If you missed the big news at Apple’s “It’s Glowtime” event on Monday, well, the company has plans to help you out with that. Apple’s upcoming updates AirPods Pro second generation Wireless earphones will soon equip the ubiquitous headphones with assistive listening features, further disrupting a market already in the midst of disruption.
Functionally, Apple is taking the same approach as many low-cost, over-the-counter headphone makers, offering a product that does double duty as both a hearing aid and a Bluetooth headset. The problem is that it’s not introducing a new product, but rather adding hearing aid technology to an existing headphone product — a novel approach for the category.
Photography: Apple
The operational details of how this new feature will work match those of most consumer-grade hearing aids. Users can take an on-demand hearing test on their iPhone: the earbuds emit a beep in each ear at different frequencies at different volumes. Users will be prompted to tap the screen if they hear the sound. After a few minutes, the app will generate an audiogram that graphically represents their hearing deficits, and this audiogram can be used to program AirPods Pro as hearing aids.
Apple claims that “personalized dynamic adjustments allow users to amplify the sounds around them in real time,” but there aren’t many details about the precision of these adjustments. A real hearing aid adjusts levels across six frequency bands or more, but some are limited to amplifying bass or treble. My expectation with Apple’s implementation is the former, but that remains to be seen. Apple will also let you upload an existing audiogram if a professional audiologist has generated one for you, adding even more flexibility.
One of the most impressive features is something that no one else has provided: these hearing settings also apply to the streaming experience. So if you have trouble hearing highs, those settings will also apply to phone calls, music, movies, and games — all automatically. Most (if not all) other over-the-counter hearing aids completely disable their hearing aid functions when streaming media, so this could represent a real, game-changing improvement for people with hearing loss.
Apple is advertising all of these features as a “first-of-its-kind software-based hearing aid feature,” which is perhaps confusing since all modern hearing aids are powered by some form of software. We’ve reached out to Apple for clarification on what this claim specifically refers to, but the company has not responded by press time.