If anybody from the accessibility teams is reading this, please know that it is difficult for me to overstate my gratitude and my appreciation for the amount of work this must've taken.
Music sounds unbelievably better through my AirPod pros, and I didn't even know what I had lost until I heard it again.
I'm willing to bet that a lot of my middle aged compatriots don't even know how much their hearing has degraded… Get your hearing test tested, folks, while you still have it!
Disclosure: Working musician. I wear musician's earplugs when playing in bands.
Everybody has vastly different sensitivities to sound exposure.
Even identical twins with identical sound exposures can have drastically different hearing profiles especially as they age.
I actually have always been very careful with my hearing; there is some evidence that I may have a very very mild congenital birth defect that makes me prone to hearing loss, but that's largely speculation.
My wife is actually older than me and has a spectacularly sensitive hearing - as does her mother! - and she's the drummer! (The wife, not her mother :-) I just do keys and vocals...)
That's why it's so important that everyone protect their hearing because even though it's not too loud for the people around you, it might be too loud for you - and you won't know until it's too late.
As a musician, you possibly have custom ones, but for anyone else who’s not an audiophile, you can get decent ones that mostly preserve the sound while lowering the volume for around $15-20. A godsend for concerts.
My Apple Watch is screaming at me that its damaging levels of audio, and I can’t imagine listening to the show without protection.
Result is, even at my age, I can still hear those annoying high frequency teenage repellents (ubiquitous in Tokyo). Can also hear some of my electric devices charging.
I'm glad to see such steps being taken by Apple. I always bring my noise canceling buds (Sony, Apple) with me when I go see movies. It's literally painful to watch movies in modern theaters without them. Just too damned loud!
Apple's on the right track. Personalized health and more daily monitoring of said health is gonna be a sea change event.
Now when I’m at festivals and I have friends without earplugs, I usually recommend them to just use their AirPods Pro (if they have some) instead of buying cheap plugs
But inly to justify a higher price tag? Yes it is true they are premium products, but I don't think it's true that they're that much more expensive than similar items occupying the same marketing niche from other manufacturers.
And they are far more than an order of magnitude cheaper than even a low end set of hearing aids.
But all of that is despite the point.
Samsung, Sony, Bose,… The list goes on. I have bought high-end headphones from them all, some with some without noise cancellation. In ear, over the ear, wired and Bluetooth... the list goes on.
NOBODY has a headphone that accommodates my hearing loss except Apple.
And they started doing it years ago as a feature buried in the accessibility settings.
But they kept improving it to the point where it is now FDA approved.
"A plus point in a differentiation matrix…?"
This is the kind of action that buys customer loyalty for life. I hope you never get to experience the depth of hearing loss that many of us have and how utterly transformative this kind of technology not just can be, but IS.
As someone with a diagnosed, severe hearing loss, I wonder how these compare to prescription hearing aids. I currently wear a pair of Phonak hearing aids and am looking to replace them, but I wonder if spending 5-6k on another pair is worth it versus the OTC or Apple AirPod options that exist today.
I have a very nice and expensive set of ReSound hearing aids and they're fabulous at what they do, which is focus on speech and kind of on music if I set them for that.
They're also unobtrusive and easily last 18-20 hours on a charge. I forget I'm wearing them, and nobody notices that I have them.
My AirPods I use primarily for running and listening to music because they just sound unbelievably better, and they're probably fine for a concert although I haven't done that with them. But I think for long-term use every day all day it wouldn't be that comfortable or unobtrusive.
Would love to hear the experience of somebody who's trying it, though!
Comfort? To me, very comfortable. I just leave them in there with Active Noise Canceling on all the time.
I may be showing my age, but if you remember "Get Smart", AirPods Pro 2 are like a Cone of Silence -- except they actually work.
Hearing aids are actually a a lot more complicated than just boosting frequencies. At the very simplest, these days they are wide/multi band compressors that try to balance discomfort with natural hearing, generally focusing on speech intelligibility since that is by far the most important target.
If you have severe hearing loss I would strongly recommend putting yourself in the care of a professional. Costco is a great source of probably the lowest cost versus highest quality hearing aids these days... but the reason I say "professional" is because there are so many kinds of hearing loss and they all affect your perception markedly differently.
It's a lot more than just "missing some sensitivity at some frequencies".
But regardless of where you or anyone else is, hearing aids are eye-wateringly expensive :-( and often for rather understandable reasons.
This will never be not true. You're fighting human nature. The vast majority of people don't need hearing aids and those who do you'll likely know they need a hearing aid if you're having regular or more personal conversations.
If you're getting your order taken at Starbucks, you can totally have ears in even today.
The stigma will/should go away, because more people will keep their earbuds in; because they will use them as hearing aids.
But we're saying most people don't require hearing aids and thus will never reach mass market and thus the stigma won't disappear.
You know who in your life has the hearing impairment, but the vast majority do not have this disability thusly "taking your ears out" is respectable.
The glasses analogy only works if general society has hearing impairments, but that's not the direction we're going as the human race, so we won't see this.
Happily, 'banter' still is. And - watch out world - the Ami's are getting used to it. A very, very, tiny little bit.
Prior to hearing aid features, I’d say this is actually quite rude even if you “can.” I don’t think the service workers taking your order appreciate this very much.
That’s what I remember hearing.
Obviously that changed when they got super popular. Your AirPods comparison is fantastic I had totally forgotten the phenomenon of “blue tools”.
For example: Does active noise cancellation result in more or less hearing loss?
Or Alcohol consumption: Apple Health could ask each day how many drinks you had and many people want to track it anyway. Correlate that to health metrics at a wide scale. It'd be much more powerful than any currently existing study given the userbase likely to opt-in.
Let people see exactly the data that will be uploaded prior to consenting to alleviate any privacy concerns. They already have stronger data-protection and anonymity mechanisms than those used by most studies built directly into the phone.
Several organizations have used ResearchKit to conduct studies:
Do most research teams have to build their own app?
Apple did run something like this in their heart research study. But not specifically counting drinks, just more survey like questions.
- Can airpods tell me how loud a room is?
- Which settings should I use for a concert to preserve fidelity? How do they compare to "concert" branded consumer earplugs, like Loop/Etymotic/SoundProtex ?
I have a feeling that it might be difficult for Apple to obtain FDA authorization for a system consisting in part of a device that Apple didn't manufacture (i.e. an Android phone). Getting the iPhone + Airpods system authorized was unusual enough already.
I mention this as you can use these today as hearing aids, you just need to use a third party app to create your audiogram. I have fairly bad hearing loss and use Airpods instead of hearing aids.
* Air Pods 2 were approved by the FDA in September
* iOS (and iPadOS) 18.1, for which the release candidate was released earlier today, comes with the ability to enable hearing aid mode and with a hearing test
* based on the hearing test, the AirPods can automatically compensate how things sound to you
* Apple has announced that iOS 18.1 will be released next week
I expect that insurance plans that cover hearing aids are going to cover this eventually, as a set of AirPods Pro 2 is $249, which is substantially cheaper than other hearing aids on the market. An open question is if any other manufacturer will be able to get a device that works this well at this price point - the amount of software and chip design engineering that went into H2 and the bridgeOS or RTKitOS that the AirPods run is just not something smaller manufacturers will be able to easily copy.
Now, I wish I could find a better eartips fit for my ears... XS doesn't pass in the app as having a good enough seal, and S is just a little bit uncomfortable for me for all day use.
I hope so because when you enable your audiogram for transparency it sounds like you're in an ASMR video. There's no way to make it sound natural but louder, which is what I would expect from a hearing aid.
The hearing aid stuff was only recently certified by the FDA as an OTC hearing aid. Apple has had a mode for a many years where AirPods + iPhone could act like a hearing aid. But it didn’t meat the medical classifications.
But it was simply called "an accommodation". Can't call it a hearing aid until you were approved by the FDA!
Seems like they are regulated for safety, and there are lots of (decent) requirements.
My go to since then has been the one plus z2 headsets, brilliant call quality, great form factor, decent ANC, and fantastic battery.
Also, everybody I know who has hearing aids eventually ends up getting them at Costco.
But if they’re $4000 a pair, that’s _sixteen_ pairs of AirPods 2 Pro. Assuming you don’t get them on sale.
So if you lose/break ‘em every 6 months, which seems quite excessive, that’s still 8 years to break even with “real” hearing aids.
And that’s not to mention the fact that you can buy replacement individual AirPods or cases cheaper than a full set. Or just get AppleCare so replacements are even cheaper if you tend to lose/damage them a lot.
Even if you buy them and they convince you hearing aids would be useful but you want more traditional hearing aids, it still seems like it might be a good value. Compared to risking $4000 on something you might not even feel is that useful to you.
Although the undisputed value in all this, won’t we still find it weird everything is always being (recorded and) processed. Or perhaps is weird when it’s not if you are born this way.
A new post-modernism of yet unknown proportions is going to be in a dare need.
Can’t stop thinking of Aldous Huxley with this and Adderall and all.
When in public, imo, one should not expect privacy.