Ok so lets review the new AirPods 3rd Gen. I'm hoping I can save some of you from wasting time or money on this purchase as I was really hoping that this would be a good review, but this is going to be a rough one. The only videos that are currently reviewing the 3rd Gen AirPods are top tier YouTubers who were shipped Pods early, and I'm sure these channels have some sort of a relationship with Apple, based on the reviews that I saw. One red flag is that no negatives were mentioned at all on any video. So I figured I'd be the guinea pig.

I will mostly be comparing these to the AirPods 2nd Gen and not the AirPod Pros since that's the upgrade path that Apple is trying to convert anyways.

Pro's

• Great Battery Life

• Cool new "Find my AirPods" feature set

Con's

• Constant buzzing/feedback noise in the right AirPod. No matter what I connect them to, there is a constant very slight feedback noise coming from the right AirPod that you can hear when nothing is playing. Some may not notice this noise, but I definitely did, and it got increasingly annoying. I nothing nothing of the sort in the 2nd Gen Pods, complete silence from those.

• I actually prefer the "tap" technology in the 2nd Gen Pods to the "click" technology in the 3rd Gen. This may be a matter of personal preference, but if I'm biking or running it's much easier for me to tap a Pod to pause, rather than having to gently locate it as I'm running, not knock it out of my ear, and then click to pause, etc. I feel like the click was a step in the wrong direction, and was possibly made only due to the reduced size of stem on the 3rd Gen Pods.

• The audio quality when connected to a MacBook is not as good as the 2nd Gen Pods. I noticed that the quality sounded more distant and less crisp. I'm not sure why this would be, but listening to the 2nd and 3rd Gen, one in each year, you can definitely hear the difference. Everything from music to podcasts sounds worse on the 3rd Gen.

• The "Spatialized Audio" function is more of a gimmick than an actual usable feature. It definitely makes the treble pop, but standard stereo is still the best way to listen to music. Anything else like Podcasts just sounds like you're inside of an echoey warehouse, so I'm not sure if this will be the reason anyone will actually purchase these. I left this feature on for about three minutes until it just got too annoying.

• The larger build is much more uncomfortable in your ear especially for all day users. This was the biggest gripe I had by far. I want to barely notice them in my ears, even after hours of wearing them. If not, it's a huge issue for me. It's also not a matter of IF but WHEN; these WILL slide out of your ears. I noticed that if I was eating they would start getting loose, and if I bent over they would get close to completely falling out, hitting the ground twice. Huge fail. This has never happened to me with the 2nd Gen Pods.

Overall this was a disappointing review for me. I was really hoping that these would be awesome, but they just don't do it for me. I will be sticking with the 2nd Gen pods for now, especially since they just reduced the cost to $129. Looks like I will be stocking up on those. Cheers!