There are only 32 days to go until Christmas at the time of this writing, and if you want to get a special someone a special something with a modern “true wireless” design and state-of-the-art active noise cancellation right now, you… luckily have all the options in the world.
Of course, your options become a lot fewer if the one you’re shopping for this holiday season happens to be a hardcore Apple fan, and even fewer if you can’t afford to spend more than $100 on this particular gift. With the ultra-high-end AirPods Pro 2 essentially out of the equation even at their huge new Black Friday discount, your safest bet is to go for something from Beats, which is of course a brand wholly owned by the aforementioned Cupertino-based tech giant.
But the Studio Buds+ and Fit Pro are also a bit on the expensive side, which leaves you with the “regular” Studio Buds as the best budget-friendly option. Not quite as powerful as their Plus sibling and Pro cousin, these bad boys are normally priced at $149.95 a pair, and after scoring a $50 discount in the lead-up to Black Friday 2023, they’re now down another 10 bucks.
In total, you’re therefore looking at slashing $60 (or 40 percent) off that $150 list price at both Amazon and Best Buy, which matches the highest ever discount offered by any major US retailer on the Beats Studio Buds and is unlikely to be further improved by the end of the year.
Available in a much wider array of colors than the industry-leading AirPods family, the non-Pro and non-Plus Studio Buds do come with a number of decidedly premium features and capabilities, actively cancelling out surrounding noises while also supporting a handy Transparency Mode, offering high-quality call performance and overall audio quality, and last but not least, promising to keep your tunes going for up to 8 hours by themselves, with that battery life rating jumping to 24 hours when taking the “pocket-sized” charging case into consideration as well.
That’s definitely not bad for under 100 bucks, especially with the Beats Studio Buds natively supporting and playing nice with both iPhones and Android handsets.
