The topic The AirPods Pro 3 are at a record-low price, plus more of the best AirPods deals… is drawing steady attention: readers, analysts, and industry watchers are all tracking how the story may unfold in the days ahead.
This is taking place in a fast-moving context — product cycles, platform shifts, and competitive moves can reshape the outlook quickly, so the details below are worth a careful read.
What follows is a clear walkthrough of the main facts and angles you need to make sense of the news.
Amazon Prime Day season is upon us, and the mega-retailer isn’t waiting until the sale proper to drop the best pair of AirPods down to their best price ever.
While Prime Day usually takes place in mid-July, it got bumped up in the schedule this year: the four-day sale will now take place from June 23 to June 26. With a little over a week to go until the sale, Apple products are starting to get marked down, but the AirPods Pro 3 are by far the standout.
That’s due to their price dropping to $179 — their lowest price to date — on a random Thursday ahead of the sale. We’ll have more info on just how good a deal this is below, but the bottom line is, we wouldn’t be surprised if this is the best, or nearly the best, price you can grab these earbuds at during Prime Day.
It makes up for a somewhat lackluster showing from other AirPods models. As of June 12, the AirPods Max 2 are down to $499.99 in select colorways. It’s not a bad price, but as Senior Shopping Reporter Haley Henschel wrote in her guide to finding the best Apple deals on Prime Day, the first-gen USB-C Maxes got a $100 markdown on their first Prime Day, so we’re hoping to see Amazon follow its own precedent. The AirPods 4 are in a similar situation: We’ve seen them as low as $69 in the past, and so far, they’re only down to $99. Not bad, but we can do better.
The AirPods Pro 3 have a lot going for them. They’re a good $50 cheaper than other flagship noise-canceling earbuds, they come with live translation and heart rate monitoring features, and of course, they sound great and have some of the best noise cancellation available. Then there’s the top-tier Apple integration, which makes these some of the best earbuds for anyone who’s deeply invested in the fruit brand’s ecosystem. Major cons of these earbuds come in the form of no companion app — that means no manually adjustable equalizer or ANC, but for what you do get, and for under $200, those are flaws worth living with.
Topics
AirPods
Apple
Prime Day
Bethany Allard is a Los Angeles-based shopping reporter at Mashable covering beauty tech, dating, sex and relationships, and headphones. That basically means she puts her hair through a lot, scrolls through a lot of dating apps, and rotates through a lot of different headphones. In addition to testing out and rounding up the best products, she also covers deals for Mashable, paying an especially obsessive amount of attention to Apple deals and prices. That knowledge comes in handy when she’s covering shopping holidays like Prime Day and Black Friday, which she’s now done for three years at Mashable.