Apple's Camera-Equipped AirPods Coming in Late 2027 Alongside 20th Anniversary iPhone

Who wants to wear their AirPods Pro all day? I only wear them for a few hours throughout the day while working or exercising. They’re great, but I don’t want them to become a permanent fixture scanning my surroundings.

The cameras in the AirPods are not designed for taking photos and videos,

I'm sure, but if these get popular, there's a pretty good chance some creepy company or DIYers will make similar looking earphones that do take photos and videos. And that's why anything resembling cameras on wearables should be banned, because it will make it almost impossible to distinguish between the normals and the creeps.

"The cameras in the AirPods are not designed for taking photos and videos, and will instead send information about the wearer's surroundings to Siri"

sooo....if its not designed for taking photos and videos than why are there cameras and not sensors? Oh, its just not designed for YOU to take them. Welcome to the future big brother

Or they’re just sensors….

If there’s one company I trust with sensors scanning my environment it’s Apple. If they keep walking the fine line beteeen privacy and usefulness.

How “useful” are they when the wearer has long hair?

If it is, it worked, because I know two people who are lining up to buy them. Great piece of tech!

I think this sounds interesting and potentially less intrusive than meta style glasses etc.
if the images/video are encrypted and only available on the device you could get very good information without huge privacy concerns.

Just imagine asking Siri about something your looking directly at without having to hold your phone up or have sneaky glasses on?

One thing I would try to get right is that more often than not people really don’t want to talk to a device. Either you’re in a quiet place or just don’t like talking to non human things.
Some kind of control mechanism (tap twice, tap once) would be really useful to navigate this.

I honestly think adding something useful to devices people already use is better than asking people to wear brand new things.

And this is “better” than pulling your phone out of your pocket? How crazy how society has become that simply pulling a phone out of your pocket, is troublesome.

I think this sounds interesting and potentially less intrusive than meta style glasses etc.
if the images/video are encrypted and only available on the device you could get very good information without huge privacy concerns.

Just imagine asking Siri about something your looking directly at without having to hold your phone up or have sneaky glasses on?

One thing I would try to get right is that more often than not people really don’t want to talk to a device. Either you’re in a quiet place or just don’t like talking to non human things.
Some kind of control mechanism (tap twice, tap once) would be really useful to navigate this.

I honestly think adding something useful to devices people already use is better than asking people to wear brand new things.

I dunno. I feel like our willingness to constantly feed AI without regard to the privacy of others is troubling. I don’t see much difference between glasses or AirPods if they both have cameras in this regard.

And the idea that it’s better if the video only goes to your device gets fuzzy when you throw in the growing number of options for AI processing based on hardware as we have seen in iPhone AI rumors. If some iPhone models can’t do full on-device processing, I don’t see AirPods doing it either. Even assuming the processing stays in your iPhone (for example) there is no guarantee future updates don’t render your hardware incapable AI processing the most “current” models.

And I honestly can’t recall a situation where I was standing in front of something with zero idea of what it was. I can get additional information about it any number of ways without capturing video or images of things or people in my vicinity. Heck, all I need to do is ask Siri for information and it will send me to a web page 😁