AirPods Pro 2 could miss out on this major upgrade

Last year, reports emerged that the upcoming AirPods Pro 2 would justify their long design gestation with some brand new fitness tracking features, reflecting the compact earbuds’ popularity amongst runners and gym goers around the world.

Unfortunately, in his latest Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is the bearer of bad news: while Apple has been exploring the technology, it’s reportedly not coming with the next generation of AirPods Pro.

“Over the past few months, there have been rumors about this year’s model gaining the ability to determine a wearer’s heart rate or body temperature,” Gurman writes. “I’m told that neither feature is likely to arrive in the 2022 upgrade, though both enhancements have been explored inside the company and could arrive one day.”

Frankly, that’s a bit of a disappointment. Not only would this have been a seriously useful feature for fitness fanatics, but it’s not the only rumored AirPods Pro 2 upgrade to be shot down recently. The suggested stemless design is also seemingly dead, and it doesn’t look like the case will be moving away from the Lightning port as other Apple devices are, either.

Which isn’t to say that the new earbuds won’t be worth buying when they arrive. It would be extremely surprising if AirPods Pro 2 didn’t improve the sound quality, given it's been nearly three years since the originals arrived on the scene. There’s even talk of lossless audio being introduced — something of a no brainer, considering it’s one of Apple Music’s main selling points.

And according to the most recent rumor, the buds will introduce another feature that audiophiles will love: “self-adaptive” noise cancellation. This will apparently sit alongside self-adaptive equalization, spatial audio and audio sharing as you would expect. 

Finally, the charging case will apparently be added to the Find My network with a built-in speaker for tracking, making it that bit harder to lose.  All of this — and three years’ worth of inflation — will likely lead to a price increase, though. We’ve heard $299 mooted, which is $50 more than AirPods Pro when they first launched. 

Still, if you’re rocking a first-gen set then you may still see the upgrade as essential anyway, as Gurman himself points out. “If you purchased the original AirPods Pro when they launched at the end of 2019, your batteries may be nearing end of life—or at least their reliability is slipping,” he wrote.

Next: This is the one upgrade I really want to see on the AirPods Pro 2. And now some smart AirPods Pro 2 features have been tipped just ahead of Apple Event.