Apple’s 4th-generation AirPods and 3rd-gen AirPods launch is approaching, and a major leak has revealed some new details about the next version of the company’s hugely popular wireless earbuds. These include new health features (covering both hearing and body temperature monitoring) and a switch from Lightning to USB-C.

The leaker-analyst Mark Gurman focused on the next generation of AirPods in the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, and while some elements have been mentioned before by Gurman and others, the article is a useful summation with some new tidbits and further detail in certain areas.

We already know, for example, that Apple is deeply interested in hearing health and how AirPods can help with this. It’s been shown that current AirPods Pro models can double as cheap hearing aids, and the Conversation Boost feature was launched years ago.

More recently, Gurman himself said in an earlier edition of Power On that hearing health would be the next area for AirPods innovation. But at the time this was comparatively vague, mentioning the “ability to get hearing data of some sort.” The new report expands on this considerably. There will be, Gurman predicts, a “new hearing test feature that will play different tones and sounds to allow the AirPods to determine how well a person can hear. The idea is to help users screen for hearing issues.” In other words, as well as serving as an effective hearing aid, the next AirPods will be able to flag up potential hearing loss earlier so it can be treated more effectively.

A separate health function Apple is looking to add to the AirPods is body temperature measurement. Again, this is an area we already know is of interest to the company, whose most recent Apple Watches are designed to measure body temperature via the wrist for fertility tracking and overall well-being, but the ear canal is a better and more accurate source of such data. Apple is accordingly working on adding a temperature sensor to a future set of AirPods, Gurman says, although this may not be ready for the fourth generation.

What will be here in time for the next model is the widely predicted switch from Lightning to USB-C on the case charging port. This makes sense since Apple is strongly expected to make the same transition on the iPhone starting in late 2023. However, while Gurman has previously said he expects all three AirPods models to move to USB-C by the end of 2023, he’s now signaling that the company may be prepared to wait a little longer for the non-standard models; the AirPods Pro, he says, will stick to their current release cadence, which means the next model, presumably based on a USB-C connection, isn’t likely to arrive until the fall of 2025. It’s unclear whether a new case will be rolled out before then as with the MagSafe case in 2021.

Finally, the idea that Apple will look at cutting the price of its cheapest AirPods, aired again in the new report, has been knocking around for years. They have generally been referred to as the AirPods Lite and are expected to compete with sub-$100 earbuds.

The current (standard) AirPods launched in October 2021, and while Apple refreshes its headphones less frequently than its phones, tablets, and laptops, work will be well underway for the sequel to this highly successful product. A glance at Apple’s AirPods release history (September 2016, March 2019, then October 2021) would suggest that the next standard edition of Apple’s wireless earbuds is likely to arrive in or close to the spring of 2024.

You can keep up with all the latest news and rumors by bookmarking our regularly updated new AirPods superguide.

Headphones

Apple’s 4th-generation AirPods launch is approaching, and a major leak has revealed some new details about the next version of the company’s hugely popular wireless earbuds. These include new health features (covering both hearing and body temperature monitoring) and a switch from Lightning to USB-C.

The leaker-analyst Mark Gurman focused on the 4th-gen AirPods in the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, and while some elements have been mentioned before by Gurman and others, the article is a useful summation with some new tidbits and further detail in certain areas.

We already know, for example, that Apple is deeply interested in hearing health and how AirPods can help with this. It’s been shown that current AirPods Pro models can double as cheap hearing aids, and the Conversation Boost feature was launched years ago.

More recently, Gurman himself said in an earlier edition of Power On that hearing health would be the next area for AirPods innovation. But at the time this was comparatively vague, mentioning the “ability to get hearing data of some sort.” The new report expands on this considerably. There will be, Gurman predicts, a “new hearing test feature that will play different tones and sounds to allow the AirPods to determine how well a person can hear. The idea is to help users screen for hearing issues.” In other words, as well as serving as an effective hearing aid, the next AirPods will be able to flag up potential hearing loss earlier so it can be treated more effectively.

A separate health function Apple is looking to add to the AirPods is body temperature measurement. Again, this is an area we already know is of interest to the company, whose most recent Apple Watches are designed to measure body temperature via the wrist for fertility tracking and overall well-being, but the ear canal is a better and more accurate source of such data. Apple is accordingly working on adding a temperature sensor to a future set of AirPods, Gurman says, although this may not be ready for the fourth generation.

What will be here in time for the next model is the widely predicted switch from Lightning to USB-C on the case charging port. This makes sense since Apple is strongly expected to make the same transition on the iPhone starting in late 2023. However, while Gurman has previously said he expects all three AirPods models to move to USB-C by the end of 2023, he’s now signaling that the company may be prepared to wait a little longer for the non-standard models; the AirPods Pro, he says, will stick to their current release cadence, which means the next model, presumably based on a USB-C connection, isn’t likely to arrive until the fall of 2025. It’s unclear whether a new case will be rolled out before then as with the MagSafe case in 2021.

Finally, the idea that Apple will look at cutting the price of its cheapest AirPods, aired again in the new report, has been knocking around for years. They have generally been referred to as the AirPods Lite and are expected to compete with sub-$100 earbuds.

The current (standard) AirPods launched in October 2021, and while Apple refreshes its headphones less frequently than its phones, tablets, and laptops, work will be well underway for the sequel to this highly successful product. A glance at Apple’s AirPods release history (September 2016, March 2019, then October 2021) would suggest that the next standard edition of Apple’s wireless earbuds is likely to arrive in or close to the spring of 2024.

You can keep up with all the latest news and rumors by bookmarking our regularly updated new AirPods superguide.

Headphones

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

The only way is upsell

One of the quirkier stories we covered last week centered on a simple Velcro strap.

Apple’s upcoming Vision Pro headset, you see, is rather heavy, and the company seems to have addressed possible issues with comfort by adding on an extra strap that goes over the top of the user’s head. But this strap is depicted nowhere in the press photos, and (according to the Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman) is likely to cost extra on top of the standard $3,499 price tag.

If you spend that sort of money on a product, you’d hope that comfort would be priced in. (And it’s entirely possible, we should stress, that it will be. For now this is merely a rumor.) But the idea that the strap won’t be included in the box is sadly compatible with Apple’s broader strategy in recent years. Apple has become the king of the upsell.

It all started, for me at least, with the charger. In 2020 Apple made the decision to stop including a power adapter with new iPhones, using the pretext that most customers already owned one, and that they were all ending up in landfill. Handy, then, that the move also enabled Apple to reduce the size of boxes and cut costs without lowering the price. And of course Apple will still happily sell you an adapter for an extra $19 if you haven’t got one lying around. The company also stopped including EarPods in iPhone boxes, which means more AirPods sales.

To be clear, I’m not saying the environmental justification was entirely disingenuous. But I do strongly suspect that Apple found a genuinely worthwhile idea more appealing because it could be used to squeeze out bigger profits. If the company sincerely wanted to reduce tech waste in landfill, after all, it would make its phones compatible with a global connection standard rather than a proprietary one before being forced to do so by regulatory pressure. But proprietary cables and chargers are better for upsell.

In 2022, Apple went all-out on the upsell strategy. It wasn’t enough for customers to spend $799 on a new iPhone 14; the company gave that device a year-old processor and generally did all it could to push customers who could possibly afford it to get the $999 14 Pro instead. (In our review, we called the 14 “basically an iPhone 13s.”) Similarly, the Apple Watch Series 8 was barely an improvement on its predecessor–why bother with the Series 8, when you’ve got the Apple Watch Ultra to push–and the AirPods Pro were heavily pushed over the standard AirPods. Every company wants you to buy their most expensive models, but for Apple that year it became an obvious and calculated strategy to an extent never seen before.

It’s difficult to argue with decisions made by a company that just touched a $3 trillion market cap (again). But this sort of thing–gouging out an extra $400 for wheels, when your customer has already shelled out $6,999 for a Mac Pro–might not be wise in the long term. It can get people’s backs up, eroding goodwill towards your brand, but more importantly, it makes your entry-level products seem a bit, well, rubbish. And those who can’t afford the iPhone 14 Pro or the Apple Watch Ultra or the Vision Strap Plus might decide to give up on the idea entirely and spend their money elsewhere.

Have your say

Thanks to the readers who got in touch about last week’s Siri-bashing column. I was reassured to discover that some of you are even angrier about the state of Apple’s error-prone personal assistant than I am.

Richard Raymond-Smith, for example, complained bitterly about Siri’s apparent regression. It used to be able to respond to natural-language queries about a journey’s ETA, he notes, but now unhelpfully replies along the lines of “Here’s what I found on the web about ETA…” That’s a big fail, Siri.

Robert Williams, meanwhile, finds it “mystifying that Apple continues to sully its reputation for excellent products by muddling along with a product that is VASTLY inferior to, say, Alexa,” and ponders why any of the company’s software engineers would willingly work on Siri, given the embarrassment factor when revealing this in conversation. And Gus Pistolis throws down a challenge: “How do we mount a grassroots effort to get Apple to create a better if not new Siri?” The campaign starts here!

Drop me an email if you’ve got any strong opinions about this week’s piece above; I can’t respond to them all, but I do read them. No promises, but I might include a few more reader comments next week.

Reviews corner

• Affinity Photo review: An affordable Photoshop alternative.
• Pixelmator Pro review: An affordable alternative for Photoshop pro users.

Trending: Top stories

Does anyone actually enjoy working at Apple, asks the Macalope.

Wallets out, everyone. A rare original 4GB iPhone is expected to fetch as much as $100K at auction.

Apple has bagged Stardew Valley in a notable coup for Apple Arcade.

The rumor mill

Apple is planning to launch its biggest iMac ever. It could have a screen beyond 30 inches.

But there might be a very long wait until the next new Mac arrives.

The next Apple Watch Ultra might arrive sooner than we thought.

You might have to pay extra to make the Vision Pro headset comfortable.

After a huge June, here’s everything coming from Apple in July.

And looking further into the future, here’s everything Apple plans to release over the next 12 months.

Podcast of the week

The Apple Watch is getting its first major revamp to its operating system this fall. And can FaceTime spur Apple TV hardware sales? Plus the fundamental change coming to all of Apple’s operating systems, all in this episode of the Macworld Podcast!

You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.

Software updates, bugs, and problems

iOS 17 is finally tapping into the iPhone 6’s full potential.

Visual Look Up is getting a lot more useful in iOS 17.

And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us on Twitter or on Facebook for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.

Apple Inc

You can generally find a pair of AirPods on sale, but it’s rare that they’re all on sale at the same time. Today’s one of those days—Amazon is cutting the price of every model of AirPods it sells, from the older second-gen model to the high-end AirPods Max and even the wired EarPods:

AirPods Pro (2nd-gen)

Price: $200 at Amazon

Savings: $49

The 2nd-gen AirPods Pro have the same design as their predecessor, but they’re all-new on the inside, with 2X better noise cancellation, longer battery life, and a new Adaptive Transparency mode that automatically blocks out harmful noises. You’ll also get all of the new features coming in iOS 17.

AirPods (3rd-gen, Lightning case)

Price: $149 at Amazon

Savings: $20

Apple’s 3rd-gen AirPods bring several upgrades over the 2nd-gen model, including personalized Spatial Audio with dynamic head tracking, sweat and water resistance, adaptive EQ, and most importantly, longer battery life. They also have a slightly refined design with touch controls. Note: This model has a wired charging case and needs to be plugged in with a Lightning cable to charge.

AirPods (2nd-gen)

Price: $99 at Amazon

Savings: $30

Apple’s older AirPods are missing several of the features found in the 3rd-gen model, but they’re still fantastic earbuds, especially when you can get them for under $100. You’ll get over 24 hours of listening, “Hey Siri” support, and simple touch and tap controls

AirPods Max

Price: $477 (all other colors) at Amazon

Savings: $73

Earbuds aren’t for everyone, which is why Apple makes AirPods Max. Apple’s highest-end headphones have a striking design featuring magnetic ear cups and a soft mesh headband available in five colors. With an Apple-designed dynamic driver and the H1 chip, you’ll get incredible sound, noise cancelation, Spatial Audio, and 20 hours of battery life.

EarPods

Price: $17 at Amazon

Savings: $12

OK, these aren’t actually AirPods, but if you don’t want wireless buds, Apple still makes its old-fashioned EarPods that made the iPod so famous. They’re simple yet functional, and at just $17 you don’t need to be paranoid if you lose them.

Headphones