Apple AirPods Pro 3 Review

My Dad Can Hear Me Again. Start There.

I’ll lead with the bit that genuinely choked me up over a set of earbuds, because no review should hide its most human moment three screens down. My father’s 68. Mild hearing loss for the last five years or so — the kind where he catches you but still says “kya?” twice a sentence, where the TV climbs until the neighbours could narrate the show, where phone calls turn into a guessing game on both ends.

Hearing aids? Not happening. The stigma, the price, the whole idea that they’d make him look old. Textbook Indian-dad stubbornness. So when Apple said the AirPods Pro 3 ship with a clinically certified Hearing Aid mode for mild-to-moderate loss, I ordered a pair and told him they were “just earbuds for calls.”

The hearing test through iOS 19’s Health app ran about 5 minutes. It tuned the boost to his exact profile. He popped them in, I talked at a normal level from the far side of the room, and his face shifted. Nothing theatrical — he doesn’t do theatrical. His eyes just widened a little and he said, quiet, “I can hear everything you’re saying.”

No spec sheet beats that. Trouble is, there’s still a Rs 24,900 pair of earbuds to judge on everything else they do, so here we go.

The Hearing Health Features, Up Close

Three things going on. The first is a clinical-grade hearing test baked into the iPhone Health app. It runs a sequence of tones across frequencies and volumes, plots your hearing profile, and flags how bad any loss is and where it sits. Five minutes in a quiet room. The results live in Health and you can hand them to an audiologist.

Then there’s Hearing Aid mode. Working off that test, iOS 19 boosts the specific frequencies your ears have trouble with. My dad’s profile showed mild loss mostly in the 2-4 kHz band — typical with age — and the boost went straight at that range. Voices got clearer for him. TV through the AirPods was intelligible at far lower volume. Calls, which he’d been dodging, became workable again.

The certification isn’t marketing fluff. These aren’t “earbuds that get loud.” Apple secured clinical-grade hearing aid certification in several markets, and in that mode the AirPods Pro 3 count as a registered medical device. In India, the test and hearing-aid features have been live since March 2026, though the medical device registration is still waiting on full CDSCO approval. Apple’s framing it as a “hearing wellness” feature here while that paperwork grinds on. Which is the honest catch — you’re using a feature that hasn’t cleared the full local regulatory bar yet.

Third piece: hearing protection. The buds track ambient noise and ping you when your daily exposure crosses safe limits, going by WHO guidance. In Indian cities, where the street routinely blows past 70 dB, that alert fires more than you’d think. I got “Your noise exposure is high today” twice in week one, both on days I’d spent ages in traffic or next to a building site. Did I do anything about it? No. But knowing is something.

The H3 Chip: What Actually Changed

The new H3 takes over from the H2 in the Pro 2. Apple’s line is “50% more computational audio power.” In plain terms: better ANC, smoother Spatial Audio, quicker Adaptive Audio handoffs, and enough overhead to run the hearing stuff without eating into battery.

The ANC step-up is real, just not dramatic. I wore a Pro 2 in one ear and a Pro 3 in the other for three days straight to compare them (looked ridiculous, got asked about it a lot). Somewhere quiet, you can’t tell. Somewhere loud — a packed cafe, the Bangalore Metro — the Pro 3 sat on a noticeably lower noise floor. The low rumbles the Pro 2 trimmed but never killed came down a touch further on the Pro 3. Call it 10-15% better overall.

The bigger leap is transparency. Apple lumps it under “Adaptive Audio,” which blends cancellation and pass-through on the fly depending on what’s around you. The Pro 3’s take is the most natural transparency I’ve had in my ears. Outside sound arrives barely coloured — conversations sound like conversations, not like someone talking down a drainpipe. Traffic sounds like traffic. Wind gets tamped down instead of blown up into a roar, which was a real annoyance on older transparency modes. Someone taps my shoulder while I’ve got these in and I can hold a full chat without pulling them out, and it doesn’t feel odd.

Sound: The Best Any AirPods Have Sounded

The H3 brings audible gains. The low end’s tighter and better defined — bass notes have actual pitch now, not a vague thud. Mids carry more texture. Highs reach further with a bit more air and shimmer.

Side by side with the Pro 2 the gap is subtle but there. Put on something well mastered — I keep returning to A.R. Rahman’s “Kun Faya Kun” because its dynamic range is so wide — and the Pro 3 digs out tabla and sitar detail the Pro 2 glossed over. Vocals have more presence, more of that “in the room” feel. The soundstage opens up a hair.

For Apple Music users on Lossless, the Pro 3 squeezes more out of the Bluetooth pipe. Apple’s codec still isn’t LDAC, but whatever the H3 does with processing closes the gap between wireless and wired further than any AirPods before it.

Personalised Spatial Audio uses the iPhone’s TrueDepth camera to map your ear shape and build a custom profile. The payoff: spatial tracks feel properly three-dimensional rather than vaguely wide. Head tracking is smooth — turn during a film and the sound stays glued to the screen. It crosses the line from gimmick into actually immersive.

Where they lose: against the Samsung Buds 4 Pro’s two-way drivers, the single-driver AirPods give up a little low-end slam and a little treble separation. Against the Sony WF-1000XM5, the bass is tighter but smaller. These are voiced for balance and accuracy, not instant wow. I lean that way myself, but plenty of people don’t, and that’s fair.

Design and Comfort

Same familiar AirPods Pro shape — stubby stems, in-ear tips, small and light. At 5.3 grams a bud they’re among the lightest premium earbuds out there, and I honestly forget they’re in over long stretches.

The comfort win: there’s now an XS tip alongside S, M and L. If you’ve tried older Pros and found even the Small too big — a complaint I hear constantly from people with narrow ear canals — XS might finally sort you out. My wife couldn’t manage the Pro 2 past 30 minutes without it bothering her; she’s been wearing the Pro 3 on XS tips for 2+ hours no problem.

IPX4 on both buds and the case. Fine for sweat and a light shower of rain. Not pool-proof, not shower-proof. Grand for daily life, not enough for serious training in heavy rain.

The MagSafe/Qi2 case is compact and oddly satisfying to flip open and shut, and it finally charges over USB-C. The case speaker chimes when you ping it through Find My. There’s a lanyard loop on the side for clipping to a bag if you’re the type who loses things.

Battery Life

9 hours a charge with ANC running. Across several days I kept landing at 8 to 8.5, near enough to the claim. ANC off pushes it nearer 11. With the 30-hour case total, my pattern (roughly 3 hours a day) means I top the case up about twice a week.

There’s a 5-minute quick charge for an hour of playback when you’re caught short. MagSafe is handy if you keep a charger on your desk — just drop the case and forget it. It’ll also take a charge off an Apple Watch puck, which is a nice touch if one’s sitting on your nightstand. The grumble: 9 hours is solid but no longer a standout, since budget rivals now hit the same number.

Living Inside the Apple Ecosystem

This is the bit that earns the AirPods Pro 3 their keep, specifically for Apple users. Auto-switching across iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch is faultless — take a call on the phone, move to music on the Mac, grab a FaceTime on the iPad, and the buds just follow. The handoff takes about 1.5 seconds and lands reliably maybe 95% of the time. That last 5%, when it stalls, is mildly irritating.

Conversation Awareness drops media volume and lifts voice frequencies the moment it hears you start talking. More natural than Samsung’s Voice Detect, to my ear — the dip is gradual rather than a hard cut, and the climb back up afterwards is smooth.

Find My with Precision Finding throws a directional arrow and a distance on screen and walks you to a lost bud. It does individual buds, not just the case. The U1/U2 chip drives it, and indoors it’s good to about 10 centimetres. Found one under my couch in roughly 15 seconds.

Announce Notifications reads incoming messages aloud while you’re wearing them — useful cooking, driving, anytime fishing out your phone is a pain. Siri’s voice has come on enough that it sounds like a person rather than a machine reading a label.

Call Quality and Siri

Calls through the Pro 3 are excellent. Apple’s beamforming mics pull your voice out of background noise better than any earbuds I’ve tested. People kept telling me I sounded “clear, like you’re in a quiet room” even while I was walking a fairly busy street. Wind handling on outdoor calls is way better than the Pro 2 — I could jog and take a call without the other side hearing a gale.

Siri’s quicker on the H3. “Hey Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes” — done inside a second. “Hey Siri, play Tum Hi Ho on Apple Music” — right track, no fuss. Hands-free means my phone mostly stays in my pocket while I cook, drive (parked!) or walk. Siri reads messages, takes your reply by voice, even sums up what you’ve missed if you’ve been away from the phone for a while.

On FaceTime the audio’s outstanding. Colleagues have flat-out said I sound better on the Pro 3 than through my MacBook’s own mics — which is something, because those laptop mics are already decent. Zoom and Google Meet hold up too, though the voice isolation’s a notch less polished off Apple’s own platforms.

Who Should Skip the AirPods Pro 3

I’m ending here on purpose, because the urge to tell everyone to buy AirPods is strong and I need to push back on it. These aren’t for everyone. Here’s exactly who should walk away.

Android users. Done. On Android you lose Spatial Audio head tracking, auto device switching, Personalised Spatial Audio, Conversation Awareness, Find My with Precision Finding, Hearing Aid mode, the hearing test, Announce Notifications — basically everything that makes them worth Rs 24,900. What’s left is a decent ANC earbud with good sound, which you can get for Rs 10,000-15,000 elsewhere. Paying the Apple tax without the Apple ecosystem is just lighting money on fire.

People who train hard or in the rain. IPX4 covers sweat and a light drizzle. Heavy rain, pool splashes, dropping them in a puddle — not covered. Samsung’s IPX7 Buds 4 Pro or the Jaybird Vista 2 at IP68 make better workout partners if water’s a genuine worry.

Bass-first listeners. If “good audio” to you means deep, chest-thumping bass that swamps everything, the Pro 3 will let you down. They’re tuned for balance. The bass is there, tight and defined, but it doesn’t boom. Sony’s WF-1000XM5 or even the boAt Airdopes Nirvana line will feed a bass craving more directly.

Budget buyers who just want ANC. The boAt Airdopes 511 ANC at Rs 2,999 gives you working noise cancellation and 10-hour battery for an eighth of the money. The Pro 3 beat them on every metric you can name — but eight times better? No. If ANC is the whole ask and cash is tight, there are seriously capable options under Rs 5,000 now.

People who don’t care about the health stuff. If the hearing test, hearing-aid mode and noise monitoring leave you cold — and for a lot of younger buyers they genuinely will — you’re paying extra for tools you’ll never open. The Pro 2, still going for Rs 19,900 or less in sales, gives you 85% of the non-health experience.

Pro 2 owners who don’t need hearing features. The sound bump is real but slight. The ANC bump is real but small. If your Pro 2 still work and the hearing tools don’t apply to you, the jump isn’t big enough to spend Rs 24,900. Hold for the Pro 4, or until your Pro 2 batteries start fading — which usually creeps in after 2-3 years of heavy use.

For everyone left after all that — iPhone users who live in the ecosystem, families with older relatives whose hearing could use the boost, anyone wanting the most natural transparency mode for all-day wear, people bouncing between Apple devices all day — the AirPods Pro 3 are the best earbuds you can buy in India right now. Just make sure you’re actually in that group before parting with Rs 24,900.

And my dad? He wears them every day. Calls them “his ears.” He’s started picking up the phone again after dodging it for two years. The TV’s down about 40%. My mother says the house is quieter. That’s not a spec-sheet result — it’s a quality-of-life one. It’s the thing I’ll remember about these long after the technical details blur.

Price in India

The Apple AirPods Pro 3 sell for Rs 24,900 in India. You’ll find them on Apple India’s site, Amazon India, Flipkart, and authorised resellers like Imagine, iStore and Unicorn. Apple almost never discounts current-gen AirPods, though resellers sometimes shave Rs 1,000-2,000 off during festive sales.

Full Specifications

Pros

• Hearing Aid mode clinically certified
• Most natural transparency mode
• 9-hour battery
• Personalised Spatial Audio
• Seamless Apple ecosystem handoff

Cons

• Expensive ₹24,900
• iPhone-centric limited Android
• IPX4 not IPX7
• Ear tip fit not universal

Our Rating: 9/10 · Price: ₹24,900