Airpods Pro Part 2: Field Test

- 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. 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. 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.