Apple AirPods 4 Review – Consumer Reports

The original AirPods were, in many ways, a love-it-or-hate-it product.

In the nine years since they were first introduced, two things have happened.

First, the design—which features a hard plastic eartip on a white plastic stem—has become iconic. During the pandemic, it even emerged as a Zoom-call fashion accessory.

However, around the same time, almost all earbuds from Apple and other manufacturers moved away from the one-size-fits-all design. Newer earbuds come with silicone or foam ear tips in a variety of sizes.

Some people, like me, love the secure fit and the passive noise canceling of these models. For other folks, like my wife, the tight-fitting soft eartips remind them of earplugs … in a bad way. These listeners prefer the less-isolating AirPods 4, which retain that hard plastic eartip—no silicone in sight—and form a very gentle seal with your ear canal.

The AirPods 4 have been reshaped slightly with an eye toward better comfort, but I find the difference between the AirPods 4 and a pair of older AirPods I borrowed from my son to be pretty subtle. Do the AirPods 4 ever fall out? For me, they didn’t. Do they feel like they’re going to fall out? That was sometimes a concern for me.

But, as with all earbuds, fit is very much a personal thing. We’ll have much more to say about all this once our diverse panel of testers tries out the AirPods 4 in our sound labs in Yonkers, N.Y.