You know that Apple is going to release an updated AirPods 2 at some point. If you’ve just got one of the existing model, though, then you typically like them so much that it’s hard to imagine how they could be improved. And, if you’ve had them since their launch in late 2016 then you’re probably wishing that their battery charge had stayed as great as it was.
The only thing we know for sure is that AirPods 2 will have a wireless charging case. But, there is so much more that Apple appears to be planning.
Through the company’s latest hiring and its filed patents, we can get an idea of where the AirPods are going. So much of this is to do with medical functions, though, that it looks like Apple is concentrating on health at least as much as it is, say, audio quality.
Maybe we’ll get the rumored “Hey, Siri” audio feature next, but there are a startling number of things Apple could do with a device stuck in our ear.
Long-term plans
AirPods were announced in September 2016 and just barely made it to online orders by the end of that year. However, as early as September 2015, Apple had applied for three patents to do with Earbuds with Biometric Sensing.
So, this is not something new. Apple has been working on the AirPods for years and that included health-related uses for them.
These patents weren’t known about until after they were approved in early 2017, when the much-delayed devices were finally appearing in Stores. All three, though, are to do with variations on, using AirPod-like devices as hearing aids.
We eventually got this feature, or at least a version of it, in September 2018 when iOS 12 was officially launched and included what Apple calls Live Listen.
So that’s three years from the patent being filed to the feature being part of a shipping iOS. Apple is playing a long game here, as it so often does, and it’s also leveraging its entire ecosystem. Live Listen uses the iPhone’s microphone, iOS’s ability to send data over Bluetooth, and then also the AirPods.
Fit and finish
The drawings included with those 2015 trio of patents don’t resemble AirPods but others do. There was a 2014 patent from Apple for sensor-packed health monitoring headphones with ‘head gesture’ control and there’s only one thing in the drawings that stands out as not being about AirPods.
True, the very end that you stick in your ear has a different shaped design in the final AirPods but really the only difference is that these drawings show wires. Then the description of what the patent covers fits right in.