Soon, some AirPods might get superpowers in the form of hearing health as well as temperature monitoring from the ear canal. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman published his newsletter Power On giving a peek into what’s cooking and truly, Apple has something interesting in the works.
First up, Apple is working on using AirPods as hearing aids. Although the move has been in the works for months, the recent FDA’s approval to use OTC hearing aids without any prescription appears to be acting as a tailwind behind the tech in the works.
Gurman added that AirPods Pro 2 could be getting a hearing feature. The earpods will scan the user’s hearing abilities by playing different tones and sounds. It will use on-screen stimulus to collect user data and project the results about a person’s hearing, unlike Apple Watch ECG app that works autonomously.
AirPods already use audiograms to generate user’s audio profiles. Nothing Ear 2 as well as Jabra Elite 75t use similar features to create sound profiles.
If that’s not more, Apple is likely to add temperature monitoring on the AirPods. It will detect the wearer’s temperature from the ear canal. Rumors around this feature have been going on as far as late 2021 and we could be getting it soon.
Next up, we have USB-C on the AirPods Pro. Turns out we could get an AirPods Pro with a charging case using the USB-C port in a few months. It comes from tipster Ming-Chi Kuo according to whom, the unveiling could be in the third quarter this year (given the fact that we are already ahead of second quarter).
On the contrary, the other two features are still far away. It is because AirPods Pro use a three year refresh cycle and the last Pro made its debut last year meaning we still have two years to go. Of course, it remains to be seen if Apple will launch AirPods Pro with the aforementioned features any sooner.
