Apple appears to have leaked its own camera-equipped AirPods. A demo video sat inside the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate, and MacRumors found it there on Monday. Juli Clover reported that the earbuds look nearly ready to launch.
The clip runs 13 seconds. A man holds up a book so the camera in the AirPods can read the title. “With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later,” the voiceover says.
John Gruber summed up the situation at Daring Fireball in a single word. “Oops.”
What the earbuds are said to do
The camera feeds information to Visual Intelligence, according to MacRumors. Siri can then answer questions about the wearer’s surroundings and log what it sees. The release candidate also contains a direct reference to setting up Visual Intelligence on the AirPods.
One string in the software covers an obvious problem. If hair covers the earbuds, the wearer gets an alert. “To get the most accurate information about things in your environment, make sure AirPods are not covered,” it reads.
The product carries the codename B790, which Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman had mentioned before. Gurman suggested a September launch, which would put it at the iPhone event alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and the foldable iPhone Ultra. Ivan Mehta of TechCrunch noted Gurman’s May report that the earbuds would resemble the AirPods Pro 3, with a longer stem and an LED to show when data goes to the cloud.
Siegler: the striking part is what is missing
M.G. Siegler made the sharpest observation about the clip in his Spyglass column. “The first thing you’ll notice is that there is no phone,” he wrote. The man is capturing the book with the earbuds he is wearing, which would make these Apple’s first true AI wearable.
Siegler also argued that starting with earbuds rather than glasses is deliberate. He put the numbers side by side. Ray-Ban Meta glasses have sold perhaps 10 million units. Apple has sold more than 400 million AirPods, and possibly closer to 500 million.
His reasoning turns on how the things look. Google Glass failed partly because it looked like nothing else, he wrote. Meta solved that by making its glasses look like Ray-Bans, and Apple can solve it by making camera AirPods look like AirPods. “Better to start with old design and new technology,” Siegler wrote.
That sequence matters for what comes next. In July we reported that Apple was targeting WWDC 2027 for smart glasses and was still deciding on cameras. On this evidence the cameras arrive on the earbuds first.
TechRadar: the verdict is already in
Tom Bedford took the opposite view in a TechRadar piece. He wrote that the privacy revolt against always-watching gadgets has already run its course, and that opinion has settled against them.
He listed where UK smart glasses are now unwelcome: courts, restaurants, theatres, and the pub chain Wetherspoons. He also noted that people now say “pervert glasses” more often than the actual product name. His prediction for Apple was “pervert earbuds”.
Bedford framed the launch as a possible lose-lose. Either the product arrives dead, he argued, or it succeeds and helps normalise the category. He quoted one user asking who is asking for this.
Zack Whittaker, the security journalist, reached for the same construction on Mastodon. “Not content with Meta making camera-equipped pervert glasses, now Apple is making camera-equipped headphones. PervertPods.”
The phrase has history on this desk. In July we covered Instagram banning the pervert glasses accounts. Meta’s Ray-Bans then got banned from UK pubs across Britain in August.
The pattern kept going from there. Meta pulled facial recognition code from its glasses app in June, one day after WIRED found it. And yesterday we reported that Instagram blocked the harassment search terms while its algorithm still recommends the videos.
The video may not show the actual product
Bedford raised a caveat nobody else in the cluster did. The clip does not look like Apple marketing material to him. The production values do not match, and he wrote that it looks shot on an iPhone with inconsistent exposure.
He suggested it may be a placeholder or an internal video, and that the earbuds worn in it are probably ordinary ones standing in for the real thing. On that reading the clip shows what Apple wants the product to do, rather than the product.
Engadget made a related point about the cameras. Nobody can see them in the video at all. The earbuds resemble current AirPods Pro apart from a thicker stem, which is where any camera would sit.
What nobody knows yet
Nobody yet knows whether these earbuds take pictures. Siegler noted earlier reporting that they would only look at the world in real time rather than capture it. He wrote that the video complicates that reading. He expects the device captures a still image, and thinks video may wait.
The codenames do not line up cleanly either. MacRumors ties B790 to Gurman. Engadget reported that B790 may be a different device from B798, a camera AirPods model Gurman has placed in 2027.
The release candidate held a great deal more besides. Engadget catalogued references to a Home Hub, a HomePod mini, AirPods Pro 4, two Beats models, a possible second Vision Pro, an Apple TV remote, an iPad mini, MacBook Pro models and an iMac. Codes can be placeholders, so Engadget cautioned that none of it is certain.
Apple has said nothing about any of it. Three things would settle the argument: whether the shipping product can capture a still image, whether it carries a visible indicator when the camera is live, and whether Apple names it at the September event at all.
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