Stephen Coyle

It’s that time again; there are new AirPods and I’ve been measuring their latency. If you’ve read my previous articles on the topic, you’ll know the gist.

I’ve kept mostly the same testing methodology as before; I connect AirPods to an iPad Pro, and tap the screen with an Apple Pencil. I use an audio recorder to capture the sound of the physical taps, and the resulting audio, then measure the time between these sounds.

One difference from previous tests is that I’ve decided to measure only keyboard click latency. Previously, I averaged keyboard click latency with the audio latency in my app, Tapt. However, it’s not been updated in a while, and is now yielding similar-to-worse response times than the stock keyboard, so I’ve decided to omit that measurement.

As you can see, the second-generation AirPods Pro perform about 40ms better than their predecessors, with an average latency of 126ms vs the original’s 167ms.¹

Perhaps a more interesting point to note is that the second-generation AirPods Pro perform only 43ms worse than the built-in speakers (at 83ms). That suggests that up to two-thirds of the time between touching the screen and hearing a noise occurs before Bluetooth data leaves the device. I think there’s still too much latency for audio feedback to feel snappy and responsive over AirPods Pro 2, but maybe at this point there are easier gains to be made by working to reduce the device-side latency.