With all that said, these new AirPods are going to take a little getting used to, especially if you’ve grown fond of the original ones. So far, the biggest issue I’ve run into is that the capacitive controls baked into the AirPod Pros’ stems are a bit finicky — in theory, a quick squeeze will play or pause your current track, while longer ones will switch between noise cancellation and a Transparency mode that lets you hear ambient sounds normally. (You can’t tap these AirPods to control them, which is just as well since they naturally sit deeper in your ears.)

So far, though, I’ve had trouble gauging exactly how much pressure the AirPods Pro need to recognize a touch. My advice at the moment is to squeeze decisively, even if it feels a little silly. My first few minutes with these things was spent wondering why they wouldn’t respond to what felt like lengthy squeezes, to the point where I thought my pair might be defective. Nope. Just took me a while to really figure it out.

I also have my concerns about battery life. Apple says that, with Active Noise Cancelling enabled, the AirPods Pro are rated for 4.5 hours of use on a single charge. That’s pretty impressive when you consider the original AirPods got about 5 hours from one change, and that ANC typically blows through batteries like crazy. (You can turn off some of the AirPods’s microphones entirely to get an extra 30-ish minutes of use, but you lose ANC and the Transparency mode in the process.) We haven’t had these things long enough to tell if they live up to Apple’s promises, but stay tuned — we’ll soon have answers to this question, plus many others.