Personalized spatial audio is also coming to AirPods 4, along with the ability to interact with Siri using gestures like nodding your head to accept a call. There’s a new charging case that gives you a total battery life of 30 hours and can be charged using USB-C or, if you have the ANC version, wireless charging. Both variants of the new AirPods 4 are available for preorder today and will be released on September 20.
Apple also announced some new colors for the over-ear AirPods Max headphones, which now charge over USB-C instead of Lightning. New colors include midnight, blue, orange, purple, and starlight. Apple released its first AirPods Max in 2020. They’re so good—and so expensive—that it doesn’t seem like much will change on that front. The new AirPods Max have held steady at the same price, $549, and will also be available on September 20.
Apple isn’t making a new AirPods Pro range, but it’s improving its hearing protection technology for the AirPods Pro 2. One feature reduces the decibels entering your ears in noisy environments, so you can wear them such as earplugs. (It would be fun to go to a concert and see everyone wearing AirPods while the band plays.) With the Pro 2 models, Apple also offers a clinical hearing test to measure your hearing loss, as well as over- the- counter hearing aid certification that allows AirPods to double as real hearing aids. This is certainly disruptive to the growing OTC hearing aid market. —Boone Ashworth
Siri and Apple Intelligence
The newly revamped Siri and Apple Intelligence features will not be available at the launch of iOS 18 or the release of iPhone 16. They will arrive via the iOS 18.1 software update in the coming weeks. We went into more detail about these features in our iOS 18 feature roundup, but in summary (as AI likes to do), these new additions help bring artificial intelligence features to the forefront on the iPhone.
