Apple will reportedly announce new features for its AirPods at WWDC
At WWDC, Apple will reportedly announce new features for its AirPods.
According to 9to5Mac, Apple will announce some new features for the AirPods during next Monday's Keynote on the first day of WWDC. Apple is reportedly working on some new head gestures following through on the ones it added to the AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods 4. With these gestures, compatible AirPods users can nod their heads up and down or side to side to take or decline phone calls and interact with or dismiss notifications without using their hands.
9to5Mac says that it has learned that Apple will allow a head gesture to extend the use of Conversation Awareness volume adjustment before the wearable returns to the original noise-control settings. Currently, pressing on the AirPods stem or swiping up on the stem will end a Conversation Awareness adjustment although soon a head gesture might accomplish the same thing. Conversation Awareness allows you to better hear someone talking right in front of you by lowering media sounds and reducing background noise.
Another new AirPods feature Apple is reportedly working on is one that will detect when a user is sleeping and will automatically halt playback if that is the case. Apple could have this feature work with the sleep detection capabilities of the Apple Watch. AirPods camera control is supposedly coming. A click on the AirPods stem will allow the user to snap a picture using an iPhone or an iPad camera.
Apple is also looking to improve the way AirPods pair with shared iPads. This would impact students in classrooms where multiple users often share iPads. Apple hopes to make it easier to pair AirPods with its tablets. Also believed to be under development is a microphone mode for AirPods which could drive sales of the wearables to content creators looking for a high-quality "studio microphone."
Apple could make the "studio microphone" part of the "Audio Mix" feature on the iPhone 16 that improves the audio recorded on videos you've taken. This feature uses machine learning to figure out what is background noise so it can be separated from the user's voice and improved. The report notes that Apple could decide to change or eliminate some of these features before the WWDC Keynote kicks off June 9th at 10 am PDT/1 pm EDT.
Apple won't be making WWDC all about AI like it did last year and much of the focus will probably be on changes being made to the different operating systems Apple develops for its devices. Already we know that Apple will officially announce a name change that replaces version numbers with the last two digits of the upcoming year. For example, iOS 19 will be known instead as iOS 26.
Besides iOS 26, other OS names will include:
- iPadOS 26
- macOS 26
- watchOS 26
- tvOS 26
- visionOS 26
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