At its annual iPhone launch event this week, Apple announced that its AirPods Pro 2 will soon work as a hearing aid.
Pending official sign-off from the US Food and Drug Administration and a software update, which is expected this fall, people with mild or moderate hearing loss will be able to use their AirPods as hearing aids. Signs of milder forms of hearing loss can be subtle, but Apple also announced a new clinical-grade hearing test people will be able to use to check their hearing at home.
The fact that most people with hearing loss will be able to use AirPods as hearing aids is a big deal. Hearing aids have been notoriously expensive and are often not covered by insurance. Other barriers such as people's ideas about who hearing aids are for and the wave of stigma about using them, have complicated getting hearing aids in more people's hands. While about 29 million US adults could benefit from using a hearing aid, many of them haven't worn one. Untreated hearing loss has been associated with a myriad of health consequences, including social isolation, dementia and more.
While an extremely popular earbud doubling as a hearing aid device is a big deal, it's also important to note that the hearing aid announcement wasn't necessarily surprising. In late 2022, the FDA made it possible for hearing aids to be sold over-the-counter and without a prescription; this paved the way for tech companies such as Sony to enter a medical market that's now stocking products at places like Walmart and Best Buy.
What's more, AirPods Pros already include features and settings that may make it easier for people to listen to the world around them when they have trouble hearing in noisy environments. Plus, rumors shared by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman suggested that the tech company would soon make a more formal move into the hearing health world.
Despite this, though, many people whose health could be improved by a hearing aid are still not getting them. According to Tricia Ashby-Scabis, senior director of audiology practices at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, many people who bought OTC hearing aids have returned them.
"I do think there's a big component of expectations," Ashby-Scabis told CNET in June of the less-than-ideal uptake of hearing aids. "You can walk into your local pharmacy and try on readers and find the ones that are clearer," she explained, but the same isn't necessarily true for hearing aids, which require some tweaking and trial-and-error adjustment.
People not only need to adjust to a new device, but their brain also needs to adjust to the fresh auditory experience they'd been going without, Ashby-Scabis explained. While AirPods can't take away any auditory experience adjustments people will need to make, they may make mild improvements in hearing even easier to access for people who've been toggling and toying with Apple devices and settings for years.
This idea is "why I kind of love the idea of AirPods," Ashby-Scabis said. "People can play with them."
The quotes from audiologist Ashby-Scabis were provided in June, ahead of Apple's hearing health announcements this week.
While we wait for the AirPods Pro 2 to officially transform into an over-the-counter hearing aid device, here's what to know about the hidden features that can help people hear better.
Read more: Apple Announces Preliminary Insights From Its Hearing Study.
AirPod Pro features that are (already) helping people hear better
Ashby-Scabis told CNET in June that she owns a pair of AirPods, has heard their hearing enhancements discussed in conferences and has toyed with some of the features.
She's been impressed, including with the Live Listen feature that lets you use your iPhone or iPad as a directional microphone to pick up specific sounds in noisy environments, giving a more intentional element to hearing. (This works with AirPods but also some Beats devices.) Conversation Boost for AirPod Pro is another feature that helps you focus on the person in front of you who's talking. Trouble hearing people talking in noisy environments is often one of the first signs of mild or moderate hearing loss.
"That's something that we encourage all the time with more traditional prescription hearing aids," Ashby-Scabis said. "We still try to get people to use accessories that can zoom in on certain people in some settings."
You'll need a pair of AirPod Pro 2 to get the most out of Apple's hearing features -- both existing and pending for this fall. To get the most out of Apple's hearing assistance features on your AirPods, you'll need to go into Transparency Mode, which somewhat resembles a hearing aid because it fine-tunes the sounds of your environment to your specific hearing.
You can toggle with Transparency Mode by going to Settings in your iPhone or iPad. Then select Accessibility > Audio & Visual then select Headphone Accommodations. From there, you can select Custom Audio Setup and even upload results from an audiogram or hearing test so it's most personalized. Once Transparency Mode is on, you can further adjust it under Headphone Accommodations and turn on Conversation Boost or play with the Amplification setting.
Even making small changes like toying with speech brightness or making things sound crisper can help some people who may have begun to lose a bit of hearing.
"I think that brightness boost can really make a difference for those folks who are starting to lose some high frequency," Ashby-Scabis said. "And it helps them pull in those consonants and gives them a little more clarity to speech."
Read more: 10 Tips to Lower Your Risk of Hearing Loss
How will AirPods Pro 2 compare to hearing aids?
Very limited research so far suggests that AirPods Pro do just as well as a basic hearing aid, even if they're still beat out by more premium models. There's a wide range of hearing aids, ranging from personal and unregulated sound amplification products, which are meant for situations where you'd like louder sounds, to OTC hearing aids for mild or moderate hearing loss and prescription-grade hearing aids.
AirPods Pro 2 may be a much more affordable option for many who could benefit from a hearing aid. For example, AirPods Pro 2 are currently hovering a bit above $200. And while it's a far cry from the average $4,000+ price tag of prescription hearing aids, a good pair of OTCs will still run you at least several hundred dollars.
Like with other prescription-free hearing devices, AirPods Pro 2 won't be for everyone with hearing loss. Over-the-counter devices aren't meant for children with hearing loss or adults with severe forms of it. People experiencing pain or other ear symptoms along with hearing loss should see a doctor or audiologist before buying any hearing aid.
Getting hearing health to be taken as seriously as other aspects of health has been a feat, according to Ashby-Scabis. But she says the public and medical community is catching on to all the ways hearing can affect our health, from cognitive effects and physical conditions that may also be connected to hearing ability.
"That doesn't mean that the hearing loss is causing the health conditions, but untreated hearing loss does tend to lead to depression, social isolation," Ashby-Scabis said. "You start to see people withdraw, they become more sedentary -- it can have such an impact on a person's general health."