Thanksgiving is a few weeks away, but there are already some great Black Friday deals to be had. For example, Apple’s AirPods Pro 2 have dropped in price again, to $170. That’s $80 or 32 percent off list price. That’s not a record low, as the AirPods Pro 2 have previously sold out for $169, but it’s not exactly low either.
The AirPods Pro 2 are our pick for the best wireless earbuds for iPhone. We also gave them a score of 88 in our review in 2022.
We think Transparency mode, which is powered by Apple’s H2 chip, is excellent. It sounds far more natural here than any other earphone we’ve tested.
Apple recently made this even better by enabling hearing health features on the AirPods Pro 2. These include an FDA-approved hearing aid function and hearing tests. The earphones can also be used to protect your hearing in noisy environments like music festivals, without interrupting the audio.
Other useful features include fast pairing and ease of switching between Apple devices, spatial audio, hands-free Siri, and solid active noise cancellation. The earphones are IPX4-rated for water resistance. The downside is that the touch gestures take a little getting used to.
The AirPods Pro 2 lasted about six hours and 15 minutes on a single charge during our testing. The charging case (whose battery you can charge wirelessly or via USB-C) adds three additional charges.
The rise of the AI NPC has felt like a threat for years, as if developers couldn’t wait to dump human writers and offload NPC conversations to generative AI models. At CES 2025, NVIDIA made it abundantly clear that the technology is just around the corner. PUBG developer Krafton, for example, plans to use NVIDIA’s ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) to power AI companions that will assist and joke around with you during matches. Krafton isn’t just stopping there – it’s also using ACE in its life simulation title InZOI to make characters smarter and generate objects.
While the use of generative AI in games seems almost inevitable, as the medium has always toyed with new ways to make enemies and NPCs smarter and more realistic, watching multiple NVIDIA ACE demos back to back really floored me. It wasn’t just slightly smarter enemy AI – ACE can create entire conversations out of thin air, simulate voices and try to give NPCs a sense of personality. It’s also doing this locally on your PC, powered by NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs. But while this all might sound great on paper, I hated nearly every second of watching the AI NPCs in action.