Shop $180, amazon.com
Welcome to the Esquire Endorsement. Heavily researched. Thoroughly vetted. These picks are the best way to spend your hard-earned cash.
It’s hard not be an Apple die-hard. I might not be the kind who waits in line for the newest iPhone, but I do test all the latest and award them when deserved. Ultimately, the stuff that comes out of Cupertino is dialed in, looks good, and works for as long as you want it to. It’s hard to compete with that.
Personally, I love my four-and-a-half-year-old iPhone 12 Mini, and it continues to function just fine. That’s rare in the tech world, especially for a product as short-lived as the Mini.
In the past, my only issue with Apple has been its AirPods. That’s where the brand lost consumers like me. Noise canceling is nice, but it doesn’t sell me. The Max in Midnight is beautiful and sounds incredible, but I don’t need all that. My girlfriend loves the Pro 2, but I don’t like the gummy ear tips or the price. Nothing ever convinced me to give up my wired Apple headphones.
But the AirPods 4 got me. They’re easy to use. The fit is good. And they’re just techy enough, with Active Noise Cancellation and top-tier sound. All that for $180 retail. You’re not going to catch me with another pair of earbuds for at least four and a half years.
Shop $180, amazon.com
They’re just so easy
This is where my fellow tech writers who wax poetic about Android immediately lose me. Maybe there are better-sounding earbuds out there with more features, but I don’t need them and I don’t care about them. I took these AirPods out of the box, and I had them connected to my iPhone Mini in under ten seconds. Every time I put an AirPod in, it’s immediately connected. If my girlfriend accidentally connects to my AirPods—she tends to lose hers and borrow mine—we can fix that in seconds. Every other spec after this is irrelevant.
If you need more in the ease-of-use section, though, Apple gave it to you with stem controls. The best feature about the AirPods 2 Pro, in my opinion, was the click-y stem control. One light press is probably the action you want to do at any given time—play/pause, answer a call, end a call. Two presses is fast-forward. Three is rewind. You can customize those, but I never felt a need to. Apple runs the game when it comes to ergonomics. The AirPods snap into the case easily. The new case shape fits into my pocket easily. Maybe I’ve been trained within the system—like if Neo took the blue pill—but everything about these makes sense to me.
Shop $180, amazon.com
The fit is exactly what I wanted
I hinted at this, but I am not a gummy-ear-tip man. None of the sizes stay in my ear, so I end up really pressing them in, which is no good. Once the noise canceling turns on, the pressure of the gummy tip plus the artificially canceled noise puts me in a weird sensory-deprivation mode. And headphones are just too much for me. I’m not walking around with those on. With the AirPods 4, the fit is perfect. At first,they didn’t feel incredibly secure, but I’ve been working out with them in recently. Through plenty of burpees, pull-ups, and kettlebell snatches, they’ve stayed locked in. I realize fit might differ from ear to ear, but all I can give you here is my personal experience. The AirPods 4 are perfect.
Shop $180, amazon.com
They’re just techy enough
This is what I’d normally lead an article with, but like I said, tech isn’t too high on my wish list here. What these actually do perfectly is being just techy enough. First, the drivers and amps that Apple fits into these earbuds are remarkable. I often use them with noise canceling off, and I can always hear my music. These aren’t critical listening headphones, but the sound is substantial and nuanced, much more so than with other similarly priced earbuds. Secondly, yes, a loud city street or a plane engine will drown out my music, and that’s when the addition of noise canceling comes in handy. This is the first time Apple has offered it on the base model, and it’s done so perfectly. It tunes everything out, though the weak seal on the earbuds means sirens, screams, and other loud noises will leak through, which is a huge positive in my book.
If I haven’t convinced you, I’ll stop trying, because nothing else will. What Apple did here is similar to what it did with my iPhone Mini. It made a takedown version of its wildly popular product, and it made it to absolute perfection. Hopefully this style of AirPod doesn’t go the way of the Mini. But if it does, there’ll be a loyal group of customers—I’ll be one of them—using the AirPods 4 well into the next decade. And that’s the greatest endorsement I can give them.
Shop $180, amazon.com
Photographs by Joe Lingeman. Prop styling by Heather Greene.
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