Tech
Apple AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation review
I can’t recall another consumer electronics product category becoming a commodity as quickly as Bluetooth earbuds. Apple’s AirPods played a key role in that growth, of course, recapturing a kind of excitement not seen in consumer music tech since the original iPod.
AirPods’ fundamentals haven’t changed much in the eight years since they debuted. The stems are mercifully shorter, and they’ve gained some key features, but these have mostly been refinements to a product that entered the world fully formed.
Until last week, their upgrade cycle was straightforward: Apple introduces a new feature for its pricey high-end models, which filters down to the base level after a year or two. At last Monday’s iPhone 16 event, however, things got more complicated, as the base AirPods forked into two distinct products: AirPods 4 and AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation.
Here’s what the line looks like:
- AirPods 4 ($129)
- AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation ($179)
- AirPods Pro ($229)
- AirPods Max ($549)
I picture a lot of late-night sessions among Apple’s handsomely paid branding team, attempting to determine what to call the new tier. I can practically guarantee someone tossed out “AirPods 4.5” in a bid to leave the office before sunrise. Ultimately, however, they landed somewhere far more unwieldy. But hey, at least it does what it says on the box.
AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation (referred to henceforth as “AP4wANC”) exist in a sort of liminal space. Had AirPods 4 arrived last year, perhaps Apple would have deemed these AirPods 5. As it stands, however, they’re smack in the middle of the in-ear AirPods line.
They look identical to the base model, featuring the same redesign, with a sleeker square charging case and a more ergonomic design. Apple says they scanned thousands of ears to produce 50 million data points. The results are smaller and more tapered than their predecessor. The AP4wANC also adopts some of the Pros’ best features, including wireless charging, a speaker for FindMy and the titular ANC.
There are two clear reasons why someone would choose the AP4wANC over AirPods Pro 2. The first is the $50 price difference. The second is a preference for the hard-edged, open design over the Pro’s swappable silicone tips. The former is self-explanatory, while the latter is highly subjective. I, for one, can’t wait to return to the warm embrace of the Pros’ tips.
I understand, however, that some people are deeply uncomfortable inserting anything into their ears, including a millimeter or two of silicone. If that’s you, get the AP4wANC and save some cash in the process. For my money, however, the comfort and passive noise cancelling you get with the Pros largely justifies the price gulf.
When the AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancelling hit the stage last week, many – ourselves included – wondered how the company would maintain daylight between them and the Pro models beyond just the tips. After all, every model, save for the USB-C AirPods Max, are run off the same H2 chip. There are a few points of difference, including swipeable volume controls on the stem, better noise cancellation and a touch more battery.
While AirPods Pro 3 are rumored to be arriving sooner than later, however, the distance between the models isn’t huge, but for one surprise. Last week, the FDA gave the green light to a new software feature that let the premium model double as over-the-counter hearing aids. It’s difficult to say how large the specific audience for that feature will ultimately be, but it finds Apple charting a fascinating future for the line.
At the moment, only the AirPods Pro 2 support the feature. This is for two key reasons. First is the passive noising-cancelling properties of the silicone tips, which are key to taking iOS 18’s new hearing test. That rules out the standard AirPods 4. The second is that the H2 chip is required, which makes the original AirPods Pro a non-starter.
I wore the AP4wANC for much of my trip home from the event last week. The ANC was enough to drown out plane noises. On the subsequent train ride, however, a woman speaking loudly on her phone a few rows away made me long for the AirPods Pro noise seal. As far as comfort goes, I had no issue with the AP4wANC, where as other open-ear design models have given me trouble.
The sound is excellent, though you do lose the full picture of the music without a seal in place. Most people won’t find this to be a major issue – doubly so if most of your listening involves podcasts and audiobooks.
The fully wireless earbud market is dramatically different than the one the first AirPods entered in September 2016. It’s safe to say we’ve all changed a lot in that time. But the AirPods themselves haven’t changed too dramatically. New features have arrived, but the core is still intact.
Competition, on the other hand, has increased dramatically. Every decently sized electronics company has their own take on the space, while at the other end, there’s an endless stream of sub-$50 buds from companies you’ve never heard of that will do in a pinch.
But AirPods are still the real deal. They’re a kind of Platonic ideal most of us picture when we think of fully wireless earbuds. They sound great and fit like a glove with the rest of Apple’s hardware offerings. As for that price gulf between the AirPods 4 and AirPods 4 with ANC, $50 goes a long way here.
Tech
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
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Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”
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