Description
The first thing to sort out on this listing is which color you are actually buying. The product title says “Powerbeats Pro in-Ear Totally Wireless Earphones, Black.” The manufacturer description immediately below it opens with, “The totally wireless Powerbeats Pro earphones in Ivory.” Those are two different products. The specification table sides with the title and records the color as black, so the description text has almost certainly been copied across from a sibling variant, but a buyer who cares about color should confirm with the seller before ordering rather than trusting either sentence.
The listener this is built for
Powerbeats Pro is an ear hook design. Each bud hangs from an adjustable loop that wraps behind the ear, which is a mechanical fix for the single biggest problem with sealed buds during exercise: they work loose when you sweat and move. Beats records the intended use as sports and exercise and names cycling, running and exercising as the recommended activities. The case is large by current standards, and the bud weight is not published in any usable form, which we come back to below.
The cycling recommendation needs a caution that the listing does not give. These are sealed in-ear buds with sound isolation. The specification table records “Noise Control: Sound Isolation,” meaning the seal blocks outside noise passively. On a road bike that is a genuine safety consideration, because a good seal removes the low frequency rumble of an approaching vehicle before you consciously register it. There is no transparency mode mentioned anywhere in this listing. If you want music while riding in traffic, the honest recommendation is a design that does not seal the canal at all, and our open-ear headphone listings exist for exactly that use. Nothing in this review should be read as endorsing sealed buds for road cycling, and volume should be kept low enough that conversation is still possible either way.
Connection, and what the listing declines to say
Beats states that Powerbeats Pro carries the Apple H1 headphone chip, and describes it as “delivering a faster and more stable wireless connection to your device for extended range and fewer dropouts.” The description also claims “Class 1 Bluetooth for extended range and fewer dropouts,” and the specification table records Bluetooth version 5.0.
What is entirely absent is a codec. Not one is named anywhere: no SBC statement, no AAC statement, no aptX statement. The H1 chip in practice negotiates AAC with Apple devices and SBC with most others, but that is background knowledge and not something this listing publishes, so we will not present it as a specification. There is no high resolution claim on this listing, which is the right outcome, because there would be nothing to support one. If a seller elsewhere tells you these deliver lossless or high resolution audio, ask which codec, and then ask whether your phone supports it.
Cross platform behavior
The listing says the earphones are compatible with iPhones and Android devices, and lists iPhone, Android, Apple Watch, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and iPod Touch under compatible devices. It also says hands free voice control works “via Hey Siri on iOS devices,” with a button press needed on other platforms. That is the standard split for H1 hardware. Android owners get a working pair of Bluetooth earphones and lose the automatic pairing, device switching and hands free assistant behavior that make this chip worth having.
Battery, buds versus case
The battery claims on this listing are more clearly separated than most, which is welcome. Beats states up to 9 hours of listening time from the earphones on a single charge, and “more than 24 hours listening time” with the charging case. The specification table repeats 9 hours as the battery life figure. Fast Fuel is quoted precisely: a 5 minute charge provides up to 1.5 hours of playback.
Two qualifications the listing does not add. Nine hours is a best case figure, quoted at moderate volume, and there is no cancellation circuit here to drain the cells further, which is one reason a 2019 era design still posts a competitive number. And a case charged over a Lightning cable, as this one is, is now the outlier: the specification table records the headphones jack as “lightning,” so this pair does not share a cable with a modern phone or laptop. That is a daily inconvenience, not a fault, but it is worth knowing before you buy.
Fit, seal, controls and the water rating that is not published
Four sizes of ear tip are supplied, which is a better count than the three that most competitors ship, and combined with the adjustable hooks this is one of the more accommodating fits in the catalog. The earpiece shape is recorded as a hook. Each earbud carries its own microphone and its own full volume and track controls, which is unusual and genuinely useful: you can change volume without reaching for a phone and without cycling through a touch gesture menu. Dual optical sensors and a motion detecting accelerometer are listed, which is what drives automatic play and pause when a bud is removed.
On water the listing is vague and we are not going to fill the gap. Beats says only “a reinforced design for sweat and water resistance.” There is no IP code anywhere in the title, the description, the bullets or the specification table. That means there is no published figure for how much water this pair tolerates, and the correct thing for a buyer to do is treat it as sweat resistant and nothing more. Do not read “water resistance” as a shower rating and certainly not as an immersion rating. Compare that with a listing like the Beats Fit Pro, and note how differently brands treat the same question.
The weight data on this listing is broken and should be ignored entirely. The specification table gives “Item Weight: 16 ounces” in one field and “Item Weight: 1 pounds” in another, and quotes product dimensions of 5 by 4 by 3 inches. A pound of earphones does not exist. Those figures describe the shipping carton, and the actual bud weight is not published.
What the listing leaves out, and the alternatives
There is no active noise cancellation on this product and the listing does not claim any. There is no transparency mode mentioned, no multipoint pairing mentioned, and no companion app mentioned. Customer feedback on this particular listing is thin: 3.9 out of 5 from just 34 ratings, which is a small enough sample that it should not carry much weight either way. The sales rank is given as 2,198th in Electronics and 305th in the earbud and in-ear headphone group, and the listing was first available in November 2020, with country of origin recorded as Vietnam.
This model appears more than once in our catalog. Our second Powerbeats Pro listing covers the same hardware under a different ASIN, and the follow up generation is covered in our Powerbeats Pro 2 review, which adds cancellation that this pair does not have. Readers who want a hook-free gym bud can start from the general true wireless earbud shelf, and readers who specifically want awareness outdoors should look at the SHOKZ OpenFit open-ear design instead.
Who should buy it and who should not
Buy it if you want a bud that stays put during hard training, you use an iPhone, and nine hours of runtime per charge suits you. The hook is the reason to choose this over a stemmed bud and it is the thing the listing gets right. Do not buy it expecting noise cancellation, because there is none. Do not buy it expecting a stated water rating, because none is published. Do not buy it as your road cycling headphone. And if the color matters, get the seller to confirm black or ivory in writing, because this listing says both.
