Apple AirPods Pro 2 Lack Bluetooth LE Audio Or Hi-Res Audio Support

According to Apple’s technical specifications for each product in the new iPhone 14 lineup and the AirPods Pro 2nd generation, all these devices come with support for Bluetooth 5.3. However, they don’t appear to offer LE Audio or HiRes Audio.

For those who are unaware, the newest Bluetooth Codec, LE Audio, is a low-power audio streaming standard that can be supported on any device with Bluetooth 5.2 or higher. It has a number of advantages for devices inside the Apple ecosystem as well as that outside of it.

Some of the advantages that LE audio brings include improved audio quality in the form of performance gains but with lower bit rates. It also offers longer battery life on devices like truly wireless buds due to the nature of the codec consuming less power. Finally, the biggest of them is the multi-stream audio feature which enables the transmission of multiple synchronized audio streams between a source device like an iPhone or Mac and the AirPods Pro.

There doesn’t seem to be any mention of LE Audio or the aforesaid advantages in Apple’s press releases or tech specs pages for the new AirPods Pro and iPhone 14. LE Audio was introduced relatively recently, and the Bluetooth protocol’s creators predicted that by the end of 2022, the number of products that support LE Audio will increase.

Given that Bluetooth 5.3 chipsets are present in the new AirPods Pro and iPhone 14 models, Apple may decide to enable LE Audio in the future with a software or firmware update.