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Higher-End AirPods Pro With 'Apple Intelligence' Rumored to Launch This Year

While enhanced audio is a potential positive, the current AirPods Pro 3 are already pretty impressive in that department and, as this new version won't be offering lossless, I wonder how much a difference it will really make.

In-aiir gestures to control the device don't hold much appeal to me. Am expecting people who use it in public will look silly. Also, given Cupertino's track record with Siri and AI and given the current APP3's finicky touch controls, which often don't work when I want them to and do work when I don't want them to and which I wish I could disable, I'm skeptical about Apple pulling this off. Guess we'll know soon enough.
 
kwl said:
Such a confusing product mix.... Need to go back to the simple days of the consumer laptop/desktop professional laptop/desktop matrix.

Apple should simply have consumer/professional over ear, consumer professional buds.
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That a categorization system makes, or made, sense for some products it doesn’t translate automatically to the fact that it make sense for every product category. The world goes on, things change. Why Apple should do professional over ear or buds headphones? They don’t make accessories for specific professional niches, they don’t make external GPUs or sound cards, mixers etc. Thinking that because computers can be split intuitively in consumer and professional ones every product category should follow the same logic is illogical. Furthermore Job’s Apple broke first the consumer/professional model a few years after introducing when they did add the MacBook Air. Finally, consumers don’t seem to have problems with how Apple categorizes its products considered how many of these products they buy, mostly because real people in the real world look at prices, not names. I will never get all this consumer/pro nonsense, neither I have heard about a single real problem it would solve or a logical, factual reason why it should be done this way.
 
carswell said:
While enhanced audio is a potential positive, the current AirPods Pro 3 are already pretty impressive in that department and, as this new version won't be offering lossless, I wonder how much a difference it will really make.

In-aiir gestures to control the device don't hold much appeal to me. Am expecting people who use it in public will look silly. Also, given Cupertino's track record with Siri and AI and given the current APP3's finicky touch controls, which often don't work when I want them to and do work when I don't want them to and which I wish I could disable, I'm skeptical about Apple pulling this off. Guess we'll know soon enough.
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People were expecting people that wear AirPods to look silly too.
 
Ice-Cube said:
How i imagine the tiny infrared cameras working: "I see that your son is about to cry, turning on noise cancellation, beep"
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Disagree. Apple has looked inwards with IR cameras in AirPods to monitor pulse rate. The next thing is to look outwards for monitoring of red and near-infrared light. As noted by Scott Zimmerman's 2019 paper, we have essentially cut out large swaths of our red and near-infrared radiation. Awareness of that shortcoming could have a marked impact on our health. "Mitochondrial Health" is a big thing, and exposure to Red/NIR light is a key component of mitochondrial health. The Photobiomodulation Database indexes over 9400 science papers that have been published on the topic.

I speculated with Claude Sonnet 4.6 on the topic. Here is the discussion.
 
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Why are people asking for lossless audio on AirPods? People can't tell the difference between lossy and lossless on $1,500 wired headphones and a $1k+ DAC & amp. People can't tell the difference between using a coat hanger or $1k cables on audiophile headphones.
 
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Airpod Pros are a disposable product for me, last 2-3 years then battery drops off and the sensors get clogged up, leading to worse ANC. The current price is about my limit, I wouldn't be willing to pay more for something that's redundant after such a short period of time
 
Why in the world would anybody put any kind of AI in AirPods? I guess I am old fashioned. I just use my AirPods 2nd generation and AirPods 4th generation to listen to music or other audio from my iPhone or iPad. I can't imagine why I would want "Apple Intelligence" as part of the experience.
 
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yes, waiting for true apple galaxy of devices. we have 4 apple pencil why should airpods pro lag behind

airpods
airpods with noise cancelling
aripods with noise cancelling with apple intelligence.
airpods pro
airpods pro ultra
airpods pro ultra with camera
airpods pro ultra with camera with Apple intelligence.

and beats and airpods max

This bloating is not what Apple was built on, can someone tell those executives.
 
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Don't know how useful the additional sensors(IR Camera) will be. Think it will be $50 over the current Pro model. Also not sure on whether it will launch this year.
 
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Apple is lost. We don’t need AI in our most beloved AirPods Pro. We need longer battery life, A better or more adjustable fit and better noise cancellation. I’ll only buy them if they have better ANC.
 
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RoadWarrior56 said:
Why in the world would anybody put any kind of AI in AirPods? I guess I am old fashioned. I just use my AirPods 2nd generation and AirPods 4th generation to listen to music or other audio from my iPhone or iPad. I can't imagine why I would want "Apple Intelligence" as part of the experience.
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I had Cortana in my headphones long before AI was a thing, and she was good about reading texts to you, or adjusting the volume. Eventually I just turned it off though, because like you said, it wasn't worth the battery drain. Now I use AirPods, again without any smarts about them, and they're perfectly good. When I don't have them, I use wired earbuds, and they're equally as good. I don't understand why Apple would bring AI to their headphones, or what AI in headphones would even be good for.
 
kwl said:
Such a confusing product mix.... Need to go back to the simple days of the consumer laptop/desktop professional laptop/desktop matrix.

Apple should simply have consumer/professional over ear, consumer professional buds.
Click to expand...
That's simply not that possible with how broad and varied Apple operates now.

Tech and creative professionals alone have very varied needs on the high-end that one SKU can’t often accommodate.

That's especially the case for the most advanced forms of computing in which the most advanced computer users who expect sophisticated, quality computer hardware variants expect specs very far and away most are willing to be complacent with.

That's evident with Apple’s prosumer monitor business.

Some categories don’t even make sense yet to be launched for consumers at a quality sensible (profitable and good) for Apple like their monitor, desktop tower, and spatial computing headset businesses
 
AppleMega said:
I never say, "Not another AirPods!" AirPods Pro 3 are the best. AirPods Max are antiques that need either a real update (USB-C and colors don't count), or need to be killed. Hopefully updated.
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Why does it need to be killed if it doesn’t serve your particular needs and enough buy them for it to make sense for Apple?

The market doesn’t revolve around your needs (not any of us individually)
 
kwl said:
Such a confusing product mix.... Need to go back to the simple days of the consumer laptop/desktop professional laptop/desktop matrix.

Apple should simply have consumer/professional over ear, consumer professional buds.
Click to expand...
Timmy has put Apple well into 90s Microsoft (or pre-Jobs return from NeXT) territory with his confusing array of products. It's feral.
 
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