AirPods with built-in cameras could arrive sooner than expected

If you’ve been keeping an eye on the news, you’ll have no doubt seen that camera-equipped AirPods Pro have been rumoured for a while now. Well, it sounds like they might be coming sooner than many thought.

Thanks to a a fresh round of reports (via TechRadar), it sounds like the camera tech could be arriving with AirPods Pro 4 and maybe the AirPods 5 – although we’d take the latter with a big pinch of salt.

Cameras as helpers, not lenses

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple has been “exploring the idea of embedding cameras” into AirPods now that it is actively working on the next generation and the H3 chip.

What this basically means is that Apple wants to install small cameras into your AirPods so it can read gestures, improve head and hand tracking, and potentially sharpen spatial audio by understanding where you are in a room. That lines up with earlier analyst chatter and patent filings about IR sensors for presence and motion cues.

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Earbuds already track head movement for spatial audio and switch between devices on the fly. Add discreet IR cameras and you open the door to more reliable gesture control, smarter positional audio, and context-aware prompts without poking at your phone. That would play well with Vision Pro’s hand-and-eye language and could push more of Apple’s AI features on devices.

It also gives the Pro tier a clearer identity. In the broader market, rivals lean on sensors and app smarts rather than optics and this would fit with the Pro.

Expected launch

We’ve heard so many rumours about expected launch dates, so nothing is set in stone here. However, if Apple is looking to launch the tech with the AirPods Pro 4, we’re probably looking at a late 2027 or 2028 launch.

That’s a long way away, but take comfort from the fact that Apple is actively working on it – and we should get a glimpse sooner rather than later.