Move Over AirPods Max: The New Beats Studio Pro Have Arrived

Apple’s Beats division has officially unveiled the highly-anticipated Beats Studio Pro — a new $349 alternative to the company’s pricey AirPods Max.

Although Apple has kept Beats as a separate, arms-length brand since acquiring the company nearly ten years ago, it’s still a wholly-owned subsidiary of Apple, which means its products aren’t developed in a vacuum.

This makes the new Beats Studio Pro all the more interesting, as they represent not only the first new over-ear headphones to be introduced by Beats since 2017 but also the first time Beats has put out a product that directly competes with something in Apple’s AirPods lineup.

However, in this case, “competes” might not even be a strong enough word. As rumors hinted at last month, the new Beats Studio Pro seemed destined to surpass the AirPods Max in just about every conceivable way.

On the one hand, that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Beats will naturally put the best technology forward, and Apple’s late-2020 AirPods Max simply can’t compete with a modern 2023 set of premium headphones. If anything, it shows how long in the tooth the AirPods Max have gotten in the past two and a half years.

The New Beats Studio Pro

First up, Beats Studio Pro are selling for $349. That’s a full $200 less than the sticker price of the AirPods Max and still less than some of the best prices for a set of renewed AirPods Max headphones.

Don’t let the lower price tag fool you, though. The Beats Studio Pro pack in the latest acoustic technology and features that the company’s engineers can come up with.

This includes top-notch Active Noise Cancellation, new 40mm drivers “engineered for optimal clarity, with near-zero distortion even at high volume,” and a full transparency mode. They also support lossless audio over USB-C — the first time any set of Apple or Beats headphones have offered this. Even the AirPods Max, despite their Lightning port, can’t handle digital lossless audio input — that port is solely for charging and passing in analog 3.5mm audio with the appropriate cable.

Of course, as Beats-branded headphones, they’re also designed to work just as well with Android phones as iPhones, which adds another ironic twist, as the USB-C digital audio input means you’ll actually be able to enjoy Hi-Res Lossless Apple Music directly from an Android phone — something that’s not possible on an iPhone without fussing with external DACs.

Interestingly, Beats Studio Pro also offer three audio profiles that are exclusively available when using wired USB-C audio, allowing you to toggle between the balanced “Beats Signature” profile to Entertainment and Conversation modes that adjust for immersive movie-watching or calling and podcast-listening experiences.

As expected, the design of the Beats Studio Pro hasn’t changed much from the Beats Studio3 that preceded them. However, the company has made a few improvements, including nicer outer earpads that combine memory foam with a leather finish.

The inside of the new Beats Studio Pro is another matter entirely. In addition to the new finely-tuned 40mm drivers, you get a bunch of features that have been exclusive to Apple’s AirPods until now, including the dynamic head tracking and Personalized Spatial Audio of the third-gen AirPods, AirPods Pro, and AirPods Max. It’s a huge first for a set of non-Apple-branded headphones, even if they are still technically made by Apple, at least indirectly.

Despite lacking the special Apple chips found in the AirPods and older Beats headphones, the Beats Studio Pro offer the same seamless pairing and setup as AirPods, which syncs across all your devices signed into the same iCloud account. However, with Google’s Fast Pairing technology, they can also do the same on the Android side. Ditto for Find My, which works across both ecosystems.

Assuming Apple hasn’t given up on full-sized headphones under its own brand, it’s a safe bet that we’ll eventually see an “AirPods Max 2” release that catches them up with the new Beats Studio Pro. Still, for now, it’s harder than ever to justify splurging on the AirPods Max when the Beats Studio Pro provide nearly all of the same features and more for considerably less.