Beats Solo 4 headphones leak shows they’re on the way at last, with new AirPods-like features (and 1 that AirPods Max don’t have)

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A new leak claims to show images of the Beats Solo 4, the next generation of Apple’s very old headphones: the Beats Solo 3 have been around since 2016 with only a few minor color changes since.

At the time, we liked the Beats Solo 3 a lot, but an awful lot has changed in the world of the best wireless headphones since they were launched in the same year as the first-generation AirPods. We’ve had two more generations of AirPods, two lots of AirPods Pro, and the AirPods Max since then, and AirPods 4 and AirPods Max 2 are expected to arrive soon. So it’s fair to say that this Beats Solo upgrade is somewhat overdue.

Although full specifications haven’t emerged yet, one feature we hope to see in the new version is the same high battery life as the Beats Solo 3: up to 40 hours.

Beats Solo 4: what to expect

According to code in the latest iOS release candidate and reported by MacRumors, the new Beats Solo 4 will have a nearly identical design to the current model but will introduce Dolby Atmos spatial audio, lossless USB-C audio (something the AirPods Max notably fail to offer currently), and other improvements including better sound quality and the same Personalized Spatial Audio as the current AirPods Pro 2.

On-ear controls will be the same as the ones in the Beats Studio Pro, which means pressing the B symbol to play, pause or to answer calls; double-pressing to skip tracks; and long-pressing to activate Siri.

There’s also a video on X/Twitter, although it doesn’t really show much: it’s just a short clip of a spinning pair of black Beats headphones. But images inside the iOS package appear to confirm black, pink and blue models.

As yet there’s no indication of when these headphones will ship or what they’ll cost, although their presence in iOS suggests that a launch isn’t too far away. The current Beats Studio 3 have an RRP of $349.95, and if you still fancy a pair you should absolutely not pay anything close to that: they’re regular sights among the best headphone deals from multiple retailers, and you can expect even more discounting when the new version ships. Though we’d probably suggest sticking with the newer model at this point.

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