New Beats Solo 4 headphones leak suggests we’ll see a supercharged battery life

Beats plays it safe with the design for its next generation of Solo 4 headphones but there’s more than meets the eye

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If you were hoping for a massive eye-catching redesign when the Beats Solo 4 headphones arrive this year, it looks like you’re going to be disappointed. Newly leaked images, which appear to be legitimate, show a design that’s very familiar indeed. But while the outside of the Beats Studio 4 might not be dramatically different, there are some important changes inside.

The images come via tech siteMySmartPrice, which says it obtained the images from “a reputed tipster”. And they follow hot on the heels of another leak, in which the existence of the headphones was confirmed byfilings with a US regulator.

As you can see from the image above – which you couldn’t quite tell from thepreviously leaked imagesfound in an iOS release – it looks like the headphones will come with a USB-C to USB-C cable and a 3.5mm to 3.5mm aux cable. The ports for each cable are on opposite sides, so one earcup has the USB port and the other has the Aux. Thankfully, what’s inside is much more interesting.

Beats Solo 4: what to expect

The Beats Solo 4 will reportedly come with custom designed 40mm drivers, the same size as the current Beats Solo 3 model and slightly smaller than the drivers in theBeats Studio Pro. There’s believed to beSpatial Audiosupport this time around, and the headphones will also feature the same dynamic head tracking we’ve already seen in the likes ofApple’sAirPods Pro 2.

One of the big selling points of the Beats Solo 3 was its very long battery life, and that appears to be a key feature here too. The Beats Solo 4 will reportedly deliver up to 50 hours of music playback, roughly a quarter more than the Solo 3, and will support fast charging too, enabling you to get up to five hours of playback with just 10 minutes of charging. As before, the price tag is expected to be $199 (roughly £156and AU$300).

We quite liked theBeats Solo 3when we reviewed them, but that was four years ago – an eternity in the wireless headphone market, and as you’ll see from our guide to thebest wireless headphonesthe bar has been raised quite considerably by Beats' many rivals – although, we do still rate them as thebest Beats headphonesin an on-ear design. Hopefully the sound quality will be improved with this new release. Back in 2000 we said that it was “not at the level of the best at the price”, and that’s only become more true in the years since.

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Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir,Carrie Kills A Man, is on sale now and her next book, about pop music, is out in 2025. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock bandUnquiet Mind.

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