AirPods 4 Lightning Review: The Best-Value AirPods

Apple recently released the fourth generation of its iconic earbuds with AirPods 4. While still retaining its hard fixed-shaped ear tips to differentiate it from the Pro models, the new iteration comes with optional active noise cancellation, bridging the gap between the Pro and non-Pro AirPods.

With the latest model, the question arises as to whether most users should opt for the vanilla option in order to save a huge chunk of money. To that, I’d say that there is now a valid argument to support this narrative, albeit with a rather sizable caveat.

What Am I Looking At?

The AirPods 4 comes in two variants: regular and ANC. With a price gap of RM230, the latter offers you not only ANC but also a transparency mode, adaptive audio, wireless charging, a speaker to help you find the case if it’s lost nearby, Conversation Awareness and Voice Isolation.

Those differences aside, both models come with custom drivers and amplifiers in each bud, beamforming microphones, in-ear sensors, accelerometers, a H2 chip, support for the Find My network, force sensors for controls, Bluetooth 5.3, and a charging cradle with USB-C. For dust and water resistance, the earbuds come with an IP54 rating.

Oddly enough, the battery life has slightly decreased compared to its predecessor, with the AirPods 4 claiming a battery life of only five hours on a single charge, which is reduced to four hours when ANC is enabled. However, the total battery life, when paired with the charging case, remains the same at up to 30 hours without ANC, while turning on noise cancellation cuts the total usage time to 20 hours.

What’s Good About It?

First and foremost, we have to talk about the sound. I’ve always been a fan of the AirPods Pros for its balanced sound but found that the vanilla models were a bit lacking in this department. This doesn’t seem to be the case for the AirPods 4: as I was blown away by the rich sound quality that is nearly on par with the Pro.

Whether it’s listening to Gracie Abrams, Noah Kahan, or Linkin Park, these earbuds offer crispy bass that doesn’t overwhelm, amazing sound staging, and absolutely crystal clear vocals. That, it makes listening to podcasts quite pleasant.

The force sensors make using the 4th-gen AirPods as convenient to use as the Pro model despite the shorter stems. On that note, it lacks the volume control function from the Pros. Additionally, Apple replaced the physical pairing button with a hidden capacitive one on the front, which I initially thought I would hate but it turns out to be very responsive and makes pairing even easier.

For the first time ever, Apple put active noise cancellation into the non-Pro AirPods (for a much higher price) and despite my reservations about it due to the lack of a proper seal, it performs nearly as well as the Pro, surprisingly. It definitely feels like high-end ANC and even the transparency mode is better because of that lack of a seal. The AirPods 4 can drown out most of the noise in a busy environment and on trains, it can reduce the background noise of the tracks to a much more tolerable level.

On the software side, it comes with Personalised Volume, Conversation Awareness, and Adaptive Audio. Regarding the Personalised Volume feature, it is suppose to actively adjust the volume to your environment but in my experience, it kept turning it down a little too low, so I just turned this off. That said, I don’t recommend disabling it if you care about your hearing in the long-term.

Conversation Awareness can be pretty useful as it lowers the volume when it detects that you’re speaking to people. That said, it could do with some improvements: it tend to take a bit too long to activate at times, and other times, it will mistake me gulping my saliva as speaking.

What’s The Catch?

My biggest issue with the AirPods 4, by far, is the fit of the eartips. Because they are a hard, fixed shape, the earbuds will either fit you perfectly, or they won’t fit you at all. In the case of the former, like with my partner, you can wear them confidently even when walking or jogging. For those who fall under the latter, don’t bother giving these a chance.

If the tips don’t fit your ears, you will need to adjust them every five minutes or so even if you’re just sitting still, making them very uncomfortable and highly impractical to use. My workaround is cheap silicone eartips that I procured on Shopee, that you can slap onto the AirPods 4. This actually made them fit in my ears perfectly. That being said, this unofficial solution comes with major compromises – As you can see from the picture, the eartips do not fit into the charging case, so you would have to take them off and put them back on every single time you want to use your AirPods.

As for the battery life, it’s a little disappointing that rival TWS earbuds nowadays can last six to eight hours on a single charge with ANC, whereas the 4th generation can only go on for about four hours as claimed. Heck, even the AirPods 3 boasts a better battery life, so I’m not sure why these can’t last just as long when the ANC is disabled.

Then there is the software side, with Apple disabling the transparency mode customisation option and leaving out the Conversation Boost feature for reasons unknown to me. Thankfully, the new Siri Head Gestures feature does trickle down to the AirPods 4, but I couldn’t get it to work at all and I’m currently hoping that the next iOS update fixes this.

Should I Buy It?

If you’re wondering why I keep mentioning the AirPods Pro throughout my review, that’s because, while the non-ANC model got a significant price cut, the ANC version got more expensive at RM829, making it only RM270 less than the Pro.

Despite my criticism of the price increase, the improved sound quality and the addition of the ANC make the AirPods 4 a worthy competitor to the Pro earbuds themselves. Unless you desperately want the hearing aid functions and provided your ears are compatible with the new model, I don’t really see a reason why you should buy the Pro over the 4th-gen AirPods.

As for the non-ANC AirPods 4, which costs RM599, I have the same opinion of it as I’ve had with its predecessors: no earbuds over RM400 should come without ANC.

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