In the coming days, Apple plans to add health-tracking capabilities to its AirPods.
According to The Verge, the tech giant has debated adding health-related functions to its AirPods for years.
According to Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, this is now finally taking place.
In the next year or two, the iPhone manufacturer “may improve the AirPods to become a health tool,” and they “could even come with the capacity to receive hearing data of some form,” Mark Gurman claims.
It was revealed in 2020 that the tech giant intended to include ambient light sensors in the subsequent iterations of the AirPods to track information like blood oxygen saturation and pulse rate.
Another rumour from later in 2021 stated that the business was looking towards new health-related capabilities for its AirPods.
Nevertheless, in 2023 January, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that the tech giant will begin shipping new AirPods Max, which might cost USD 99, in the second half of 2019 or the first part of 2025.
Meanwhile, photos from a Twitter account named MrWhite128 reportedly showed ribbon cables that look like they’d fit perfectly in a set of eye-shaped goggles, thus giving rise to chats that the tech community might have just witnessed the looks of cables and sensors for Apple’s upcoming and much-rumoured virtual/ augmented reality headset.
The account also shared pictures of a cable that has three bulbous sections, which, for The Verge, could be some sort of sensor/camera array. The headset is rumoured to have colour-passthrough capabilities that let the users see the real world outside of it, similar to the Meta Quest.
There are rumours that Apple may announce the launch of the interactive headset at the 2023 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) and release it before the end of the year.
These developments come at a time when the tech giant is facing a talent exodus at the leadership level. Since the second half of 2022, Apple has lost about a dozen high-ranking executives, as per media reports.
Most of these people carried the title of vice-president, which is just below the senior vice-president level that reports to the company CEO Tim Cook. They are some of the most important figures at Apple, responsible for the daily operations of many core functions.
The departures included vice-presidents overseeing Apple’s fields like industrial design, the online store, information systems, cloud efforts, aspects of hardware and software engineering, privacy matters, sales in emerging markets, subscription services and procurement. In total, close to 12 key officials have left the company so far.