It’s a clever move by Apple to include a heart-rate monitor with the AirPods Pro 3. Ear-based photoplethysmography (PPG) can be remarkably robust, and Apple claims its proprietary system pulses infrared light 256 times every second to read the blood flow in your ear. But despite being a daily Apple Watch wearer, I won’t be replacing my watch with earbuds. Here’s the practical—and clinical—reason why.
Ear-based heart rate is promising, but situational
In principle, the ear is a good location for an optical measurement. There’s a reason medical pulse oximeters clip to the earlobe: Perfusion there can be more stable than it is at the wrist, especially in cold or high-intensity situations. In academic trails of ear-PPG signal have been demonstrated to be robust under motion and thermally challenging conditions.
In practice, consumer earbuds move. By articulating from speaking, eating, or merely retracking your fit can introduce artifacts. Toss in sweat and fast head turns during intervals, and you’ve got noise that the algorithms need to cut through. That’s fine for a spot check midworkout, but it’s quite different from all-day, low-drift monitoring at the wrist.
Consistent context trounces workout-only checks
According to Apple, AirPods Pro 3 heart rate tracking is designed to be used during workouts started from the Fitness app or third‑party apps that support this feature. It’s helpful, but it leaves a lot of health context on the table. My Apple Watch tracks resting heart rate, walking average, cardio recovery and trends passively — I don’t have to do anything. Those baselines are important: For instance, a sudden elevation in resting heart rate or decrease in heart rate variability (HRV) can be an early warning sign of illness, overtraining and subpar sleep.
Many of us don’t have earbuds in our ears for 16 hours.) Battery life AirPods Pro 3 Up to X hours of listening time on one charge Apple Watch At least 18 hours to last all day14 With up to X hours of battery life, the new AirPods Pro 3 are designed to keep up with your hectic lifestyle during the day and at night while charging. Without round-the-clock wear, the data from the AirPods is episodic — strong during a run, mute during the other 22 hours that tell you the rest of the story.
Health features that have been validated yet but can still live on your wrist
The Apple Watch is a lot more than a heart rate monitor. It features an ECG app, which has been cleared by the FDA, and it can provide you with FDA‑cleared irregular rhythm notifications. Positive predictive value of the notification for AF, reported in the Stanford Medicine Apple Heart Study, against ambulatory ECG patches was 0.84-—robust by consumer device standards.
Outside of ECG, the watch measures HRV, estimates VO2 max, offers fall detection and emergency SOS features, reports sleep stages that data can use to look for signs of apnea during slumber time, logs blood oxygen for wellness testing purposes and uses skin temperature changes to provide trends (like period cycle tracking).
Earbuds can cover the metrics, but they can’t fill in that validated, safety‑critical stack—not when you leave your phone behind and the watch has to take calls or alerts or provide navigation by itself.
Training features depend on wrist-first data
Real training, it wrote, depends on consistency and precision. Zones, recovery and load are based on this clean HR plus context such as pace from GPS, elevation and power if available. The watch combines these signals and syncs seamlessly with services like Strava and TrainingPeaks. Wrist optical sensors have been validated heavily as well; independent academic research has consistently shown low error rates for Apple Watch heart rate during steady‑state exercise, particularly compared with other wearables.
In some cases, might the ear actually beat the wrist in action for accuracy? Absolutely. But without the 24/7 context and broader sensor array, it’s an accessory lens, not the main one.
Real world, safety factor in
There’s also the slapdash fact of what it means to use earbuds. Most races and cycling groups prohibit the use of headphones for safety concerns. Pools are a non‑starter. They are often dissuaded by lifting platforms and group classes. The watch, on the other hand, loves those circumstances and continues to log heart rate, exertion and recovery even when the buds are out of your ears.
Battery life and comfort are important, too. Ear fatigue is a thing, and having to charge up during the day kills that continuity. The watch is meant to fade away on your wrist; AirPods are made to be taken in and out.
Where an AirPods sensor shines
None of this devalues the importance of having heart rate in earbuds. It’s ideal for gym sets, treadmill runs and quick checks in the middle of a class. Audio coaching with live zones in your ears you are doing can be one motivating thing. The ear physiology may also come in handy when you have cold temperatures and wrist perfusion goes down. And if Apple is actually employing dual‑sensor signals as well from both ears, that could lead to even cleaner artifact rejection.
It’s also a shrewd redundancy play. Even with a low or charging watch battery, you continue to receive a heart rate stream for that workout. More sensors in more locations can only serve to make Apple’s fitness ecosystem richer down the road.
The bottom line
I’m looking forward to heart rate arriving in AirPods Pro 3, and I’ll take advantage. But it’s not going to replace my Apple Watch. My health hub is the watch’s ongoing context, clinically validated features, safety tools and training depth. Earbuds may be a sharp accessory — just not the lead instrument.
Market data supports that division of labor: analyst firms have shown Apple Watch continually leading the smartwatch category, indicating users find it useful all day and appreciate its health stack. The AirPods sensor brings a new angle to the same body — it complements, rather than competes, with the wrist.
