Mark Gurman of Bloomberg reiterates his comments from a few weeks ago and continues to report that Apple is working on AirPods equipped with cameras.
AirPods as a supplement to the iPhone?££££
A seemingly counterintuitive idea, but one that makes perfect sense when combined with artificial intelligence. Indeed, these cameras - certainly infrared - would not be intended to capture images, but to analyze the environment to glean information communicated to your iPhone, or directly in audio on the earphones. A system that would be associated with Visual Intelligence, the Apple Intelligence function that allows you to learn more about a captured or filmed image. This response to Google's Google Lens allows you, for example, to find out the menu and opening hours of a restaurant by capturing the storefront, or to discover the breed of a dog in the camera's field of vision.
Furthermore, these cameras could enable gesture control by understanding the movement of hands and fingers in the air. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo already mentioned the project last year, speaking of large-scale production in 2026, for a release in 2027.