Introducing The New Beats Pill: How Apple Is Revolutionizing the Bluetooth Speaker Arena Again

The last Beats speaker launched in 2015, nearly a decade ago. Now, finally, the Beats Pill is making its glorious return with a flurry of modern features and a more reasonable price tag.

The first Beats Pill, which launched in 2012, helped to define our expectations for Bluetooth speakers. It offered minimal controls, simple connectivity options, a rechargeable battery, and an easily-recognizable design. All modern Bluetooth speakers owe something to the Beats Pill. The great irony, of course, is that Beats abandoned this product category after being acquired by Apple. It had a last hurrah with the Beats Pill+ in 2015 before quietly turning its focus back to headphones. That’s somewhat understandable, as the launch of AirPods led to a huge demand for wireless earbuds.

Alright, it’s time to end the history lesson. The new Beats Pill offers all the features you’d expect from a modern Bluetooth speaker, including USB-C charging, an impressive 24-hour battery life, and a ton of bass. Apple seems to be very proud of its new speaker architecture, which is capable of pumping substantially more bass than the old Pill+ (no surprise there) while remaining distortion-free at high volumes.

Apple

I’m happy to see that the Beats Pill supports wired audio over USB-C. The speaker is capable of delivering lossless 48kHz/24-bit audio over a wired connection, although I’m not sure how big of a difference lossless quality will make in a speaker of this size.

There are also some common quality of life features here, such as IP67 sand and water-immersion resistance, reverse charging (the speaker can stand in for a portable power bank), plus voice assistant support on both iPhone and Android. You can pair two Beats Pill speakers together for a stereo experience, though I should note that Apple has made no mention of Auracast functionality, which is technically included in the Bluetooth 5.3 specification.

And we get a mess of cool Apple stuff, including Find My tracking, One-Touch pairing, and iCloud pairing. But Apple has leveled the playing field by implementing the Android-equivalent versions of these features, specifically Google Find My Device tracking, Google Fast Pair (tap your phone to the speaker to initiate pairing), and Google Account pairing. It seems that Beats is the only brand to offer this kind of cross-platform functionality in a Bluetooth speaker, and I should take this moment to point out that the recent Beats Solo Buds also support Google’s Find My Device network.

Now that the Beats Pill has returned, I hope that Apple takes the time to revive the wonderful, super-loud, somewhat explosive Beats Pill XL. It was the best speaker in Beats’ portfolio, and it deserves a comeback.

We got our hands on the new Beats Pill a few weeks early—check out our review to learn all the details. You can purchase the new Beats Pill today from the Apple Store or Beats by Dre website . It costs just $150, which is $30 less than you’d pay for a Beats Pill+ back in 2021 (and nearly $100 less than the Pill+’s original launch price).

Source: Beats