AirPods 5 Review: The Open Earbuds to Beat?

Despite using Apple products for years, I have somehow never owned a pair of AirPods. There wasn’t any particular reason for it; the earbuds I already owned worked perfectly fine, so I never felt much need to replace them just because I had an iPhone or MacBook.

The AirPods 5 are therefore my first proper experience with Apple’s earbuds, and after spending some time with them, I finally understand the appeal. They are comfortable, sound great for the most part, and integrate with the Apple ecosystem so effortlessly that you barely have to think about which device they are connected to. Open the case, put them in, and they are basically ready to go.

That ease of use is probably the AirPods 5’s biggest strength. Better-sounding earbuds exist, and others offer more features, such as the Samsung Galaxy Buds4 Pro, and Apple still makes baffling decisions about what it locks behind the more expensive version. But as a complete everyday package for someone already using an iPhone and MacBook, the AirPods 5 make a very convincing case for themselves. If you are deciding between Apple’s two in-ear options, our AirPods 5 vs AirPods Pro 3 UAE comparison breaks down the differences.

Design, Comfort and Features

The AirPods design needs little introduction. The latest model retains the familiar glossy white finish and short-stem design of the previous generation, with an open-ear fit that rests inside your ear rather than sealing the canal with a silicone tip.

What surprised me was the charging case’s size. It’s tiny. Much smaller and slimmer than most wireless earbud cases I have used or reviewed, and it disappears inside a pocket. Despite being entirely plastic, it feels suitably premium, with a sturdy hinge and the kind of fit and finish you would expect from an Apple product.

I am far less enamoured with the glossy finish. The AirPods get slippery very quickly, particularly after a workout, and seemingly every bit of dirt and oil from your ears becomes immediately visible. I found myself constantly wiping them down just to maintain some grip while taking them out. I would happily accept a slightly larger case or some subtly textured areas if it made the buds easier to handle.

Comfort, thankfully, is excellent. The AirPods 5 mostly disappear once they are in my ears, and I can wear them for several hours without irritation. The open-ear design creates the sensation that they sit loosely, and that feeling never completely goes away, but in practice they have been far more secure than they feel. I have worn them while lifting weights and walking on a treadmill without either bud dislodging once. Your mileage might be different if your workout involves considerably more movement or your ear is shaped differently.

The only discomfort I have experienced comes from the ANC, which creates a little pressure around my ears after prolonged listening. It isn’t particularly severe, but after a few hours I do occasionally take them out for a short break.

The stem controls work remarkably well considering how short the stems are and how close they sit against the ear. Squeezes have registered reliably every time, while swiping up or down to change the volume quickly became second nature. I have never accidentally triggered the wrong command or knocked a bud out of place, although you instinctively learn to be a little more deliberate when touching them.

What is ridiculous, however, is that Apple includes volume swipe controls only on the more expensive Wireless Charging Case version. The cheaper AirPods 5 (AED 549) still get the same basic playback controls, but apparently changing the volume from the earbuds themselves is now a premium feature. I can understand charging extra for wireless charging, a case speaker, or longer battery life, but withholding something as basic as volume control just to separate the two models feels unnecessay.

Anyway, let’s talk about the Apple ecosystem integration, which might be the biggest reason to own AirPods in the first place. Setup is about as painless as it gets: open the case beside an iPhone, tap Connect, and you are done. My MacBook picked them up almost immediately as well.

Switching between devices is equally slick. I can be watching something on my iPhone, start playing a video on the MacBook, and the AirPods automatically move over without me touching a Bluetooth menu or fiddling with stem controls. It works so well that it almost feels invisible.

Almost.

If a notification from Slack or WhatsApp arrives on the Mac while I am listening to something on the iPhone, the AirPods can occasionally decide that the Mac now deserves their attention and switch over. That gets annoying very quickly if you receive a steady stream of notifications. Automatic switching is still enormously convenient, but Apple occasionally needs reminding that I know which device I actually want to listen to.

The AED 629 Wireless Charging Case version also supports Qi and Apple Watch charging, along with a built-in speaker that can play a sound through Find My if you misplace it. The AirPods 5 and case are IP57 rated as well, making them resistant to dust, sweat and the occasional encounter with water.

Software and Configuration

As with most Apple accessories, you don’t need a separate app to configure the AirPods 5. Everything lives inside iOS, and thankfully, Apple has organized the options well enough that nothing feels particularly difficult to find.

The main page gives you quick access to the four listening modes – Off, Transparency, Adaptive and Noise Cancellation – along with separate menus for audio settings, controls, Live Translation, accessibility, battery management and Find My.

One of the more interesting additions is Live Translation, currently labelled as a beta feature. With both AirPods in your ears, you can press and hold both stems to start translating supported languages in real time, with language packs downloaded directly from the AirPods settings menu. The current list includes Mandarin Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Korean, among others. Arabic, however, is not available yet, which is a notable omission for users in the Middle East and limits how useful the feature is locally for now.

Under Audio & Routing, you can enable Personalised Volume, Conversation Awareness, Automatic Ear Detection and Personalised Spatial Audio, the latter using the iPhone’s TrueDepth camera to scan your head and ears. Meanwhile, the Controls & Gestures page lets you configure press-and-hold actions, call controls and head gestures.

There is also a proper equaliser now, albeit a fairly simple three-band implementation for Low, Mid and High frequencies. I do wish Apple had provided a proper 6, 8 or 10-band EQ because, well, why not? Apple provides a Recommended profile or lets you create a custom curve, and I bounced between the two during most of my testing. Raising the low frequencies does give the bass a little more body, but the difference compared to the Recommended profile isn’t dramatic, and Apple doesn’t really explain what that preset is actually changing.

Audio Quality

The AirPods 5 have genuinely impressive audio quality, particularly their soundstage, stereo separation, and detail retrieval. For such tiny earbuds, they can produce a surprisingly large soundscape, with instruments and effects clearly separated rather than being condensed into one blob in the middle of your head.

The open-ear design likely plays a large part in that. Taal Se Taal (Western), for example, has a busy arrangement with percussion, vocals and instruments constantly moving around the mix, and the AirPods 5 give everything enough breathing room to remain distinct. Tool’s Chocolate Chip Trip is equally impressive in how clearly every drum hit can be positioned around the soundstage.

The tuning itself, however, hasn’t quite won me over. It leans very neutral and fairly flat, which sounds great on some tracks but strangely lifeless on others. At times, the music almost sounds as though a very thin veil is over it, even though the detail is still present underneath. It isn’t muddy, and the bass doesn’t bleed into anything else. The presentation just occasionally lacks the energy and body I want from music.

Bass is probably the biggest contributor. There simply isn’t much of it. The open-ear design has obvious acoustic limitations, and the AirPods 5 struggle to produce the kind of deep thump, rumble, or weight you would get from a good pair of sealed earbuds. The bass response reminds me more of clip-on open earbuds: present enough to complete the sound, but rarely strong enough to make you want to bop along with the track. Even Seven Nation Army, with its prominent bass line, doesn’t have quite the physicality I would like.

Mids fare much better. Vocals remain clear and naturally presented, and instruments retain plenty of separation without sounding artificial. Treble is smooth enough for long listening sessions and carries a decent amount of detail, although this is also where I occasionally notice the processing. Certain higher-frequency sounds can have a slightly artificial edge to them, almost as though the signal is beginning to tear or become digitally processed rather than resolving naturally.

Spatial Audio changes the experience dramatically, although I prefer leaving it disabled for music. Songs can sound oddly stretched with it enabled, though live recordings might benefit from the wider presentation.

Movies are an entirely different story.

I watched The End of Oak Street using Fixed Spatial Audio and came away seriously impressed. The movie already has excellent sound mixing, with dinosaur roars, jump scares, and plenty of audio cues layered both horizontally and vertically, and the AirPods 5 handled it far better than I expected. Sounds appeared from areas around me that I would normally associate with a proper closed-back headset, while the already strong stereo separation gave Spatial Audio plenty of room to work with.

In fact, for movies, I would happily use the AirPods 5 instead of my regular headset. The soundstage is remarkably convincing, positional effects are excellent, and the earbuds are considerably more comfortable to wear through an entire film.

ANC, Transparency, and Call Quality

Active noise cancellation is equally impressive considering there is no physical seal around your ears. It won’t match something like the AirPods Pro 3 with silicone tips, but it cuts out a surprising amount of environmental noise for an open-ear design.

Constant noises are handled particularly well. Fans, air conditioning and the general background hum of a room largely disappear, while louder sounds such as passing buses, gym music, wind and nearby conversations can still seep through at low levels. None of them were distracting during normal use, though, and once music reaches around 70% volume, the combination of ANC and playback effectively drowns out most of what remains.

One caveat: ANC creates a noticeable pressure sensation in my ears. It isn’t painful, but it feels somewhat similar to the pressure you experience during take-off on a flight, where you instinctively want to pop your ears to relieve it. I found myself taking the AirPods out occasionally during longer sessions just to get rid of that feeling. Thankfully, I haven’t noticed any hiss or electronic background noise when ANC is enabled without anything playing.

Transparency mode is excellent and sounds remarkably natural, without the obvious microphone processing you sometimes hear from wireless earbuds. Conversation Awareness works particularly well alongside it, automatically lowering your media and opening up the mics when you begin speaking to someone.

Adaptive Audio blends Transparency and ANC depending on your surroundings, and you can adjust how aggressively it favours noise cancellation. I usually kept it close to max ANC, at which point I struggled to notice much difference between Adaptive Audio and simply enabling Noise Cancellation outright.

Call quality has been another strong point. Everyone I have spoken to while using the AirPods 5 has said my voice comes through clearly and naturally, without the thin, overly compressed, or robotic character wireless earbuds can sometimes introduce. For everyday calls, FaceTime or work meetings, I would have no hesitation using them as my primary microphone.

Battery Life

Battery life is one of the weaker aspects of the AirPods 5. Apple rates the Wireless Charging Case version for up to five hours of listening with ANC enabled, or seven hours with it turned off, with the case extending total listening time to around 22 hours.

I haven’t managed to completely drain the earbuds in a single sitting, mostly because I rarely wear earbuds continuously for five hours, but those numbers are still below what you would expect from premium wireless earbuds today. Around six hours with ANC has become fairly normal, while some alternatives stretch considerably beyond that. Even the AirPods Pro 3 are rated for around eight hours of ANC playback on a single charge.

The saving grace is the tiny charging case, which makes topping them up throughout the day easy, and five minutes inside the case provides roughly an hour of playback. For normal commuting, gym sessions and casual listening, I haven’t found battery life particularly restrictive, but long flights or extended listening sessions could expose its limitations fairly quickly.

Should You Buy the Apple AirPods 5?

The AirPods 5 have finally shown me why AirPods are such an easy recommendation for people already invested in Apple’s ecosystem. They also arrive alongside Apple’s latest hardware wave, which we have covered in our complete Apple UAE price guide. They are extremely comfortable, ridiculously easy to use across an iPhone and MacBook, and features such as automatic device switching, Conversation Awareness and Spatial Audio feel properly integrated rather than tacked on for the sake of it.

As my first pair of AirPods, I finally understand their appeal. They may not be the best-sounding earbuds I have used, but few have been this comfortable, convenient and effortless to live with.

AirPods 5 FAQ