The hot new thing in headphones

"The past month and a half in particular, we've had some really interesting headphones come out," says The Verge's John Higgins. He and David Pierce sit down to survey a landscape that feels genuinely transformed: noise cancellation has become commodity technology, open-ear designs are solving real problems for people who hate jamming things into their ear canals, and a new broadcasting standard called Auracast promises to change how we think about headphone connectivity entirely. The question is no longer "which headphones cancel noise best?" but "what do headphones even compete on anymore?"

The end of the noise-cancellation arms race

For years, the headphone market was defined by a single arms race: Bose and Sony trading blows over who could block more ambient sound. That era is over. "There's only so much noise you can block," Higgins explains, "before it starts just feeling weird in your ears." He describes a phenomenon some colleagues call "eardrum suck"—the disconcerting suction sensation that occurs when aggressive noise cancellation disrupts the ear's ability to balance internal and external pressure. The technology has improved to the point where even $40 knockoff headphones from TikTok shops deliver perfectly adequate noise cancellation, as Pierce notes from personal experience.