All for Apple entering HA market. But if Tim Cook thinks he can pull off HA sales by using AirPod as a hearing aid - he is badly mistaken. Seriously do we want to use a microwave oven as a TV?
I think there have been a fair number of people doing this with AirPods Pro for a few years already. Making it more formal and supported is a good thing, I’d say. It didn’t work for me. But it works for many.
WH
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I had actually daydreamed about the more powerful speech processing maybe NEEDING something like an AirPod to hold all the stuff in it. But, um, to your point? I would not want to be lugging around a refrigerator in my EAR all day.
And come to think of it, that’s what a hearing aid dispenser told me like 40-odd years ago: that with my level of loss (half what it is now), I should be hauling around a refrigerator-sized aid. 
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I used them as HAs for a while before taking the plunge and buying L90s. They worked pretty well for my needs, and the only reason I bought ‘real’ aids was because it’s not considered professional to wear airpods at work events. The L90s are better, of course, but they should be: I paid 10x as much for them, and that was for a used pair on eBay that was probably less than half of original retail. And I still prefer airpods for phone calls because the connection is more stable and the other person hears less background noise.
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Why not both? But yes, for it to replace hearing aids it would need >16 hours battery life and probably look more like real hearing aids. So, use regular hearing aids, then use AirPods in more difficult environments where you need noise-cancelation and things like that.
Not sure how well they will actually work fore people with mild loss of hearing but I know my wife loves hers for Bluetooth streaming tv.
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I haven’t kept up with this, but a year or two ago, Active Noise Cancellation in AirPods (and Sony and Bose headphones) was judged superior to anything HAs could do in that realm. Obviously, with the Phonak Audeo Sphere, it’s a whole new ball game. But Apple, with a market capitalization of 3.48 trillion dollars as of September 2024, clearly has resources to burn on audio that no HA OEM can match. So rather than telling them to go jump in a lake, we should welcome them to the party.
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I feel like ANC is good when you don’t want to hear anything external. But in my experience it doesn’t discriminate out things you want to hear.
MEG
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What the INTENT1 aids does wonderful is to give me a full sound scape and when someone started talking the aids lower everything but the speech so I can hear what the person is saying.
Some may not want to hear a full sound scape but I sure do. I walk the forest trails around hear and I want to hear everything around me. But if my walking partner says something I want to hear what was said. In other words I what my aids to give me as close to normal hearing as possible. And the INTENT1 aids are doing a great job of that.
Since I haven’t tried AirPods myself, I can only repeat what I’ve read, which is that the Apple Transparency Mode under ANC is pretty good, removing sudden, loud noises without isolating you from your environment. Most AirPod wearers, just like the average HA wearer, are probably wearing an open fit. They don’t have to be using noise filtration if they don’t want to, and can maintain environmental awareness. So, those people with HAs or earbuds who choose to isolate themselves probably do so for a reason, e.g., they want to hear something they’re streaming more clearly. I effectively do this with my HAs all the time (at my own peril) by turning off my external mics so I don’t have to hear barking dogs, ambulance sirens, airplanes and helicopters overhead as I attempt to listen to a podcast (and actually hear what’s being said) as I’m out for a walk (wind can be a problem, too). ANC is just a nice feature to have when you need it, not something to be used all the time.
Snippet from a review on Airpods2 Transparency Mode:
The Adaptive Transparency mode balances the need for environmental awareness with the desire to mitigate the harshness of sudden loud noises. In our review, we found it effective in allowing ambient sound to pass through while dampening potentially jarring noises, providing a comfortable and safe listening experience without completely isolating the listener from their surroundings.
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It is closed if you use their tips. I found the occlusion oppressive.
WH
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AirPod models differ as to whether they’re in the ear canal or outside the ear canal. The following PC Mag review refers to Apple ANC as “exceptional.”
AirPods 4 are outside, AirPods Pro 2 are inside, for example.
The ANC is the reason I’m so excited about this. Conventional hearing aids don’t actively cancel noise. They selectively amplify certain frequencies, and the fancy ones selectively amplify some sounds (e.g., speech) but not others at the same frequency. The really fancy ones automatically figure out how to combine those things in all kinds of useful ways (e.g., Speech in Car mode).
But if there’s a lot of background noise and it’s loud enough for a person to have trouble hearing over it, then only amplifying speech without doing anything to counter the background noise is of limited use for someone with mild/moderate loss. The best they could do would be to use closed domes or molds to physically block it out as much as possible. (Ironically, I suspect this may be less of an issue for someone with severe/profound loss, because in many such situations, they wouldn’t hear the background noise at all if their aids didn’t amplify it. Perfecting what the aids amplified would theoretically be sufficient to solve the problem. In practice, the technology isn’t quite there yet.)
But ANC does something fundamentally different. It actively cancels noise by emitting ‘anti-noise’ counterwaves through the speaker. In my experience, this is much more effective than physically occlusive earplugs alone at producing dead silence. Actively canceling undesired background noise while selectively amplifying speech has the potential to be a game-changer for the mild/moderate demographic, or for people with ‘normal’ hearing and auditory processing issues. I don’t know if that’s what Apple’s planning on doing here, but we’ll all find out soon enough. And as an added bonus, I won’t have to spend any money to do it!
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Don’t forget that it will probably actively cancel the speech you are wanting to hear too. Active noise cancellation is to give you a nice clean quiet background for music that is being streamed to them from your phone.
Oh, I haven’t forgotten! But I’m hopeful they’ve figured out a way to distinguish the two. If they take existing HA algorithms for distinguishing between speech and non-speech, and incorporate that into their existing technology so that ANC is applied to only the undesired sounds, that has the potential to be a huge improvement on anything else out there, at any price. And Apple does have a similar algorithm already, because the Conversation Awareness feature uses it.
Over on the MacRumours forum, there’s a lot of excitement about this feature. I hadn’t appreciated that apparently it’s considered socially acceptable to walk around with AirPods in your ears all day. As one commenter added ‘literally nobody wants to wear a hearing aid’. Oh well, that’s ok then.
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this is a huge huge game changer for hearing world-wide, huge. But it does seem like they could make them look better.
If I read the documentation correctly this requires IOS 18 which is only available on an iPhone 15 or above. While I have air pod pro 2 that I really enjoy, if it requires me to update my 1 yr old iPhone 14 I will have to wait to experience.
iOS 18 runs on the XR/XS and above. The cool A(pple) I(ntelligence) features only surface on the iPhone 15 Pro.
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Thanks for the correction to my comment! iOS 18 will run on older devices
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