With pulse sensing, refined lighting and a growing ear database, Apple’s latest earbuds combine health, fitness and reliability into a seamless everyday design.

Read Tech

Kate Bergeron on AirPods Pro 3: The New Design You’ll Never See

With pulse sensing, refined lighting and a growing ear database, Apple’s latest earbuds combine health, fitness and reliability into a seamless everyday design.

Josh Rubin

25 September 2025

This month marked one of Apple’s boldest refresh cycles in years. With the launch of the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone Air, the new generation of Apple Watch and the renewed push on AR and software excellence, Apple has reshaped its ecosystem. The iPhone 17 family comes with improved cameras, an in-house A19 chip and a new iPhone Air model that pushes the envelope with slimness without sacrificing power. On the wearables front, the Apple Watch Series 11 introduces high blood pressure alerts and in-depth health information. In that context, the AirPods Pro 3 would have overshadowed us. Instead they become a lynchpin: a place where health, communication, accessibility and entertainment meet.

Apple’s new AirPods Pro 3 for familiarity with a silent update. At first glance they look like a refinement of the iconic building but inside they represent a step forward in engineering. Kate Bergeron, Apple’s VP of Hardware Engineering, described the design challenge in a nutshell: “It’s a 3D Tetris game of trying to pack as much as we can into a very small space.” That game produced smaller, lighter and stronger earbuds—including improved water and dust protection—all while improving the sound quality and comfort that defined previous models.

The jump isn’t just physical—it’s mathematical. Each earbud now functions as a computing device powerful enough to support functions that were once exclusive to an iPhone or Watch. With this generation AirPods Pro 3 (and select models of the previous generation) can help translate live with the Translate app, allowing a conversation in all languages ​​directly through your ears. Redefining the role of the product: AirPods are no longer just sound pipes but active participants in processing and mediating the world around you.

One of the most important additions is the heart rate sensor, Apple’s first for an AirPods product. Unlike the Apple Watch which has a surface area for optics, the challenge was to integrate the biometric sensor into the part of the space. Bergeron emphasized why the ear is a good place: “The ear is a really stable place to measure, so it’s a good place for us to be able to track the heart rate.” This transforms earbuds from audio accessories into health-conscious wearables—measuring your heart rate while you run, meditate or go about your daily life. The feature works alongside the Apple Watch to track workouts, checking regularly and using the best data source. It also works without the Apple Watch to track several types of workouts directly on the iPhone.

Transparency mode is also seeing its most natural evolution yet. Redesigned microphones and acoustic tuning allow vocals to come through in an unmistakable way while surround sound is shaped to feel real rather than filtered. Bergeron explained that the development of active noise cancellation (ANC) also improves visibility: “Transparency is actually the opposite of canceling noise. In ANC, we try to block everything as much as we can. And obviously, we try to bring the real world as much as possible. So the good thing is, our collaboration, we work very well with statistics, and statistics. that we have made progress in ANC, and that will help transparency” In our assessment this is the most psychological aspect – when given power through the sound is almost impossible to see as it is processed from the microphone to the speakers and it sounds like you are not wearing AirPods at all. And yes, the ANC is amazing too.

Then there’s music, the reason AirPods exist in the first place. Custom drivers and acoustically freed chambers, made possible by thin microelements, deliver richer bass, crisper highs and spatial contrast than ever before. Songs sound bigger and more detailed with real-time dynamic EQ playback to suit your unique ear geometry. For a device this small reliability depends on unusual things.

Much of this improvement comes from Apple’s relentless drive to reduce the invisible. The antenna plan is now printed directly on the system-in-packagepassive components are reduced to small scales of millimeters and each layer of the design works to create a sound space. Bergeron explained the main paradox of their work: “We’re always trying to figure out how to fit more into the same volume or even less volume.”

Along with focusing on performance and fitness is balance—because the design isn’t just about what’s inside the bud but how it adapts to the body. AirPods Pro 3 benefit from years of building what Bergeron calls their ear database, a digital library of scans used to refine the ergonomics and design of the ear tip. He explained: “Whenever we hear from someone who says the AirPods don’t fit, we invite them in to have their ears checked. Then we add that to our ear knowledge, which we use for all generations.” This constant collection of data means that AirPods are literally built for the differences in human ears.

The result is something that feels both complicated and useless. Heart rate sensing, live rendering, improved visibility, surprise, better sound and better fit—all wrapped up in a design that still looks like a gem, it’s almost effortless. As Bergeron put it, “We’re always trying to do more in a smaller space” and “We want people to just plug them in and make them work the way they expect.”

AirPods Pro 3 embodies Apple’s newest brand: hiding its complexity. What you notice is not a new antenna system, a reduction in components or additional biometric sensors. What you notice is how little you see besides the music, your conversation, the city or your heartbeat—all flowing through earbuds designed to disappear.