I’ve been trying other earbuds with earhooks as alternative to my 4.5-year-old Powerbeats Pro, and just not finding myself happy with them. Lots of them actively hurt my ears. Some of them have these capacitive buttons instead of actual clicky buttons, which are hard for me to actuate precisely. Many of them don’t work with my glasses.
I still hate the auto-switching, but for comfort I just keep coming back to the Powerbeats Pro.
The problem is that one of my PBP - the right side - has lots of connection problems. I’m not sure why this is, but it started after I’d owned them for about 2 years. Sometimes it glitches out after 10 minutes of not playing anything, and has to be put back into the case to re-pair.
So…
Apple currently has new Powerbeats Pro on sale for about $160. That would be a new pair, but from what I can tell it’s a new pair of an 4.5-year-old design. A design that fits me better than anything else, and really suits my use case - but a 4.5-year-old design.
Can any of you think of any reason why this would be a bad purchase?
If they work for you and the price makes sense for your budget, I’d say go for it. My wife swears be hers. In fact, when they were on sale at some point, we picked up a spare set, ha
The case sits flat on my nightstand the vast majority of the time, and my “charging ritual” is to pick up the case, put in the one I was using (I basically never use them as a stereo pair), and watch the LED to make sure it has contact.
If I thought there were any chance of this, I’d be holding off for the new model. It seems like these are a legacy product, with the new Beats Fit Pro or whatever replacing them. But a little spike that goes inside my ear doesn’t replace an earhook for me.
You know Tim Cook is watching this thread, waiting for you to tell us you’ve done the sensible thing and purchased the current model. Two weeks later he will announce the new model.
I would go for it. As you say, they’re comfortable and suits you perfectly in terms of functionality.
Sure, this might be the clearance sale in anticipation of the new model, but we don’t know what that means. It is a very good probability they will be upgraded with capacitive buttons, or other changes that are not right for you.
I’d owned a pair of these before, and they were pretty junky back then. But I decided to give them another shot since they’ve revised them, given the case USB-C, etc.
Thus far, they work well. They have one button that starts/stops playing, answers/hangs up phone calls, etc. Battery life seems to be as good as Powerbeats, and I can use the two sides independently if I want. There’s also no “head detection” stuff, which is a sensor I always had random glitches with.
Potential downsides?
No multi-device. As far as I can tell, they pair with one device at a time, which I’m fine with as the auto-switch nonsense is one of the things I didn’t like about the PowerBeats.
There’s no “hold for Siri” or anything like that with the button.
No volume control on the headset.
The microphone quality is ever-so-slightly sub-par, as my dictation isn’t as crisp as it is with the PowerBeats. But people I’m talking to on the phone seem to be fine with it.
I wasn’t a fan of the little rubber ear tips, and Comply Foam wouldn’t share interior tip dimensions with me so I could try to fit one of theirs, so I took an educated guess and grabbed these:
in size “SF1 Black (5.8-6.5mm)”. They pop on and fit nicely. Buying tips isn’t a drawback though, as I would buy foam tips for the PowerBeats - so that’s a wash.
All said, they’re working well a couple of days in. For $25 instead of $160 (on sale) or $200 (regular price) I’m pretty happy.
