If you've been hankering after a set of Apple's best true wireless earbuds, the AirPods Pro, then I've got good news and potentially bad news for you.
The good news is that you can get a pair with a welcome 21% off at Amazon UK today, taking the price down from £239 to a much more attractive £189. That's also £10 less than the really quite impressive Beats Fit Pro, which are similar.
The bad news? Apple is expected to announce the AirPods Pro 2 tonight.
That doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't buy the AirPods Pro today, though. If the only thing stopping you has been the price then getting over a fifth off the RRP is an unusually good deal on Apple's earbuds, and while the newer version is likely to mean similar deals appearing in the coming days they probably won't be significantly cheaper than this – not least because there's usually a short delay between an Apple announcement and the device actually being available to buy.
The big question is: do the AirPods Pro 2 have enough features to justify paying 20-ish-percent more than you can get the current model for?
What we're expecting from the AirPods Pro 2
As we're reporting live ahead of today's Apple event, we're expecting the AirPods Pro 2 RRP to be the same as the current version, and possibly slightly more in the UK where the Pound isn't very strong against other currencies. In terms of new features it's possible there will be support for higher resolution audio, which is a fairly niche thing as much as it matters to audiophiles, and we're expecting more efficient Bluetooth for more stable connections and hopefully slightly better battery life too. Rumours suggest an improvement to the noise cancelling, which is already very good, and that the MagSafe charging case will swap out its Lightning port for USB-C.
I don't think any of these changes are massive reasons to wait for the second generation if you can get a good deal: all the core things that make AirPods Pro great earbuds – the fit, the sound, the clever integration with all your Apple kit – are already there, and the new features all tend to be nice-to-haves rather than must-haves.
Certainly for me the appeal of the AirPods Pro 2 is more about tempting you away from other firms' offerings; as with the iPhone 14, the most upgrade fun with Apple kit is when your upgrades skip a generation, for example by hanging on to an iPhone 12 and then upgrading to an iPhone 14. The AirPods Pro 2 will definitely be better than the AirPods in this Amazon deal. But they're not necessarily going to be pay-full-price better.
