I spoke to Apple about AirPods 4 and how ANC works in an open-ear design

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When you think of audio brands, chances are Apple isn’t the first to come to mind. Tablets, phones and smartwatches, sure – but audio? Several others will likely be on your list before Apple.

A few years ago, Apple may not have been around at all in the traditional sense: it never made portable turntables, CD players, or cassette tapes, nor can it claim having delivered superb stereo speakers. But he created the iPod. He is also behind the iPhone which later killed the iPod, and was a key player in the trend towards wireless headphones thanks to AirPods.

The first pair of Apple AirPods were introduced in 2016, but their life has been marked by several important milestones. In California, at the iPhone 16 and AirPods 4 launch event, I spoke to Eric Treski, director of AirPods product marketing at Apple, and Kate Bergeron, vice president of hardware engineering at the company, the new AirPods, how Apple managed to implement active noise. the undo in its iconic open-ear design and the journey it took to get there.

The evolution of EarPods to AirPods

When Apple first announced AirPods, the in-ear headphones were met with mixed reviews. The design was new to the field, and let’s face it, they didn’t look too much like the miniature toothbrush heads you’d stick on your Oral-B. However, this design has really stuck and has even been adopted by several other brands, Samsung having recently switched to it with its latest Galaxy Buds 3 and Galaxy Buds 3 Pro, and Nothing having also opted for it in its Ear 2.

So what made Apple adopt this divisive design in the first place? In my interview, Bergeron mentioned “the iconic iPod commercials with the dancers and everyone with the white wires and earphones going down,” and how “from that point in 2001 until 2007 with the iPhone, we did something very typical for Apple as a company. all this when we started looking at a space and saying, “we want to provide the best customer experience possible.”

She said Apple had started “learning about the physiology and geometry of the ear and the second generation of (wired) EarPods – this new form that arrived with the iPhone 1 – was the result of our work with sub-biometric data and understanding of what was happening. was an ideal shape to fit people’s ears.

“Oddly enough, we literally cut the bottom wire,” Bergeron said of the original AirPods design and its evolution from the EarPods that I still notice in people’s ears on the train, although rarely now. “We were able to introduce AirPods to the world through the magic of form and some pretty transformational low-power Bluetooth technology with our H1 chip, and get all that magical experience in a small package that fits in your pocket,” he said. she declared. added.

“It was the next big step from the iPod to, all of a sudden, ‘I can take these headphones with me wherever I go’… being able to charge the battery in your pocket and l ‘always have it charged and ready to go.

Things expanded further with the first AirPods Pro model, arriving in 2019. “In order to create ANC (active noise cancellation) that you could put in your pocket, we had to sit down again and say: OK, there are keys. acoustic principles here to give us a system where the ANC will be great,” Bergeron recalls. “And so, first and foremost, for this product, it was about adding the ear tip; achieve a perfect fit thanks to the passive isolation of the ear tip adapting to your ear. Then, there was also the computing necessary to be able to produce these ANC and transparency algorithms. “.

For the second-generation AirPods Pro, Apple added an additional set of silicone tips to “broaden the population fit,” Bergeron explained, adding that “adding these extra small ear tips in the AirPods Pro “Really allowed us to acquire a bunch of people who we had received feedback from and found that they couldn’t get the product in their ears.”

Implementing ANC without tips

With the latest AirPods 4, Apple has made further changes compared to the previous AirPods 3 (released in 2021), using what it learned from previous iterations of AirPods. “We set these goals for fit and comfort, as well as stability, meaning being able to take your product out, whether it’s running, or doing active activities with it and keeping it in your ears.” , said Bergeron.

She added: “We started to develop internal tools that allowed us to really increase the number of ears that we could scan, building that database up to over 50 million data points and using our tremendous engineering talent to build this in a way that we could start iterating on the form and integrating the components. Of course, now we’re talking about H2 and its incredible computing advancement, a new acoustic driver, and bringing the whole thing together into something compact enough that we can even fit in it. more people.”

Put the AirPods 3 and AirPods 4 side by side and they look slightly different, but what exactly changed and why couldn’t Apple just add noise-canceling capabilities to the design AirPods 3? Bergeron explained: “The positioning of the speaker is a little different, as is what we call the reference microphone, which basically points into your ear canal to hear what you hear. With the AirPods 4, we’ve actually made it even a little bit better than the AirPods 3.

“The AirPods 4 are (also) a bit smaller, so we had to work even harder to fit everything in. For a lot of people with smaller ears, they fit better, which means we get that nice alignment from the front of the AirPod with your ear canal, which ultimately means the ANC works better because it fits your ear better.

The case is also smaller, with Bergeron describing it as “one of the cutest Apple products we’ve ever made.” Whether or not it’s cuter than the iPod shuffle is up for debate, but it’s certainly very small, not to mention decent battery life for the AirPods 4 and the integration of a built-in speaker for the convenient Find My function.

Better ANC than AirPods Pro?

Apple says the AirPods 4’s ANC talents don’t quite match those of the AirPods Pro 2, which makes sense considering the price difference between them, but what can you expect from ANC in the design at open ear? “We’re actually able to get almost the same total attenuation as the first generation AirPods Pro,” Treski told me, before adding: “The AirPods Pro 2 still have twice the active noise cancellation ( performance) compared to the first generation AirPods Pro and AirPods 4.”

“There’s obviously a lot of variability in adapting without an ear tip – and that’s really important not only for audio quality but also for active noise cancellation,” he added.

“We use our third generation of adaptive EQ, which is this internal microphone that monitors in real time to ensure that you’re getting the best sound quality and noise cancellation possible,” he said. “We know exactly what you’re hearing because this mic is actually a reference mic for your ear and what you’re hearing, so that’s very important in knowing how to achieve that.”

Apple doesn’t disclose decibel reduction numbers, so it’s difficult to gauge exactly how comparable the AirPods 4 and AirPods Pro are in terms of the amount of noise they can block, although Bergeron explained that the AirPods 4 “need to use more”. of H2 calculation to do its job of noise cancellation than the AirPods Pro, because of the feedback mechanism and this that Eric (Treski) was talking about.

“We have more sophisticated algorithms on AirPods 4 because of the open ear,” she added.

Although a full review is still to come, first hands-on impressions of the AirPods 4 have indeed been positive, and the implementation of open-ear noise cancellation does indeed look promising.

OK, so maybe they won’t match the AirPods Pro 2 in terms of sound-blocking ability, but having some ANC in an open-ear design could be a great compromise between fit, features and, of course, the asking price. Could this make the AirPods 4 the best value pair yet?

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