Dell has entered the earbud market with a product you can manage from the cloud.

The new Dell Pro Plus Earbuds cost $229 – $20 more than Apple’s latest AirPods Pro 3 and $50 more than Cupertino’s AirPods 4.

We mention those models because, like Dell’s offering, they include active noise cancellation, transparency mode, and adaptive audio that filters out just the right amount of noise so you’re not cut off from whatever’s going on in your environment. Dell’s buds also offer touch controls, come nestled into a charging case, and ship with four ear tips of different sizes. The buds connect over Bluetooth, and a USB-C “audio receiver” that nestles into the case and presumably into a PC, too. A companion app lets users set a personal sound profile.

But overall, these buds have a very familiar set of features that your correspondent – who regularly manages to lose earbuds – has all-too-often acquired from reputable brands for between $50 and $100. The buds are also physically unremarkable, as the image below illustrates.

Dell Pro Plus Earbuds – Click to enlarge

At this point, readers may wonder how Dell thinks it can get away with selling what look like deeply average earbuds at quite a high price.

The company has two aces up its sleeve.

One is the claim that the buds are the first to win the Microsoft Teams Open Office Certification, which the software giant awards to those who make audio devices that isolate users’ voices so that utterances made by others around an office don’t leak into a Teams call. The devices have also won Zoom’s seal of approval.

The other is that buyers can use Dell’s cloud-based Device Management Console (DDMC) tool to configure the devices, update their firmware, and do what Dell calls “fleet oversight”.

Dell says DDMC “revolutionizes peripheral management for IT Administrators.”

Which makes the Dell Pro Plus Earbuds more than just a high-priced alternative to letting your staff connect their own earbuds to their work PCs, but a cloud-manageable high-priced alternative. ®