• Apple TV: A faster A17 Pro chip that will support next year's revamped version of Siri powered by Apple Intelligence, and an Apple-designed Wi-Fi chip with Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7 support. A built-in FaceTime camera has been rumored for a future Apple TV, but it is unclear if that will arrive with the next model.


• HomePod mini: S9 chip or newer with support for next year's revamped version of Siri powered by Apple Intelligence, an Apple-designed Wi-Fi chip with Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7 support, improved sound quality, a second-generation Ultra Wideband chip, and potentially new color options like Red.


• AirTag: Up to 3× longer item tracking range vs. current AirTag, a more tamper-proof speaker, and "very low" battery life alerts.


• iPad Pro: M5 chip and two front cameras, allowing for photos and video calls in both portrait and landscape orientations.


• Vision Pro: A faster M4 chip or M5 chip, a new head strap that improves comfort, and potentially a Space Black color option.


• Studio Display 2: A new version of the Studio Display with mini-LED backlighting is expected to launch in late 2025 or early 2026.

With three hearts, blue blood, and eight arms that seem to have a mind of their own, octopuses are among the ocean’s most fascinating creatures. Their signature limbs and complex nervous system help them explore, communicate, capture prey, and mate in many marine habitats. Now, scientists are unlocking some of the secrets embedded in these arms, namely whether they have some degree of “handedness.”

A new study of octopuses in the wild found that all eight arms can do multiple actions, but their front arms are primarily used for movement and exploration, while the back arms are used to support movement. The findings are published today in the journal Scientific Reports.

“Octopuses are ultimate multitaskers–all arms are capable of all arm behaviors and all arm deformations,” Chelsea Bennice, study co-author and a marine biologist at Florida Atlantic University, tells Popular Science. “They can even use multiple arm actions on a single arm and on several arms at the same time.”

When octopuses move across the seafloor, they can use multiple arms to camouflage from predators. These strong arms are also used for building dens, chucking shells, competing for mates, and more. According to Bennice, all of this flexibility helps the cephalopods to thrive in a wide range of habitats, from sandy shores to rocky reefs. 

What is less clear is if particular arms are preferred for one task over another, the way that humans typically have a dominant hand. Currently, limb preference is only well known in primates, rodents, and fish.

“No other animals are capable of such extreme arm flexibility and control,” says Bennice. “Octopuses are unique in that they have eight flexible appendages that can bend, shorten, elongate and twist (arm deformations) in all directions due to the octopus’s extensive nervous system in each arm and the complex arrangement of their arm musculature (and lack of bones).”

[ Related: This magnetic robot arm was inspired by octopus tentacles. ]

To delve into the world of the octopus, the team quantified nearly 4,000 different arm movements from 25 video recordings. The recordings included three wild octopus species observed in six different habitats in the Caribbean and Spain. From the footage, they categorized how the octopuses deployed four main arm deformations–bend, shorten, elongate, and twist.

The recordings showed that the octopuses used all of their arms to bend, shorten, elongate, and twist. However, the regions of each arm had different roles. The tips of the arms were primarily used for bends, while elongations were more frequent closer to the body. So instead of preferring an arm or side the way most humans do, octopuses can use all of their arms for all functions, but do have a slight preference for those up front.  

“Importantly, all arms are capable of all functions (arm behaviors), but the front arms are simply used more often than the rear arms (60 percent vs 40 percent),” study co-author and Marine Biological Laboratory biologist Kendra Buresch tells Popular Science. “This is surprising because previous studies have shown particular arm preferences, for example a difference in using left vs right arms–but these studies have mainly been done in the lab.”

This flexibility showcased how well they can control their motor skills and the adaptability of these cephalopods. 

“Adaptability is the key feature,” adds study co-author Roger Hanlon, an ethologist and marine biologist also at the Marine Biological Laboratory. “Because they are such tactile creatures, they have evolved suckers and arms that not only give them many forms of locomotion, but sensory capabilities that allow them to find hidden foods when they forage in any eco habitat.”

In future studies, the team hopes to compare these findings with other octopus species and their arms.

“Other octopus species have different proportions of arm size and length, and it would be informative to compare their arm behaviors as it relates to the whole animal behavior,” says Bennice.” Examples include octopuses with very long slender arms, such as the mimic octopuses Macrotritopus defilippi in the Caribbean and Thaumoctopus mimicus in the Indo-Pacific.”

Understanding the mechanics behind these exceptional arms can also be applied to neuroscience and could lead to more robots inspired by these adaptable creatures. 

The post Octopus arms are the animal kingdom’s most flexible appeared first on Popular Science.

Portland, Oregon has assembled a toolkit of resources for community groups that want to make their streets safer.

According to a Strong Towns blog, the city’s Safe Streets hub offers a wealth of data such as crash statistics and maps of high-injury corridors, as well as guidance for building low-cost safety interventions. “This resource will make it easier for communities to identify dangerous areas and clearly communicate the need for change. Instead of working with fragmented or outdated information, people now have a shared regional picture of where the risks are and how severe they are.”

The Community Quick-build and Demonstration Projects guide provides step-by-step instructions for designing and implementing low-cost interventions such as temporary crosswalks, curb extensions, traffic diverters, and protected bike lanes. “Since Oregon Metro is a regional governing body, every city within its boundaries now has access to the same tools — and encouragement from the regional level to use them. That alignment can help accelerate safer, more productive street design across dozens of jurisdictions.”

• Portland
• Safe Streets
• Road Safety
• Tactical Urbanism
• DIY Urbanism

The Trump administration announced it will propose several changes to vehicle safety regulations in the spring of 2026 that will change requirements for self-driving cars, eliminating some features such as windshield wipers and gear shift sticks that are designed for human drivers. According to a Bloomberg article by Keith Laing, “The move is the latest effort to rewrite of [sic] decades-old Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards under President Donald Trump to pave the way for an era of robotaxis.”

As James Ochoa explains in Auto Blog, the proposed changes would amend or remove three rules in the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. “Specifically, the rulings are FMVSS No. 102, FMVSS No. 103, 104, and 108 which cover regulations regarding a variety of safety features that can be found and controlled by the driver in everyday passenger vehicles, including starter interlocks (No. 102), windshield defrosting and defogging systems (No. 103), windshield wipers and washers (No. 104) and ‘original and replacement lamps, reflective devices, and associated equipment’ such as headlights and taillights (No. 108).”

• Self-Driving Cars
• Robotaxis
• Autonomous Vehicles
• Tesla
• Road Safety
• Vehicle Design

Earth’s oceans have always been a wild world of sound. A symphony of chatter between creatures, rain hitting the surface, the boom of calving ice, the thunders of waves and fizz of bubbles, the rumble of undersea earthquakes, and even mysterious quacking sounds. 

Still, time has moved slowly and surely on our restless Earth. Across its roughly 4-billion-year history, the ocean’s soundscape has evolved gradually, in a rhythmic tandem with the transformation of the planet itself. But in just the last two centuries, it has shifted dramatically, growing ever louder and more chaotic, due to a cacophony of human-made noise. Activities such as global shipping, seismic airgun surveys for oil and gas, offshore construction and drilling, and the emerging threat of deep-sea mining now flood the seas with constant, disruptive sound.  

This rising din threatens to drown out the ocean’s own voices—songs so well-structured that a leopard seal’s (Hydrurga leptonyx) melody appears to fall somewhere between a dolphin whistle and a human lullaby.

[ Related: As humans get louder, monkeys mark more territory. ]

With the dawn of the Industrial Revolution came steamships crisscrossing the oceans, introducing steady low-frequency noise from engines and propellers as global trade expanded. By 1950, shipping traffic increased fivefold, with bigger ships and noisier propellers. Between 1964 and 2004, ambient noise levels in the 30-50 Hz band increased by tenfold in sound energy. And in the years since 2004, the global shipping fleet has seen a cumulative growth of approximately 110%. 

Climate change is also rewriting the ocean’s acoustic script. As the seas warm, researchers have found that sound carries farther, and that rising acidity alters the very chemistry of how vibrations move through saltwater, reshaping the pathways of song and echo. Meanwhile, thinning ice sheets form strange acoustic ceilings, trapping sound in shallow layers where it ricochets and lingers. Human-made sounds ripple through the warming seas, drowning out the delicate echolocations and calls of marine life, leaving once-clear signals lost in a growing oceanic roar. The average cargo ship produces a steady rumble between about 20 and 200 hertz, roughly the same low-frequency band as a bass speaker, at a volume that’s on par with a chainsaw at close range.

And, we’re only beginning to understand its impacts on marine species. The songs at risk

Since water is a denser, more resistant element than air, it bends and muffles light and sound in ways that terrestrial life never quite encounters. Below 328 feet, nearly all sunlight has vanished, so ocean life has learned to “see” in other ways over time. Over millennia, marine animals have honed ears and sonar-like abilities to read their world in vibrations and echoes, turning the ocean into a place both alive with sound and fine-tuned to its subtleties.

Such noise is particularly critical for cetacean communication, where it is used for navigation, hunting, mating, and social bonding. Humans have long studied echolocation, noting how dolphins and some whales emit clicks and listen to the returning echoes to map their world.And yet, this same reliance on sound that makes their communication so spectacular, leaves them especially vulnerable to anthropogenic noise intruding into their environment.

Dolphins can have disrupted hunting and social behaviors from loud noise, while whales may abandon critical habitats or change migration routes in response. Narwhals have exhibited intense fear responses to seismic airguns used in oil and gas exploration, making sudden, deep dives to escape the blasts. Some whales have become stranded or collided with ships when overwhelmed by anthropogenic noise, while others have been left to, dangerously, reduce singing altogether. 

For many species, scientists are only beginning to recognize the role of sound in their survival, including leopard seals. A study recently published in Scientific Reports found that leopard seals arrange their songs with a surprising sense of order. 

Each breeding season, male leopard seals dive beneath the ice and repeat long, solitary sequences of five distinct call types for hours on end. Researchers analyzed those patterns using a tool from information theory called entropy, which quantifies how much variation or randomness is within a patterned sequence. They discovered the seals’ underwater arias were more structured than dolphin whistles or humpback songs, yet less rigid than human music. In fact, the seals landed in the same statistical range as nursery rhymes, where repetition and predictability help a message carry and be remembered.

“We can’t assume that a particular sound has a particular meaning in the way that we do with words,” Lucinda Chambers, a marine bio acoustician at the University of New South Wales in Australia and the study’s lead author, tells Popular Science. “But we can assume that a particular combination of sounds is very meaningful.” 

These sound combos placed leopard seals curiously alongside us. When their calls were compared against everything from squirrel monkey chatter to melodies by the Beatles, their songs showed a balance of randomness and order that suggests style, not just repertoire, matters for communication. In the vast and noisy Southern Ocean, such predictability may be the key to helping rivals or potential mates recognize an individual voice across miles of ice and water.

Each male combines the five call types in his own fixed sequence—functioning almost like a personal name that allows others to recognize him across the ice, notes Chambers. 

[ Related: Arctic seals have special noses. ]

The original leopard seal recordings were captured in remote, rugged Antarctica during the 1990s. Yet even here, at the bottom of the Earth, the soundscape is shifting. The continent remains relatively insulated from the constant hum of shipping lanes or coastal industry, yet it is not immune. Tourism, krill fishing, and vessel traffic are all on the rise. 

“It’s getting louder and louder,” says Chambers, who notes that scientists are only beginning to understand how such changes in background noise might alter the way leopard seals and other marine animals learn and pass down their songs. 

Leopard seals are intensely solitary mammals, scattered across vast stretches of pack ice, which makes it unclear how young seals ever learn the breeding songs in the first place. Females do sing, though not with the same long, patterned displays as males. Researchers suspect they may play a role in teaching pups,but it remains uncertain.

Many scientists  and policymakers across the board are testing solutions to keep the ocean’s acoustic world intact. Quieter ship technologies, speed restrictions in sensitive areas, and designated “quiet zones” can give marine species the breathing room they need. Stricter oversight of industrial activity, adoption of alternative low-noise technologies, and public education campaigns aim to reduce human-generated noise before it overwhelms ocean life. 

But even as new tools and strategies emerge to quiet the seas, the legal foundation that has long safeguarded marine life is under pressure.

Since 1972, The Marine Mammal Protection Act has served as a buffer against this cacophony, giving regulators tools to limit harm and protect species from deadly entanglements, vessel strikes, and industrial noise. A proposed reauthorization, however, could weaken those safeguards, lowering the standard from maintaining healthy populations to simply surviving, and limiting the rules agencies can set to reduce human-caused disturbance. 

Scientists warn that without strong protections, critical sound-based behaviors (communication, hunting, mating, etc.) could be increasingly disrupted, putting populations at risk.

“Animals will generally increase the loudness of their sounds in response to increasing background noise,” says Chambers. “If their distribution gets interrupted, it will further impact the way these sounds are learnt, or the way these songs are able to be transmitted.”  

The post Leopard seals sing like the Beatles appeared first on Popular Science.

Lansing, Michigan plans to install 50 modular micro-housing units in an effort to provide more emergency shelter for unhoused residents, reports Jordyn Hermani for the Associated Press. Lansing officials plan to identify a city-owned location for the shelters.

The city agreed to purchase 50 units from a project in Kalamazoo that never materialized. The 50 units, which are not approved for winter use, will cost $640,000 to buy and roughly $750,000 per year to maintain. 

Lansing officials made the decision to purchase the pods in August after the city began cracking down on homeless encampments. The city expects the site, once selected, to be ready for occupancy by June 2026. 

In a public meeting, some residents questioned the city’s plan for transitioning people out of the pods and into more secure, long-term housing. Deyanira Nevárez Martínez, an assistant professor at Michigan State and candidate for Lansing city council, pointed out the potential for a “slippery slope” to communities viewing modular micro-housing as a solution, not a temporary stopgap, for homelessness.

• Lansing
• Homelessness
• Unhoused
• Affordable Housing
• Housing Crisis
• Shelters
• Tiny Home Village
• Housing Assistance
• Emergency Housing

In the world of traffic engineering and transportation planning, there are a few terms practitioners use quite often. One of the most common is “Level of Service,” also known as LOS. It is used to describe how congested a road is from the user's perspective, expressed on a scale of A to F — like a grade school class. A means free flow, while F means gridlock. It is mostly used for motor vehicles, but it can also be used for pedestrians (I am not lying; look it up). 

Why is this important, you ask? Well, these concepts form the foundation of how we make transportation-related decisions. The best examples of this are Traffic Impact Studies (TIS), also known as Traffic Impact Assessments (TIAs). These studies evaluate the impacts of new developments on the surrounding transportation system. 

For instance, if an apartment complex was developed in a busy downtown, a LOS-based TIA would probably conclude that adding an apartment complex would add significant traffic, giving it an E or F result. In this case, the developer or responsible entity would need to provide relief. This is done via impact fees, one-time charges levied by local governments on new development to rectify growth-related impacts. 

This could mean anything from road widening to new traffic light programming, all of which are expensive. That means that developers try to avoid impact fees by developing in distant, less dense locations to obtain a better LOS grade. This promotes unnecessary sprawl, something we definitely do not need more of in the United States. Studies have shown that LOS-based TIAs contribute to slowed economic growth by limiting mobility to important destinations with inefficient development patterns. 

So what happens when developers do choose to pay impact fees in high-density environments? In many cases, they overpay. According to a policy brief by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Institute of Transportation Studies,  “Conventional trip- and parking-generation analyses, central to LOS-based TIA, tend to overestimate the traffic impacts of all types of developments, though the bias is largest for higher-density developments in more urban areas. Overestimated traffic impacts result in higher traffic impact fees, which tend to raise housing prices of both new and existing homes of all types and qualities.”

An interesting parallel here is parking minimums: just like they increase housing costs, LOS-based TIAs tend to pass the cost to consumers. No one notices it, but it slowly adds extra costs to an already expensive housing market and makes the goal of affordable housing in dense areas harder to achieve. 

For a long time, Level of Service was the undisputed metric for measuring traffic impact. But in the last decade, a new paradigm started to become popular: TIAs based instead on Vehicle Miles Traveled, or VMT. 

When you replace LOS with VMT, a few fundamental changes occur. Most importantly, the metric is no longer how much congestion a development produces but how much driving (or VMT) it induces. Changing this metric affects everything about how a development is evaluated. 

Let’s use the same example as before: a downtown apartment complex. Having apartments downtown means people are closer to their destinations, which means people will either drive less or not drive at all. This would mean low VMT, which translates to good results for the neighborhood and the city as a whole. If we stayed with the LOS route, which would only show the impact to local streets within a few blocks, the developer would either have to pay expensive impact fees and/or move to the outskirts of town to have less of an impact. This would then induce high VMT, as people would be farther away from their needs downtown. 

This is a simplification, but it explains the concept. Hence, proponents of VMT-based TIA argue that it will increase safety, improve environmental quality, and increase community cohesion. Additionally, studies have found that using VMT instead of LOS as a metric would save time and money in development projects. 

Don’t get me wrong, LOS is still useful today. As the senior managing Director from Reason Foundation writes, “Using LOS on arterials — designed to transport commuters-far distances — makes sense because the goal is to move large volumes of traffic relatively far distances.” But for some collectors and local roads, LOS might not be the best criteria. Local roads and collectors are, in many cases, streets where commercial activities happen, yet in most American communities, these places are also used for heavy vehicle travel.

This resulted in a hybrid that Charles Marohn from Strong Towns famously calls a “stroad.” A stroad is a mix between a road and a street. A road’s function is to connect places (preferably quickly), while a street’s function is to create wealth; as Mr. Marohn mentions “in a street, we're attempting to grow the complex ecosystem that produces community wealth. In these environments, people (outside of their automobiles) are the indicator species of success.” With this in mind, evaluating a street on its ability to provide free-flowing traffic (LOS) does not make sense, in this case. VMT is a more appropriate metric. 

The metric matters, especially in car-dependent America. LOS-based TIAs come from the 1950s, a time when motor vehicle proliferation and the destruction of American communities through highways were at all-time highs. 

Opponents of VMT-based TIAs argue that decreased driving might be detrimental to the economy or productivity of the region. But a report from the Victoria Transport Policy Institute that explores this issue argues that “research indicates that vehicle travel can be reduced in ways that achieve economic, social and environmental goals, provide financial savings, benefit most travellers, and enhance freedom overall.”

It is also important to note that while decreasing VMT now might mean decreased carbon emissions, this will not always be the case. As more electric and hybrid vehicles enter the market, the link between miles traveled and lower carbon emissions will not be as significant. But this does not mean VMT as a metric will become obsolete. For instance, finding new sources for transportation funding will become more pressing as the proliferation of EVs leads to the collapse of gas tax revenue.

The Washington State Transportation Commission’s assessment of projected gas tax decline is just one example of a trend playing out across the country.

Here VMT is once again a metric that could save the transportation world, as mileage-based user fees or VMT tax could replace the financial hole left by fuel tax. The logic is simple: the more miles you drive, the more you pay. In part, this is the same as the gas tax, as the more you drive, the more gas you need (and hence, pay). As Adrian Moore from the Reason Foundation writes:

There are five major advantages to user mileage-based user fees:

• Fairness. Mileage-based user fees (MBUF) ensure that those who pay the user fees are the ones who receive the benefits.
• Choice. MBUFs give users more control of what, when, and how often they pay.
• Flexibility. MBUFs give state departments of transportation (DOTs) the ability to adjust revenues and expenditures, as economic conditions, consumer demand, and technology change.
• Better incentives. Mileage-based user fees create incentives for drivers and DOTs to think seriously about the efficiency, quality, and costs of transportation. 
• Constraint. MBUFs can help prevent overconsumption and negative externalities, such as traffic congestion and air pollution.

Various U.S. states are already incorporating VMT as a metric. Not surprisingly, California was one of the pioneers on this matter. In 2013, the California Senate Bill 743 (SB 743) was passed, and later implemented in 2018. With it, traffic congestion was no longer considered as a potential environmental impact under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and instead, the amount of driving (VMT) became the new metric for assessing transportation impacts for new developments (under CEQA review). Other states such as Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington, have also started experimenting with VMT as a metric to reach environmental-related goals. 

Regarding VMT as a new source of transportation funding, states such as New Jersey have started developing their own mileage-based user fees pilot programs. In 2024, this program was born out of a partnership between the Eastern Transportation Coalition (the Coalition) and the New Jersey Department of Transportation and has as its main purpose to experiment with the new idea. The program was targeted specifically at EV drivers and required participants to contribute to the transportation system based on the miles they had driven. Additionally, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center data, states such as Oregon and Utah already operate active mileage fee systems to obtain transportation funding.

VMT is set to play a significant role in the future of transportation. Of course, no single metric is perfect, and VMT has its own limitations. But as more states and communities start using this new metric, a better model will inevitably develop, one that creates more equitable, sustainable, and efficient transportation systems. 

• VMT
• LOS
• Vehicle Miles Traveled
• Level of Service
• Traffic Demand Management
• Traffic
• Congestion
• Driving

• Australia West - 8:00 p.m. AWST


• Australia East - 10:00 p.m. AEST


• Austria - 2:00 p.m. CEST


• Belgium - 2:00 p.m. CEST


• Canada West - 5:00 a.m. PDT


• Canada East - 8:00 a.m. EDT


• China - 8:00 p.m. CST


• Denmark - 2:00 p.m. CEST


• Finland - 3:00 p.m. EEST


• France - 2:00 p.m. CEST


• Germany - 2:00 p.m. CEST


• Guernsey - 1:00 p.m. BST


• Hong Kong - 8:00 p.m. HKT


• Ireland - 1:00 p.m. IST


• Isle of Man - 1:00 p.m. BST


• Italy - 2:00 p.m. CEST


• Japan - 9:00 p.m. JST


• Jersey - 1:00 p.m. BST


• Luxembourg - 2:00 p.m. CEST


• Netherlands - 2:00 p.m. CEST

• New Zealand - midnight NZST next day


• Norway - 2:00 p.m. CEST


• Portugal - 1:00 p.m. WEST


• Puerto Rico - 8:00 a.m. AST


• Saudi Arabia - 3:00 p.m. AST


• Singapore - 8:00 p.m. SGT


• South Korea – 9:00 p.m. KST


• Spain - 2:00 p.m. CEST


• Sweden - 2:00 p.m. CEST


• Switzerland - 2:00 p.m. CEST


• Taiwan - 8:00 p.m. CST


• UAE - 4:00 p.m GST


• United Kingdom - 1:00 p.m. BST


• United States West - 5:00 a.m. PDT


• United States Mountain - 6:00 a.m. MDT


• United States Central - 7:00 a.m. CDT


• United States East - 8:00 a.m. EDT


• US Virgin Islands - 8:00 a.m. AST

• Photonic Engine - Combines the best pixels from a high-resolution image and an image optimized for light capture, producing a 24-megapixel image with detail sourced from an image twice the resolution. The Photonic Engine kicks in for low light images.


• Deep Fusion - Works in mid to low lighting conditions and brings out the texture and detail in the image. It improves images with medium lighting.


• Smart HDR 5 - Recognizes one or more people in a scene and optimizes contrast, lighting, and skin tones so everyone looks their best.


• Portrait images with Focus and Depth Control - You don't need to choose Portrait mode before capturing an image to get a portrait shot. You can just snap a photo, and if there's a person or a pet, depth information is collected and Portrait mode is enabled automatically with a blurred background. It works for Night mode, too.


• Portrait Lighting - Changes the lighting of Portrait mode photos with effects that include Natural, Studio, Contour, Stage, Stage Mono, and High-Key Mono.


• Night mode - Takes a series of images over a few seconds and aggregates them to allow for photography in extreme low lighting situations.


• Panorama - Captures panoramic shots that are up to 63 megapixels in size.


• Photographic Styles (including a new Bright option this year) - Photographic Styles are filters that you can apply before an image is captured, previewing them as you take a shot.


• Spatial photos and videos - Videos and photos captured in spatial mode can be viewed in 3D on the Vision Pro.


• ProRAW - A pro video recording option.


• Lens correction (for the Ultra Wide) - Eliminates distortion.


• Auto image stabilization - Corrects for camera shake.


• Burst mode - Allows a series of images to be captured all at once, which is good for high-action shots.

• Cinematic mode up to 4K Dolby Vision at 30 fps for keeping the focus on the main subject while you move


• Action mode up to 2.8K Dolby Vision at 60 fps for enhancing stabilization to reduce shake


• Spatial video recording at 1080p at 30 fps, with spatial audio


• Academy Color Encoding System


• Macro video recording, including slo-mo and time-lapse


• 1080p Slo-mo support at up to 240 fps, or 4K Dolby Vision at 120 fps


• Time-lapse


• QuickTake


• Digital zoom up to 15x


• Cinematic video stabilization


• Continuous autofocus video


• Audio Mix and wind noise reduction

• Verizon (US)


• AT&T (US)


• T-Mobile (US)


• Orange (Europe/Global)


• EE (UK)


• Three/3 (UK/International)


• Sunrise (Switzerland)


• AIS (Thailand)


• SoftBank (Japan)


• NTT Docomo (Japan)


• au (Japan)


• SmarTone (Hong Kong)


• CSL (Hong Kong)


• CTM (Macau)


• Singtel (Singapore)


• M1 (Singapore)


• Zain (Middle East/Africa)


• du (UAE)


• Boost Mobile (US)


• US Cellular (US)


• Metro by T-Mobile (US)


• China Unicom


• China Mobile


• China Telecom


• Jio (India)

1. 2× more active noise cancellation: Apple says the AirPods Pro 3 offer up to 2× more active noise cancellation than the AirPods Pro 2, and up to 4× more than the original AirPods Pro. In fact, the AirPods Pro 3 offer the best active noise cancellation of any in-ear wireless headphones, according to Apple.


2. Improved sound quality: AirPods Pro 3 feature a new acoustic architecture, with next-generation Adaptive EQ, that "transforms the bass response, widens the soundstage so users hear every instrument, and brings vivid vocal clarity to higher frequencies across music, shows, and calls," according to Apple.


3. Longer battery life per charge: Apple says AirPods Pro 3 offer up to 8 hours of listening time on a single charge, with Active Noise Cancellation enabled. That is up from 6 hours with the AirPods Pro 2. On the other hand, the AirPods Pro 3 charging case offers up to 24 hours of total listening time with Active Noise Cancellation enabled, whereas the AirPods Pro 2 case provides up to 30 hours of total listening time with Active Noise Cancellation enabled.


4. Heart rate monitoring during workouts: Like the Powerbeats Pro 2, the AirPods Pro 3 feature a heart rate sensor that shines pulsating infrared light to measure light absorption in blood flow. AirPods Pro 3 users can track their heart rate and calories burned, close their Move ring, and earn awards for 50 different workout types in the Fitness app on an iPhone, with no Apple Watch required.


5. Improved fit: Apple says AirPods Pro 3 are the "most secure and best-fitting AirPods ever." The earbuds are slightly smaller, and the external design of each ear tip was "aligned to the center of the body for increased stability."


6. Improved water resistance: AirPods Pro 3 have IP57-rated sweat and water resistance, up from IP54 for the AirPods Pro 2. By definition, an IP57 rating means the AirPods Pro 3 could withstand temporary immersion in up to one meter of water, but Apple's marketing only promises that they "can handle the sweatiest workouts and even a sudden downpour."


7. U2 chip: No, the AirPods Pro 3 do not come with a free U2 album, but the charging case does feature Apple's second-generation Ultra Wideband chip, presumably for longer location-tracking range in the Find My app.


8. XXS ear tip option: AirPods Pro 3 come with new XXS silicone ear tips, along with the same XS, S, M, L sizes included with the AirPods Pro 2. Apple says the tips are now infused with foam for greater passive noise isolation.