Apple has unveiled the hotly anticipated AirPods Pro 3 – among the many other things it announced at its iPhone 17 livestream – and the biggest change compared to the best AirPods available so far is the addition of heart-rate sensors.
This wasn’t a surprise – it had been heavily rumored, and Apple recently added the same kind of tech to its Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 – but Apple went further than I expected it to.
It revealed that AirPods Pro 3 can use the motion sensors they have built in, along with the heart-rate tracking, to heavily encroach on the territory of the best Apple Watches.
You can do fully-tracked workouts in 50 different kinds of exercise with them on, where they’ll track your motion in conjunction with your heart rate to estimate calories burned, and they even work with Apple Fitness+ and third-party apps to display your stats on-screen as you work out.
At first I thought: Isn’t this going to be a huge problem for the Apple Watch SE 3? And then I thought: Wait, no, could this be amazing for the Apple Watch business?
Why it could be bad for the Apple Watch
For a long time, a key reason to get into the entry-level Apple Watch is as a gentle fitness device; something to help you build on light exercise goals, that’s able to to grow with you as you try more challenging exercises.
You can see your heart rate improve over time, you can use workout apps with it – a light way to help achieve health goals.
Given how often people use a pair of the best earbuds while exercising, wouldn’t it be even better if the light-touch device that tracked all that stuff I mentioned was your earbuds? Then you only have to pay for one device, and you don’t need to wear anything additional.
AirPods Pro 3 and the Apple Watch SE 3 are the exact same price, so they’re in hot competition for this spot – and so my first thought was that Apple’s audio division could be eating its wearables division.
Why it could be great for the Apple Watch
However, my second thought was that the Apple Watch has perhaps moved past being a device where fitness is the key factor to you get into it. These days, Apple’s focus (aka why new people should buy the Watch) is more about your general health, rather than purely as a fitness aid. The new Apple Watch SE 3, for example, has sleep apnea warnings, fall detection, irregular heart beat warnings, car crash detection, deeper sleep tracking and more – plus the potential for more advanced fitness tracking.
And that’s just the most basic Apple Watch – obviously the Ultra is in another world entirely.
So the AirPods Pro 3 might help boost the Apple Watch by acting as a gateway buy for people to start tracking their fitness more, which will get them thinking about those other health elements that they’d also like to know about, and thus could lead to a massive boost in Apple Watch sales (maybe).
The more I think about it, the more I suspect the latter is the case – that AirPods Pro 3 will pave the way for more people to think about the benefits Apple Watch offers.
But there’s still a little part of me that can’t help but think a surprising number of people might get everything they need out of the new AirPods, and Apple will miss out on selling them two devices. Which is, ultimately, good news for people looking to spend less money, currently.