A Brief (And belated) review of Beats Studio Buds+
Here’s my short take on Beats Studio Buds+: the transparent ones look fucking cool.
My longer take is I bought the $170 earbuds after seeing them discounted for last year’s Prime Day. I’ve used them with good regularity over the last year, alternating between them and my AirPods Pro, and they’re very nice. As an Apple-owned subsidiary, Beats’ products seem to more or less achieve feature parity with the canonical AirPods products. With notable few exceptions—the Beats’ lack support for head gestures for accepting or declining phone calls, as one example—the Studio Buds+ stand toe-to-toe with AirPods by offering 90% of the latter’s features. There’s active noise cancellation. There’s Transparency mode. There’s the same custom chip. There’s the one-tap, iCloud-backed setup and pairing process. The case is nice, replete with the cool-as-hell transparent aesthetic. There’s USB-C for charging. And yes, audio quality is top-notch.
At first blush, Beats Studio Buds+ are great—yet the devil lies in the accessibility details.
Accessibility obviously means different things to different people, but in my experience, the Beats Studio Buds+ fall short in terms of their hardware accessibility. The biggest pain point for me is getting them in and out of my ears without dropping them. Beats’ earbuds have decidedly shorter “stems” than on AirPods, which is bad because it makes grabbing them more precarious. My lackluster fine-motor skills are such that I find there’s less to grab onto with the Studio Buds+; this means I have to be much more deliberate and careful when taking them out of the case and putting them in my ears or vice-versa. It’s not a matter of can versus can’t—in absolute terms, I can get them in and out of my ears. I’ve grown accustomed to the design of the Studio Buds+ such that I know how to best finagle them for my needs. The crux of the issue is I shouldn’t have to handle them so gingerly. By contrast, the stems on the AirPods (of any surname) strewn about my office—ah, the life of a regular gadget reviewer—is a de-facto accessibility feature. What grab bars are to my shower, the stems are to my AirPods. The markedly lengthy stems give me something to grab onto as I get the earbuds in and out of my ears and back into the case. The saving grace for the Studio Buds+ is, again like AirPods, the case is magnetic so the earbuds are “sucked in” by physics when I go to put them away.
Then there’s the charging story. I won’t rehash my oft-cited argument, but suffice it to say, USB-C continues to belie accessibility in a functional sense. It’s surely nice to have One Cable To Rule Them All, but said cable oneness means little if you struggle to plug in the cable to charge the Studio Buds+. Ironically, this problem is exacerbated by my pair’s otherwise badass transparent finish, as it visually obfuscates the port in a similar way to how many people find Liquid Glass to be visually obfuscating (and thus less legible) in iOS 26, et al. As a practical matter, my hand-eye coordination sometimes struggles with finding the USB-C port on my Studio Buds+; it happened often enough that, once again, I beg of Apple/Beats to throw standardization by the wayside and make a magnetic USB-C port. I’m no materials engineer, so maybe this isn’t feasible, but my point stands: a magnetic USB-C port would make it much more accessible.
Score another point for AirPods and wireless charging, which the Studio Buds+ lack.
Finally, a cursory note on AirPods Max. Apple sent me a pair of the “new” ones shortly after the company announced back in late March iOS 18.4 would bring lossless audio and ultra-low latency audio to the high-end headphones. The AirPods Max have USB-C now and, despite sounding incredible, suffer from the inaccessibility issues faced by the Studio Buds+ (and my old pair of Lightning AirPods Max, for that matter). Not to mention AirPods Max remain, five years into life, heavy on the head that wears them.
Anyway, back to Studio Buds+. USB-C aside, they’re a terrific alternative to AirPods.
