Apple just dropped the Beats 360, and it’s a radical re-design that’s more Apple-like, but with more personality than AirPods. The Beats 360’s new look includes swappable cushions, stronger noise-canceling, a new acoustic system, and incredible sweat and water resistance. It’s also built to compete with the best premium headphones.
A completely new Beats design
The Beats 360 is a much bigger design reset than its predecessor, the Beats Studio Pro. Gone are the harder edges and slightly more aggressive look of older Beats headphones, replaced by softer curves, flatter earcups and a smooth finish that feels much more modern. Aside from the familiar “b,” there’s very little here that feels tied to the original Beats by Dre aesthetic.
Apple nailed the design with the customizable nature of these. Both the ear-cushion housing and headband cushion come off quickly and can be swapped for different colors and materials, with a satisfying twist-and-click mechanism that makes changing the look take less than a minute.
With four frame colors and eight cushion options, Beats says there are 32 basic combinations, or up to 256 if you mix and match the ear and headband cushions separately. Much like AirPods, we can see this becoming a timeless design for years to come, with Apple refreshing the swappable colors and finishes along the way.
Underneath the removable bits, the construction is surprisingly minimal. Each side handles much of its own battery, antenna and processing, which lets Beats keep the headband incredibly thin and simple. It looks almost skeletal with the cushions removed, but it still feels solid, durable, and premium. As a result, we think these could last 10 years with cushion refreshing.
One tradeoff versus the Studio Pro is that the 360 is not collapsible and will only swivel flat. It takes up more room in a bag even with the included soft case.
The fit is a mix of good and bad. The clamping force is strong enough to keep the headphones planted during workouts, even when you’re lying back on a bench, and the addition of proper sweat and water resistance finally makes that gym use official. But that same pressure becomes noticeable after an hour or two.
Performance Knit looks cooler and theoretically breathes better, and the cushioning is great, but we found it a bit scratchier against the skin compared to the other option. UltraPlush is easily our preference, though it only comes in Black and Cloud white. At $50, replacement cushions aren’t exactly cheap, but they’re an inexpensive way to bring the headphones back to life after a few years of wear. And not a terrible price to glow them up if you get bored with the look.
Features and everyday use
The Beats 360 gets the everyday stuff right, with dedicated buttons for power, playback, volume and listening modes. The power button sits nearly flush with the left side, while the right side has a play/pause button and volume rocker. The volume rocker is not very rocker-y but it gets the job done.
There’s also a dedicated button for switching between noise-canceling and Transparency mode, although it currently does nothing on our prerelease unit. We’re chalking that up to prerelease software for now. Otherwise, you can choose which listening modes the button cycles through and tweak a couple of call controls, but software customization is pretty limited.
On an iPhone, the Beats 360 feels every bit as native as a pair of AirPods. Pairing is a one-tap affair, the headphones automatically show up across devices signed into your Apple Account, and settings are built directly into iOS rather than hidden behind a separate app. Automatic Switching can move them between your iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Vision Pro, while Audio Sharing lets someone with compatible AirPods or Beats listen along. You also get Find My, hands-free Siri and Personalized Spatial Audio with head tracking.
Android support is surprisingly complete too, with Fast Pair, pairing across your Google account, Audio Switch, Find Hub and the Beats app. That cross-platform flexibility is one of the best things about the new Beats – you get access to Apple’s closed ecosystem and still get a first-class Android experience.
Battery life is rated at up to 32 hours with ANC enabled, and a five-minute Fast Fuel charge gets you about an hour of playback. Battery life has been solid in our testing, and you can also continue using the headphones while they’re charging, which is always appreciated.
Beats finally added IPX4 sweat and water resistance too, making the 360 much better suited for workouts than the Studio Pro ever officially was.
Sound, noise-canceling and transparency
The Beats 360 are a real audio quality upgrade over Studio Pro. The difference is pretty easy to hear. Music sounds cleaner and more detailed than it did on Studio Pro, especially when a track gets busy. There’s some serious new hardware behind that improvement too, including a new 40mm dual-magnet driver and high-dynamic-range amplifier, with Beats claiming 12dB more driver output than Studio Pro while keeping distortion low.
There’s no user-adjustable EQ, which feels like a miss at this price. Beats does have Adaptive EQ, which automatically adjusts the tuning based on fit when ANC and Transparency are turned off, but you can’t actually control it yourself.
Beats hasn’t been chasing the old head-rattling bass sound for years. Instead, the Beats 360’s default tuning is extremely balanced. They especially shine with pop music and vocals. We found that you’ll also hear a lot of detail through them that you won’t easily from competitors.
That said, Beats 360 are a custom EQ away from having a real seat at the table with the best from Sony, Bose and Sonos. There’s some hope Apple adds one down the line, especially now that supported AirPods have a three-band custom EQ.
Beats 360 also supports Personalized Spatial Audio with dynamic head tracking, which can keep the sound field positioned around you as you move and works with music, movies and games. For music, it gives everything a wider, more spacious sound, though it wasn’t something we found ourselves using outside of testing.
Noise-canceling is a winner with Beats 360; it’s excellent. We wouldn’t confidently call it the best we’ve ever heard, but it’s about as good as it gets. Beats claims up to 1.75x more total noise-canceling than Studio Pro, and that tracks with our experience since the Studio Pro’s ANC was not so impressive. On the train, most of the low rumble and background noise simply disappears.
Transparency mode on these headphones is the best we’ve heard. It’s so clean and natural with zero distracting hiss or weird amplification. You can have a normal conversation, wear them around the office or house, and genuinely forget Transparency is even turned on. Between how good ANC and Transparency are, we rarely found much reason to listen with both modes switched off.
Beats is also putting a lot more technology behind voice calls. There are nine digital microphones in total, with eight used for ANC and three for voice pickup, two of which are shared between the systems. A three-microphone beam-forming setup paired with AI focuses on your voice and reduces background noise. In practice, it shows. The microphone quality is about as good as Bluetooth headphones get. Voices come through clean and natural, and background noise is handled well enough that we’d be comfortable using the Beats 360 for calls even in less-than-ideal environments.
What’s missing
For all the things Beats 360 gets right, there are a few omissions that are hard to understand. The biggest is wear detection. Taking the headphones off doesn’t pause your music, and putting them back on doesn’t resume it. That was already a frustrating omission on Studio Pro, and for the price tag it feels even stranger here, especially when auto-pause is basically standard on premium headphones now.
There’s also no wired audio at all. Studio Pro could play over USB-C or a 3.5mm cable, while Beats 360 is Bluetooth-only; the USB-C port is just for charging. That probably won’t matter to most people, but we wish Beats would’ve kept it around since it’s useful fo rsituations like watching seatback movies on an airplane. And if you’re looking for a USB-C charging cable in the box, you won’t find one.
Software customization is similarly sparse. The custom EQ is the real miss for us, but there’s no real other personalization that you’d expect from an accompanying headphone app.
Final Thoughts
We think Beats 360 is going to make a real splash. It feels like the clearest idea yet of where Apple wants to take the Beats brand. It gets most of the same ecosystem benefits as AirPods, doesn’t shut out Android users, and has its own unique personality.
Overall, it’s a huge upgrade from Studio Pro and they’re certainly Beats best-sounding headphones to date. The design is better, ANC is dramatically improved, transparency is excellent, and the swappable cushions are useful and fun.
At $349.99, the Beats 360 is competing directly with the other premium noise-canceling headphones from Sony, Bose, Sonos, and… Apple itself. The replaceable cushions may actually be one of the best reasons to buy these. Cushions are the parts most likely to look beat up after a few years, and now you can replace them instead of living with tired looking headphones. Or, to spice up the colors whenever you get bored.
Cushion kits normally cost $49.99, but Beats is launching them for just $9.99 in the U.S. through October 31 while supplies last, with a limit of three per customer. For 10 bucks, we’d stock up. Performance Knit comes in Black, Cloud, Sky, Pink, Navy and Volt, while the much comfier UltraPlush comes in Black and Cloud. Whether you’re buying backups for a few years down the road or just want to change the look, it’s a surprisingly good way to protect a $350 investment.