If you didn’t hear the big news at Apple’s “It’s Glowtime” event on Monday, well, the company has plans to help with that. Imminent upgrades to Apple’s second-generation AirPods Pro wireless earbuds will soon outfit the ubiquitous headphones with hearing aid features, further disrupting a market well in the throes of a disruption already.
Functionally, Apple is taking the same approach as many low-cost, over-the-counter hearing aid manufacturers by providing a product that does double duty as both Bluetooth earbuds and a hearing aid. The catch is that it isn’t introducing a new product but rather adding hearing aid technology to an existing headphone product—a novel approach to the category.
Photograph: Apple
The operational details of how this new feature will work line up with most consumer-grade OTC hearing aids. Users can take an on-demand hearing test on their iPhone—the earbuds ping each ear with different frequencies at varying 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 graphs your hearing deficits, and this audiogram can then be used to program the AirPods Pro as hearing aids.
Apple touts that “personalized dynamic adjustments [let] users have the sounds around them boosted in real time,” but details are scarce on how finely tuned these adjustments are. A true hearing aid will adjust levels at six frequency bands or more, but some are limited to merely boosting bass or treble. My expectation with Apple’s implementation is the former, but this remains to be seen. Apple will also let you upload an existing audiogram if you’ve had one generated by a professional audiologist, which adds even more flexibility.
One of the most impressive features is something no one else has provided: these hearing settings are applied to the streaming experience too. So if you have trouble hearing highs, those settings will also be applied to phone calls, music, movies, and games—all automatically. Most (if not all) other OTC hearing aids shut their hearing aid features off altogether whenever you are streaming media, so this could represent a real, game-changing improvement for people with hearing loss.
Apple bills all of these features as a “first-of-its-kind software-based hearing aid feature,” which is perhaps confusing since all modern hearing aids run on software of some kind. We’ve reached out to Apple for clarification on what this claim specifically refers to, but the company did not respond by press time.
