- Cameras can arrive from AirPods Pro 4
- Infrared cameras would support unspecified Apple Intelligence features
- Inclusion in AirPods 5 and AirPods Max seems unlikely to us
We’ve been hearing about AI camera-equipped AirPods for many months now, and the expected launch date has been oscillating for a while: it’s 2027! It’s 2026! It’s 2027 again! But a new report suggests that there is now a more solid timeline and that the cameras could come to the AirPods Pro 4 and perhaps the AirPods 5 as well.
This “power” does a lot of work though. This comes in a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman who says that now that the AirPods Pro 3 are done and dusted, Apple is working on the next generation and the H3 chip to power them and add new AI features. And in this context, Apple has “explored the idea of integrating cameras into the device”.
So, will we have camera-equipped AirPods next year?
The short answer is “maybe”.
The first camera-equipped AirPods were reported in 2024 by respected analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who said the built-in infrared cameras would help deliver more accurate spatial audio in the Vision Pro. And the story was apparently confirmed by an Apple patent filing discovered the following summer (although Apple files many patents, only some of which fall within the scope of production hardware).
Kuo returned to the subject last year, saying the cameras would be able to see gestures that could then be used to control app or system functionality. It has also been suggested that the cameras would work with unspecified Apple Intelligence features, most recently by Mark Gurman: he said that exploring the cameras was part of the “bigger problem” of “turning them into AI devices.”
If the cameras do indeed arrive on the next generation of AirPods, it seems very unlikely to me that Apple will put them in the AirPods 5: these are the less premium versions, and Apple likes to differentiate the Pros from the more affordable models. Gurman says it’s unlikely Apple will integrate heart rate detection into this product line, which makes the cameras even less likely.
I also don’t see built-in cameras coming to the AirPods Max, because these earbuds are in the void between “too popular to abandon” and “not popular enough to warrant big investments.”
So we’re left with the AirPods Pro 4 as our ear-powered AI friends. And that means even 2027 looks awfully optimistic. The first generation ran from 2019 to 2022, and the AirPods Pro 2 ran from 2022 to 2025. If Apple sticks to this timeline, we shouldn’t expect to see the replacement for the 2025 AirPods Pro 3 until 2028. If cameras are indeed coming to AirPods, it will still be a while away.
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