Beats has finally announced a new version of its wildly successful Powerbeats Pro sports-oriented wireless earbuds. In a short Reel featuring baseball player Shohei Ohtani that was posted to the brand’s Instagram account on September 4, the company teased the Powerbeats Pro 2 and promised that they’ll be arriving in 2025.
The new model can’t come soon enough for Beats fans. The original version has been around since its release in 2019, a relative eternity in a world where it feels like wireless headphones and earbuds get updated every year.
The only thing we can glean from the video is the shape of the new earbuds. The Powerbeats Pro 2 retain the earhook design that helped propel the first-gen to success, but the overall body appears to be more slender. Ohtani is wearing a white set of Powerbeats Pro 2 with a black (or possibly navy) Beats “b” logo. It’s hard to tell, but the that logo looks like it’s painted onto the surface of the earbud, suggesting that Beats may have hidden the physical button beneath the surface, similar to the Beats Solo Buds and the Beats Fit Pro.
Sound quality — especially bass response — was a big selling point on the Powerbeats Pro, so we can likely expect a similar sound signature on the new model. Other features that are a strong possibility are active noise cancellation (which was a surprising omission when the first generation debuted), transparency mode, spatial audio, and (hopefully) a much more compact charging case with USB-C instead of a Lightning connection.
Battery life has always been one of the Powerbeats Pro’s strengths and it’s a good bet this will continue on the second-gen.
Instagram is making its way to yet another screen, and this time, Apple TV is getting a taste of the Reels rabbit hole. The company has launched a dedicated Instagram app for Apple TV, bringing Reels, longer videos, and live shows to the big screen. So, if watching one quick clip on a phone somehow turns into an hour of scrolling, there's now a much larger screen for that.
Instagram brings Reels and more to Apple TV
Audio-Technica, a brand well known for making some of the best studio and professional headphones on the market, has just come out with the ATH-AWX7000, which the company itself claims to be its "finest headphones ever." The new flagship closed-back headphone has debuted at an eye-watering price of $3,799. It combines hand-finished Japanese woodwork with a newly developed 58mm driver.
The earcups are made from Kiso cypress, a prized wood historically used for Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Each housing is finished by hand with traditional Echizen lacquer, which brings out the grain and is expected to darken over time. The frame and sliders are finished in a deep navy kachi-iro shade traditionally associated with samurai.
This post is brought to you in paid partnership with Best Buy.
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