Apple has silently discontinued the ancient Beats Powerbeats Pro ahead of a 2025 upgrade
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As predictable as Apple can be when it comes to releasing new iPhones (minus SE upgrades, perhaps), the company's Beats-branded product lineup remains incredibly erratic. The Studio Buds Plus, for instance, saw daylight less than two years after the original Studio Buds, while the iconic Pill speaker was revived a staggering nine years on the heels of 2015's Pill+.
And then you have the gym-friendly Beats Powerbeats Pro, which were introduced in 2019 and unceremoniously discontinued before they could get a sequel. Praised in our in-depth review shortly after their commercial debut for their outstanding battery life, unwavering fit, flawless connectivity, and superb audio quality, these bad boys died an undignified death, apparently disappearing without a trace and no advance notice from both Beats and Apple's websites at some point in the last few days.
Like many officially retired Apple products, this continues to be available from a number of third-party US retailers, and Amazon even sells the sporty H1-powered earbuds at a seemingly decent $90 discount from a $250 list price in both black and white colorways at the time of this writing.
But even though the OG Powerbeats Pro hold a clear and undeniable advantage for a certain type of user over the aforementioned Studio Buds and Studio Buds Plus, as well as Apple's own-brand AirPods 4 and AirPods Pro 2, you might want to think long and hard if a purchase makes sense right now.
That's because Apple has actually confirmed a little over a month ago that a second Powerbeats Pro edition is coming in 2025, which was a highly unusual official revelation. Seemingly similar in design to their forerunners, the Powerbeats Pro 2 are expected to add heart rate monitoring, active noise cancellation, spatial audio, and adaptive audio to a currently solid but not exactly stellar list of features and capabilities.
Those sound like absolutely massive upgrades guaranteed to radically change the user experience in all the good ways, so if you're a fan of earhooks, you should probably wait a few more months to see how the second-gen Powerbeats Pro perform and how much they'll cost. Personally, I'm not very optimistic on that latter front, especially if the wireless earbuds will indeed double as a (basic) health tracking device of sorts, but I've definitely been surprised by the affordability of a number of Beats products before.
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