Technologies

Want to Get the Most Battery Life From Your Wireless Earbuds? Here’s How

Wireless earbuds have more features than ever, but that comes at a cost: power. Here’s how to maximize your battery life.

The saddest sound coming from your wireless earbuds isn’t Billie Eilish’s song, What Was I Made For? It’s the low-battery warning tone, especially when you’ve just sat down for your commute home. After a day of music, calls and the occasional TikTok video (on your break, ahem), can you reasonably expect to have some juice left for the ride home? The answer should be yes. Or it could be, depending on a few things.

Most active noise-canceling, or ANC, wireless earbud manufacturers publish battery life specs with varying degrees of specificity, ranging from basic playback time with and without ANC to a virtual dissertation on battery life using different codecs and features. Some also provide talk-time specifications, but none offer guidance on what to expect from mixed-use scenarios or using all the latest advanced features. So which of those features is depleting your battery the most?

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Real-world battery life

Most common battery drainers:

ANC and transparency modes
Listening volume
Hi-res audio streaming

Less common but potential battery drainers:

Distance between phone and earbuds
Spatial audio processing/head tracking

The average mid- to top-tier earbuds, such as the Apple AirPods Pro, are rated for 8 hours of ANC-powered audio streaming, with some models from Samsung and Bose claiming far less (4 to 5 hours). Talk time with ANC for the AirPods is also less, around 5 to 6 hours. That means if you’re doing a combination of media streaming and phone calls, with many models, you’re looking at about 5 to 7 hours of battery life at best per charge while ANC is on.

The most common battery-draining features are ANC and transparency modes, as well as listening volume and high-resolution audio streaming. These are the places to start squeezing some extra life out of the batteries.

Turn off ANC or transparency, and you’ll see a noticeable increase in listening/talk time. For example, if a spec is 8 hours with ANC on, it’s usually 10 to 12 hours with it off. Other strategies include keeping your volume below 40% (for both battery life and your hearing), and if your earbuds support multiple codecs, choosing a lower-quality one can help. This may not be possible with iPhones, which have more limited codec options compared to Android devices.

There’s also an ever-expanding universe of other power-hungry features out there, including pulse monitoring, fitness tracking, spatial audio, live translation, sound equalization (EQ) and Find My (or the equivalent). These can add up to a death by a thousand cuts for your earbuds’ battery life. You’ll need to take a little tour through various settings to manage all of these, but if you’re running low on juice, you can turn some of them off to avoid being banished to the land of silence.

TL;DR: Turn the volume down, turn off any features you don’t absolutely need and keep your phone nearby.

Fast charging to the rescue

If conserving power by compromising on features isn’t your style, your other option is to take advantage of fast charging via your earbuds’ charging case. Most earbuds offer an extra hour or two from just 3 to 15 minutes of charge time. Hopefully, this will help you finish out your commute or long flight.

Earbud cases generally give you two to four full charges, but what if the case’s battery is low, too? If that happens to you regularly, and assuming wall charging or connecting to your laptop isn’t feasible, consider a small portable power bank. We have recommendations for Android and Apple products. For your next pair of earbuds, some models have cases with enough capacity to charge your phone as well. We like the Anker Soundcore P41i, which has a 3,000-mAh battery in its case.

One last note: To preserve the long-term health of your earbuds’ battery, avoid letting them reach 0% before recharging. Keeping the charge level between 20% and 80% is generally considered best practice for battery longevity over the long term.

Technologies

Google, Meta and Amazon Join Global Pact to Fight Rising Online Scams

The companies will share fraud intelligence and coordinate responses as AI makes scams faster, cheaper and harder to detect.

Modern online scams operate across multiple platforms, perhaps spanning social media, messaging apps, email and online marketplaces. Google, Meta and Amazon are among 11 tech, retail and payments companies that have signed a new agreement to combat online scams by sharing threat intelligence across platforms, Axios first reported Monday.

The initiative, called the Industry Accord Against Online Scams & Fraud, is designed to improve how companies detect and respond to fraud that spans multiple services. Participants say they will exchange signals, such as scam-linked accounts and fraudulent domains, and coordinate enforcement actions.

By sharing intelligence in near real time, companies hope to identify these scams earlier and stop them before they spread.

The effort reflects how modern scams operate. A victim might encounter a fake celebrity investment ad on social media, move to a messaging app where the scammer builds trust, then faces prompts to send money through a fraudulent website, payment app or crypto wallet — spanning multiple companies’ ecosystems.

Google said it now blocks hundreds of millions of scam-related results every day using AI, underscoring how both attackers and defenders are increasingly relying on the same technology. Meta removed more than 159 million scam ads in 2025 and is expanding AI tools to detect impersonation and warn users.

Online scams are growing rapidly, in part because generative AI has lowered the barrier to entry. AI can be used not only to produce realistic phishing emails but also to clone voices and deepfake videos that impersonate executives, public figures and even family members.

The agreement is voluntary and doesn’t create new legal obligations, but it comes after regulators’ increased pressure on tech platforms to address fraud more aggressively. The companies say they will begin building frameworks for reporting and intelligence-sharing, though it’s not yet clear how quickly those systems will be deployed or how effective they will be in practice.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Wednesday, March 18

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 18.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? I thought it was a fairly easy one, but read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Word before «card,» flood» or «photography»
Answer: FLASH

6A clue: Joust weapon
Answer: LANCE

7A clue: Brain, heart or lungs
Answer: ORGAN

8A clue: «Frozen» reindeer
Answer: SVEN

9A clue: What can be found on frozen roads or frozen margaritas
Answer: SALT

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Follow a dentist’s recommendation
Answer: FLOSS

2D clue: Baby bug
Answer: LARVA

3D clue: Shape made in the snow
Answer: ANGEL

4D clue: Very little
Answer: SCANT

5D clue: Egg layer
Answer: HEN

Technologies

Amazon Speeds Up Delivery Even More With 1- and 3-Hour Options

The retailer says the one-hour option is available in hundreds of cities, with discounted shipping for Prime members.

Same-day delivery apparently isn’t fast enough for some Amazon shoppers. The retail giant said on Tuesday it’s adding new shipping options that will get products to front doors within a one- or three-hour window.

The company said in its announcement that the one-hour option is available in hundreds of cities across the US, while the three-hour option is now live in more than 2,000 areas. Amazon’s web page at amazon.com/getitfast shows whether those options are available to shoppers for their location. More than 90,000 products will be available for those shipping windows, the company said.

For those who can’t get those services (including the author of this post, who lives between Austin and San Antonio in Texas), a message will display: «3-hour delivery is currently unavailable. Check back at a later time or shop products with Same-Day delivery below.»

Pricing for the faster delivery options is not cheap: It’ll cost you $20 for one-hour delivery and $15 for three-hour delivery for those without an Amazon Prime account, or $10 and $5 for customers who subscribe to Prime.

Last year, the company rolled out faster Amazon delivery options to 4,000 additional areas.

In a video of the podcast Learn and Be Curious with Doug Herrington, hosted by Amazon’s CEO of worldwide stores, Kandace Kapps, the director of the company’s same-day strategy team, spoke in more detail about the challenges of fast shipping. Kapps discussed shifts in customer buying habits over the last few years, such as more people buying household essentials like toilet paper on Amazon.

She said that Amazon can deliver so quickly by placing same-day delivery hubs close to customers in metro areas and by getting products ready to ship within 15 minutes, aided by warehouse robots.

«I think customers are going to continue to get magically surprised by how fast we can deliver to their doorstop,» Kapps said.

Herrington said fast shipping increases sales: «When we speed up the service, the probability that somebody buys a product from us goes up.»

Other retailers, including Walmart, have been adding same-day delivery options or exploring other ways to speed up shipping times to compete with Amazon.

Removing buyers’ moments of hesitation

Part of Amazon’s strategy, which has involved a massive buildout of locations, deployment of thousands of trucks, deals with other delivery services and investment in logistics software, is actually pretty simple: being there when people need last-minute items or make impulse buys.

«It’s about removing the last moment where you would’ve reconsidered the purchase,» said Stephanie Carls, retail insights expert at coupon and promotional-code website RetailMeNot, a sibling site of CNET. «It changes how you shop, not just how fast you get things.»

Carls said that Amazon’s super-fast delivery is removing the timeframe when people might change their minds about a purchase.

«There used to be a gap between deciding to buy something and actually having it. That’s when you’d price check, rethink it, or decide you didn’t need it after all,» she said. «This closes that gap.»

The retail expert said that competitors, including Walmart and Target, have been speeding up delivery times in some markets. Still, they’re not matching Amazon’s scale or product range at those speeds or levels of consistency.

«And that’s what starts to make everyone else feel slow,» Carls said. «Amazon’s advantage is how tightly connected its technology, inventory and delivery networks are, which makes this level of speed more repeatable.»