The Complete Guide To Enjoying Your New AirPods Pro: 7 Top Tips

Apple AirPods Pro are the newest – and most expensive – true wireless earbuds and they are very cool. You can read my in-depth review here. And for another take on how good they are, check out fellow Forbes contributor Anthony Karcz’s excellent feature, here.

Meantime, if you’ve bought a pair, then now’s the time to find out how to set them up, how to get the best fit and where you can make the most of them. 

In other words, here’s all you need to know from basic knowledge to advanced tips. 

Set-up

This is extremely quick and simple – a world away from some earlier Bluetooth headphones which were a nightmare to connect. 

You can use AirPods Pro with any Bluetooth-compatible phone, for instance, but they’re especially easy to connect to an iPhone or iPad. Once you’ve opened the box, literally all you do is open the AirPods Pro case next to your Apple device. As you do, the screen will show the new AirPods Pro and invite you to connect. When you’ve connected the AirPods Pro, this same gesture shows the charge in the AirPods and their case.

Tip 1: With AirPods Pro an animation will run through the different ways to control the earbuds, running through how to skip tracks, switch in and out of noise-canceling and so on. 

Sort your fit

You could just cram the AirPods into your ears and start listening. But for optimal audio, there’s another step to take. It’s worth it.

The AirPods Pro, unlike previous AirPods, have silicone ear tips. These are designed not only to feel comfy but also to create a seal between your ear and the AirPod. This means that even without noise-canceling turned on, there’s a noise-isolation effect. It’s a significant ingredient in making AirPods Pro sound so good, so it’s important to get it right. 

Also read:

Nestled in the bottom of the AirPods Pro box is a small cardboard sleeve with silicone ear tips in it. These come in three sizes. The medium tips are the ones mounted on the earbuds and the small and large are in this sleeve. 

Put the AirPods Pro in your ears as they are and on the iPhone you’ve just connected, go to Settings and choose Bluetooth. When that page opens, you’ll see your AirPods Pro in the list of connected devices. Ooh, look, it’s even named them for you. 

Tap the blue “i” to the right of the device name and you’ll go to another screen. Here you’ll see noise controls, ways to customize the touchpad on each bud and the bit we’re looking for: Ear Tip Fit Test. Tap this and put the AirPods in your ears. Tap Continue and then press the Play button. 

You’ll hear five seconds of music – it’s pleasant enough but its purpose is to tell the AirPods whether they are a good fit for your ears. This happens thanks to a microphone inside the earbud pointing into your ear and listening to how much outside noise it hears. 

It’s pretty clever: it can even tell if you only have one AirPod in place. When it’s finished it’ll either say “Good seal” or “Adjust or try a different ear tip”. 

Once it says you have a good seal then you’re ready to listen. 

Tip 2: Even if it says there’s a good seal, you can still try other tips. I have found several different tips were a good seal but I preferred one combination over the rest.

Tip 3: It’s a common misconception when going for noise isolation to think that bigger is better. Once you’ve tried the medium, go for small before large. You might be surprised.

Tip 4: The silicone tips have a special connector that holds them in place on the earbud. To switch tips you grip and pull. Don’t be shy, you won’t break them, they’re durable and effective. Oh, and in a detail that only Apple would come up with, even the card sleeve is resilient enough to let you click the tips back in place after, though probably not very many times. 

Pausing the music

So, you’re listening to music and someone’s talking to you. Your natural, instinctive response is to take one of the buds out of your lughole. With most headphones the music will keep on playing while you conduct your conversation, right? Not AirPods. As you remove the bud, the AirPods automatically pause the music. When your conversation is finished, the music restarts as you put the AirPod back. Cool, huh?

This is something that Apple has put in its AirPods since the first generation launched in 2016.

The force sensor

The what? You might well ask. Take a look at the AirPod stem, the bit that doesn’t go into your ear. One edge is flat and has a matte finish instead of gloss. This is actually a touch-sensitive surface and it’s how you control the AirPods Pro.

Apple says you need to press the sensor, but I’d say it’s more of a squeeze as it works best if you press on the sensor with your index finger while your thumb sits behind. 

One touch pauses the music, or plays if it’s paused. This also answers a call. Two squeezes jumps you ahead a track, three takes you back one. 

Tip 5: When you squeeze sensor it really feels like it’s responding like a button because it sounds a click in your ear. It’s purely electronic but it’s mighty convincing.

Noise-canceling

This is the standout feature of the AirPods Pro. Helped along by the seal between ear and AirPod, a microphone on the outside of the earbud listens to the noise around you. It then creates a sound that’s reversed in phase (which just means it’s the opposite) and feeds that in to your ear so that the outside noise is neutralized. As it turns on, you can hear the world fade away. It’s fantastic.

Tip 6: You turn this on with a long press of the force sensor and you’ll hear a chime when it happens. There’s also another way to do this. On the iPhone go to the Control Center and choose volume. You’ll see, by the way, that there’s a tiny picture of the AirPods Pro on the volume icon. Long-press this and the screen opens to a big volume control and three noise options: noise-canceling, off and transparency.

Transparency

Sometimes you don’t want to be cut off from the outside world, in which case there’s another option to taking out an AirPod to hear what’s going on. Press and hold the force sensor until you hear a different chime, a rather more open-sounding one than the noise-canceling chime. Now, you can still hear the music but at a lower volume and the outside microphone is pumping the sound of the world, including your own voice, into your ear. 

It works really well, though I’d say that it’s more courteous to take the earbuds out when you’re having a conversation with someone. For just listening to an announcement, however, Transparency is brilliant.

Airplane use

Even on a quiet airplane like the Boeing 787 Dreamliner or Airbus A350, in-ear headphones struggle. 

Not the AirPods Pro. I’ve just got off a 747 – a plane I love but the engine noise is pretty fierce – and I could hear my music with no problem at all. The results were deeply impressive. 

Tip 7: If you want to listen to the inflight entertainment, a little doohickey like the TwelveSouth AirFly is ideal. It plugs into the headphone socket on board and connects by Bluetooth to your AirPods Pro. The same system works if you want to tune into the TV system at the gym, for instance.

_______________ 

Follow me on Instagram by clicking here: davidphelantech and Twitter: @davidphelan2009

If you enjoyed this story, you might also like these:

More on Forbes: Google Buys Fitbit For $2.1 Billion: Here’s What It Means

Apple Releases iOS 13.2.1: Surprise Update In Record Time, But It’s Not For Everyone

_______________