The premium AirPods 5 are the best open-ear earbuds Apple has made

The $149 AirPods 5 with Wireless Charging Case have great ANC and finally add swipe volume controls.

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It’s almost a guarantee that the new version of a product will be, at best, the same price as the old one, and often (especially in the past couple years) more expensive. But that’s not what Apple did with the AirPods 5. The $149 AirPods 5 with Wireless Charging Case are $30 cheaper than the AirPods 4 with ANC they replace. They have slightly better active noise cancellation, and they’re the first non-Pro AirPods with volume controls on the stem. Apple has never made wireless earbuds that offer as much for so little, and they make the base AirPods 5, which are $20 cheaper but don’t have wireless charging or volume controls, pointless.

Cheaper than the AirPods 4 with ANC Improved sound Volume swipe control

The AirPods 5, like all non-Pro AirPods, use an open-ear design, meaning they don’t have silicone ear tips to form a seal in your ear canal. Last generation, Apple offered two versions of the AirPods: one with active noise cancellation and one without . This time around, there are still two models. But both models of the AirPods 5 include active noise cancellation. They both also have adaptive audio and transparency mode, plus live translation with an iPhone 15 Pro or later, and are IP57 rated (up from IP54 on the AirPods 4). The main differences between the $129 AirPods 5 and the $149 AirPods 5 with Wireless Charging Case — aside from the wireless charging case and the annoyingly long name — are the volume controls, battery life, and 20 bucks.

That extra $20 is well worth it. The wireless charging case is nice (it isn’t MagSafe, but it does work with the magnetic Apple Watch charger). But the most important change is that they finally have swipe volume controls. That’s one thing that’s been missing from all non-Pro AirPods until now. Part of the convenience of wireless earbuds is that you can leave your phone in your pocket or bag, and omitting volume control on the earbuds themselves defeats the purpose. With the two models so close in price, I can’t understand why Apple even released the base AirPods 5.

Apple says that both models of the AirPods 5 have up to 50 percent better noise cancellation than the AirPods 4 with ANC, but the company doesn’t provide details about which frequencies are affected (we’ll have to wait for folks like SoundGuys to put them on their measurement rig). While the size and look of the AirPods remains the same, Apple redesigned the internal acoustic architecture, reworked the algorithm, and included denser mesh on the ports for slightly more passive attenuation (naturally reducing ambient noise), which helps achieve that ANC improvement.