AirPods Pro 2 are back down to a bargain price while they last – for this cheap, you might prefer them over AirPods Pro 3

The price of Apple^[1] AirPods Pro 2 has dropped back down again: Amazon is currently offering AirPods Pro 2 for just $169, down from $249^[2].

That isn’t quite the lowest price we’ve ever seen – it briefly dropped $20 lower back in July 2025 – but it’s significantly less than the usual selling price of around $200, and it’s unlikely to go any lower this side of Black Friday.

At full price we’d recommend buying the AirPods Pro 3^[3] instead, because they have the same $249 list price. But when there’s an 80-dollar price difference, the second-gen model may be the better value buy.

Today’s best AirPods Pro 2 deal

Should you buy these AirPods Pro 2 instead of the AirPods Pro 3?

That’s a very good question, and we wrote an entire feature in order to answer it.^[4] The tl;dr version is that the AirPods Pro 2 are very good, and the AirPods Pro 3 are slightly better but right now, notably more expensive. They’re very similar in design (the AirPods Pro 2 are fractionally lighter and have a soft in-ear tip) and they both have the same H2 chip.

The newer model gets better battery life, adds heart-rate tracking and has improved noise cancellation, but actually aren’t too different overall.

In our updated AirPods Pro 2 review^[5] we gave the earbuds 4.5 out of 5 stars for their impressive noise cancelling, “super” sound and Spatial Audio quality, and their “great” Active Transparency mode: commenting on the launch of the refreshed USB-C model, which is the one Amazon^[6] is offering, we said that “compared to new releases, they still hold their own for audio prowess, and the noise cancellation is only just behind the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds 2.”

Your writer is a long-term AirPods Pro user and to be honest I don’t see any compelling reason to upgrade from my AirPods Pro 2: at $169 the second-gen are great earbuds for a good price, even with a newer generation available.

But if you want to take advantage of these discounts it might be wise to move sooner rather than later, because Apple has already removed the second-gen from its own retail outlets and website. Clearly the second-gen aren’t going to be around for too much longer – there’s no guarantee that these will get any cheaper over Black Friday, since they may not last that long.