Open-ear earbuds sit on the exterior of the ear, but they also come in many shapes and sizes, from clip models to ear hook models. Some are specifically designed for working out, while others are better for everyday use. The Bose Ultra Open earbuds are an especially popular pick, thanks to their sound quality and color options, but at $299, they’re hardly the most affordable option.

Plus, since the Bose Ultra Open came out in 2024, big audio brands like Sony have released open earbuds of their own, while Shokz has introduced noise reduction into the category for the first time. To help you find the best open earbud models available in 2026, we tested the latest options from Soundcore, Sony, Shokz, Bose, and more.

What are open earbuds?

Open earbuds let you get as close as possible to the feeling of not wearing earbuds at all. Unlike in-ear earbuds, which sit in your ear canal, open earbuds sit just outside your ears (as the name would suggest). Some models hold the speaker component in place with an ear hook, while others opt for an ear cuff.

People generally opt for open earbuds for three main reasons:

1. They provide a private listening experience while leaving you almost completely aware of your surroundings. It’s like the best transparency mode you’ve ever used.

2. For some people, not having an earbud physically in their ear is generally more comfortable.

3. The hooks and cuffs (along with general awareness of your surroundings) make them a great option for keeping you in place and alert while you’re working out, working, or simply existing in the world.

What are the drawbacks of open earbuds?

As you may have gathered from the section above, open earbuds don’t come with active noise cancellation. That’s mostly thanks to how much sound they let in (by design) and the difficulty of cancelling out sound without having the device covering your actual ear canal.

Also, thanks to the whole open ear-canal situation, these aren’t going to be the earbuds for audiophiles. That’s not to say open earbuds sound bad — if you’ve never tried them, we promise they sound much better than you’re imagining — but you will lose out on some of the nuance of a song without having the earbud actually in your ear.

That said, many pairs still have equalizers on their companion apps to help you make them sound their best. Our best picks for sound, the Bose Ultra Open earbuds and Shokz OpenFit Pro earbuds, even have spatial audio features that work surprisingly well.

Most open earbuds will also boast some form of special technology that keeps them from leaking too much sound. While these pairs do pretty well in keeping the sound just to you, most pairs (including our picks) will be prone to some leakage, especially at higher volumes.

Finally, some open earbuds — mainly those with ear hooks — tend to have slightly bulkier cases. If you like to travel especially light, it’s something to keep in mind.

How to wear open-ear earbuds

Open-ear earbuds come in three major styles: cuff, ear hook, and bone conduction. How you wear them depends entirely on which style you have. Cuff earbuds “clip” onto the ear, not unlike a piece of jewelry, generally around the area right above the earlobe. Ear hook earbuds have a hook situated around the back of your ear and a speaker component situated right over your ear canal. Finally, bone conduction earbuds sit right behind the ears, with a band that goes around the back of the head to hold them in place.

Regardless of the style, its important to adjust the exact positioning of your open earbuds to see which offers the best sound, especially as the wrong positioning can deteriorate the quality.

For a visual representation of what wearing a cuff-style earbud looks like, you can check out our open earbuds explainer.

What about bone conduction headphones?

Bone conduction earbuds work exactly like the name implies they do — they use your skull to conduct sound waves, instead of projecting the sound into your ear, like most of the picks are on list. Typically, a band runs from either side of the users head to help hold the headphones in place.

Shokz, the brand behind our top pick, is a popular maker of these kinds of headphones. While we do consider them open earbuds, we have yet to test any bone conduction earbuds — look out in the future for that update. On that note:

What’s next in our testing pipeline

The open earbuds market is rapidly expanding, so we’ll be testing more as we can get our hands on them. We recently added the Sony LinkBuds Clip and Soundcore AeroFit 2 Pro to this guide.

In addition to the earbuds that made our initial guide in May 2025, we tested out the Nothing Ear (Open) earbuds ($149), the Sony Linkbuds Open ($199.99), the Anker Soundcore AeroClip earbuds ($169.99), and the Shokz OpenFit Air ($119.95). While none of the above were bad earbuds by any means, we found our picks to outshine them in their comfort and sound quality, especially when considering their respective prices.

Read our full review of Tinder Platinum.

While some women have found relationships on Tinder, that’s usually not why I recommend it. Even as Tinder tries to shed its hookup app reputation, it’s still my go-to choice for casual dating. It has a massive user base, especially among younger people — the SSRS survey found that 73 percent of online daters aged 18-29 have used Tinder.

It’s the app I suggest having in your back pocket if you’re looking for anything more casual than a serious relationship, whether that’s a one-night stand or just an impromptu date while traveling. Just be prepared to do some digging and wade through a ton of fish pictures, especially since the app is currently skewed heavily male (men make up around 75 percent of the user base).

I picked Tinder because, love it or hate it, the instant gratification of the swipe is undeniable, and its expansive user pool means you’ll find active users almost anywhere. Based on numbers alone — over 75 billion total matches made in the app’s history and 4.2 million GIFs sent between matches per week — Tinder’s ability to put you in touch with a massive pool of people is hard to top. But the platform is also actively trying to make a cultural and financial comeback; its Q1 2026 earnings report revealed that new user registrations have finally returned to year-over-year growth. Match Group and Tinder CEO Spencer Rascoff recently stated that “winning women is critical” to this continued growth, and that the platform must do a better job of driving positive outcomes for female daters.

In 2026, Tinder is evolving far beyond the simple swipe and giving users more control to find what they’re looking for. On the Explore page, you can now filter for specific relationship goals, from “Short-Term Fun” to a “Long-Term Partner” or even “Non-Monogamy.” The company has also been testing a paid height preference, so you might be able to get your 6-6-6 after all.

Tinder is also changing how people connect. Instead of one endless feed, you can now switch into specific modes like “Double Date Mode” (for a low-pressure group hang) or “College Mode.” According to Tinder, this is all part of an effort to give Gen Z “easier, low-pressure ways to connect” and, more importantly, to help you find “better matches, not just more of them.” Other new features include an AI matchmaking service called Chemistry, as well as Astrology and Music Modes.

Most importantly, safety has gotten a serious upgrade at Tinder. The app previously rolled out mandatory “Face Check” verification for all U.S. users, which requires a facial scan to verify you’re real before you can even start swiping. However, after a viral video demonstrated how romance scammers were tricking the system by hiding a digitally altered image at the end of their profiles, Tinder strengthened its photo verification logic by requiring “greater consistency” across every single photo on a user’s profile. This, combined with the “Share My Date” feature (which lets you send a link with your date’s location and photo to friends), shows that Tinder is finally taking user safety as seriously as its match count.

The 2025 Acer Aspire 16 AI is a stellar pick for casual users with limited budgets and simple workloads, particularly those who like a larger screen. (Younger students would make great use of it.) It’s portable for its size and long-lasting, so big ups if you frequently work on the go. We can’t say that it’s better than the Neo, but we can say it’s the best MacBook Neo alternative right now.

The Aspire 16 AI is my reigning favorite cheap Windows laptop. It offers great multi-core performance for the money, a healthy amount of RAM and storage, plus a smooth display and all the ports you could need. You mainly feel its “budget-ness” in its build quality.

Performance: The Aspire 16 AI’s Qualcomm Snapdragon X chip is about 40 percent slower than the Neo’s A18 Pro chip in single-core scenarios, so it doesn’t feel as responsive when you’re surfing the web or working in Word docs. That said, it’s just as good as running multi-core tasks like light video editing. (Our benchmarking showed that it’s 12 percent faster than the Neo in that regard. It’s a trivial bump, but it’s something.) At the time of writing, the Aspire 16 AI was the fastest sub-$900 laptop we’ve tested for multi-core workloads.

Note that the Snapdragon X CPU is a Windows on ARM chip, so it’s not compatible with as many games or specialty apps as Intel or AMD chips (which have x86 architecture — see above, in the Zenbook A14’s section). But a budget laptop isn’t really made for that kind of usage, anyway, so that’s not a huge concern here. I’d be more worried about it not working with an older scanner or printer.

Battery life: The Aspire 16 AI plowed past the Neo in our battery life benchmark, a video rundown test, lasting 17 hours and 22 minutes to Apple’s 14 hours and 50 minutes. Stamina-wise, it’s more on par with the M5 MacBook Air, which lasted 17 hours and 40 minutes. You can easily squeeze two full workdays out of this thing without needing to charge it in between.

Design: The Aspire 16 AI is pretty trim for a 16-incher. At 3.42 pounds, it’s only a little bit heavier than a 15-inch MacBook Air. (There are even slimmer, lighter 16-inch options — see the Asus Zenbook A16, below — but they’re way more expensive.) Its display is a bit dim and not as crisp as the Neo’s, but I appreciated its buttery 120Hz refresh rate and touchscreen capabilities. Its port setup is also great: While the Neo has just two USB-C ports and a headphone jack, this laptop tacks on two extra USB-A ports, an HDMI port, and a microSD card slot. That’s some MacBook Pro-level connectivity.

Value: For the same price as a 512GB Neo, the Aspire 16 AI offers double the RAM, better multi-core performance, more ports, a 120Hz touchscreen, and a backlit keyboard. But it’s not as well-made as the MacBook Neo; it lacks a fingerprint login feature, and it doesn’t feel as fast in everyday productivity scenarios. It also comes in one boring color. Still, it feels very fairly priced in an era when decent, cheap Windows laptops are getting scarce.

FYI: Acer also makes a 14-inch version of this laptop (the Aspire 14 AI), which comes with an Intel processor that alleviates the Windows on ARM compatibility issues. It offers double the storage, slightly better battery life, and slightly better single-core performance for only $500 to $700, depending on the retailer. I haven’t tried it, so I can’t speak for it personally, but our friends at CNET really liked it. You probably can’t go wrong with either size.