music (ie not Spotify), and probably most problematic of all is the fact that it forces you to speak out load to control anything - hardly ideal if you want to listen to music on the bus.
The original AirPods already had a touch-sensitive control for activating Siri, so we’d like to see this extended to controlling music directly. The BeoPlay E8’s have shown how this can be done with simple tap controls, and it’s time for Apple to follow suit.
Changeable ear tips
We get that Apple likes to rely wholly on sleek white plastic, but we weren’t a fan of the lack of rubber tips on the original AirPods.
Especially when there’s no cable to catch them if they fall, we want any true wireless earbuds to feel nice and secure in the ears, and including a number of changeable ear tips so we can select those that perfectly fit our ears would be the perfect way of achieving this.
One individual in the TechRadar office even went to the length of fixing some rubber tips from an alternative pair of headphones onto their AirPods to make them feel more secure.
Better Android pairing
Given that Apple likes to ensure all its products are designed to work as a family this has little chance of happening, but we’d love to see the AirPods play slightly nicer with Android phones.
On iPhones, pairing is a dream. You simply hold the AirPods near your phone and they connect more or less automatically.
However with Android the process is a lot more complicated and involving jumping into settings menus to select the AirPods manually. We’d love to see Apple simplify this process for the AirPods 2.
Different designs and colors
We get it, Apple likes white things. But in an era where iPhones and iPads are available in a range of different colors we’d love to see this same courtesy extended to the AirPods.
We just want our headphones to match our phone and our Apple Watch; is that so much to ask?
Although Apple has experimented with different colors for its various devices, its earbuds have always stayed the same iconic white making it pretty unlikely that we’ll get to see the AirPods in another color.
Better battery life
This one’s pretty self explanatory, but given the AirPods’ small size it’s not entirely unexpected that the battery life was just five hours.
This is pretty good compared to a lot of the other true wireless headphones out there, but we’d like to see Apple push themselves to go better and try and rival the battery life of over-ear wireless headphones.
It’s a lofty goal, but if anyone can do it it would be Apple.
- We might see the AirPods 2 announced alongside the 4K Apple TV
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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