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. Impending upgrades to Apple’s second-generation AirPods Pro wireless earbuds will soon be rolled out to all headphones with hearing aid features, further upsetting a market in the midst of turmoil.
Functionally, Apple takes 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’s not introducing a new product but rather adding hearing aid technology to an existing headphone product—a new approach to the category.
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Photo: Apple
The operational details of how this new feature will work on 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 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 shows your hearing deficits, and this audiogram can be used to program AirPods Pro as hearing aids.
Apple claims that “personalized dynamic adjustments (let) amplify the sounds around them in real time,” but there are few details on how well these adjustments match. A true hearing aid will adjust levels in six frequency bands or more, but some are limited to just boosting the bass or treble. My expectation of Apple’s implementation is the former, but it remains to be seen. Apple will also let you upload an existing audiogram if you have one done by a professional audiologist, which adds even more flexibility.
One of the most impressive features is something that others don’t provide: these hearing settings are also applied to the streaming experience. So if you struggle to hear highs, those settings will also apply to phone calls, music, movies, and games—all automatically. Most (if not all) other OTC hearing aids completely shut off their hearing aid features whenever you’re streaming media, so this represents a real, game-changing improvement for person 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 some kind of software. We reached out to Apple for clarification on what this claim specifically refers to, but the company did not respond by press time.
