Beats has finally announced a new version of its wildly successful Powerbeats Pro sports-oriented wireless earbuds. In a short Reel featuring baseball player Shohei Ohtani that was posted to the brand’s Instagram account on September 4, the company teased the Powerbeats Pro 2 and promised that they’ll be arriving in 2025.
The new model can’t come soon enough for Beats fans. The original version has been around since its release in 2019, a relative eternity in a world where it feels like wireless headphones and earbuds get updated every year.
The only thing we can glean from the video is the shape of the new earbuds. The Powerbeats Pro 2 retain the earhook design that helped propel the first-gen to success, but the overall body appears to be more slender. Ohtani is wearing a white set of Powerbeats Pro 2 with a black (or possibly navy) Beats “b” logo. It’s hard to tell, but the that logo looks like it’s painted onto the surface of the earbud, suggesting that Beats may have hidden the physical button beneath the surface, similar to the Beats Solo Buds and the Beats Fit Pro.
Sound quality — especially bass response — was a big selling point on the Powerbeats Pro, so we can likely expect a similar sound signature on the new model. Other features that are a strong possibility are active noise cancellation (which was a surprising omission when the first generation debuted), transparency mode, spatial audio, and (hopefully) a much more compact charging case with USB-C instead of a Lightning connection.
Battery life has always been one of the Powerbeats Pro’s strengths and it’s a good bet this will continue on the second-gen.
