AirPods With Cameras Referenced In macOS 26.7 Code

Juli Clover at MacRumors wrote yesterday about a definite oops from Apple: the release candidate for macOS 26.7 Tahoe contains a video for the as-yet-unannounced AirPods with cameras. The video was shared publicly on X by spelunker (and MacRumors contributor) Aaron Parris, who notes the new earbuds, codenamed B790, use Visual intelligence to help identify objects to the wearer. 

“In a short demo, a man holds a book up so the camera in the AirPods can see the title,” Clover reported on Tuesday. “‘With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later,’ says the voiceover text.” 

She continued: “The camera on the AirPods will feed information to ‌Visual Intelligence‌, and Siri will be able to answer questions about the wearer’s surroundings and log information. There is a direct reference to setting up ‌Visual Intelligence‌ on the AirPods.”

My modus operandi doesn’t live and breathe by the machine known as the Apple rumor mill, but this genuine leak—however inadvertent—has such clear applicability to accessibility. To wit, these new camera-equipped AirPods potentially could be eminently useful not only in helping to remember the title of a book, as shown in Apple’s marketing video, but in perhaps the myriad detection modes in iOS as well. It’s easy to imagine the earbuds alerting a Blind or low vision person to, say, a door or the carton of milk in the refrigerator. Privacy notwithstanding, these new AirPods could even assist with people detection or way-finding in Apple Maps. Put another way, AirPods with cameras could be a real proxy for smart glasses; this is especially poignant given, as my friend Carolina Milanesi noted, Apple already has “an army of people” who adore their AirPods. 

That the iPhone, via its LiDAR sensor and Magnifier app, has long supported detection modes is great. But these clearly forthcoming new AirPods are the perfect carrier for such software absent actual glasses. In a disability context, it’s highly plausible these things will make the world a far more accessible place because of the cameras and hands-free nature of AirPods. It can enable and empower in ways the iPhone really can’t because you obviously must hold the damn thing and point it correctly somewhere, whereas the AirPods should have sentience about your immediate environment. 

See also: More references to unreleased stuff in the 26.7 codebase.