- Cameras may arrive as soon as AirPods Pro 4
- IR cameras will reportedly support unspecified Apple Intelligence features
- The inclusion in AirPods 5 and AirPods Max seems unlikely to us
We’ve been hearing stories about AirPods equipped with AI cameras for many months, and the expected release date has been swinging back and forth for a while: it’s 2027! It’s 2026! It’s 2027 again! But a new report suggests that there is now a more solid timeline and that the cameras could be coming to the AirPods Pro 4 and perhaps the AirPods 5 as well.
However, that “power” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It comes in a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who says that now that the AirPods Pro 3 are done and dusted, Apple is working on the next generation and the H3 chip to power them and add new AI features. And as part of that, Apple has been “exploring the idea of integrating cameras into the device.”
So will we have camera-equipped AirPods next year?
The short answer is “maybe.”
The first camera-equipped AirPods were reported in 2024 by respected analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who said that built-in infrared cameras would help deliver more accurate spatial audio in the Vision Pro. And the story was apparently confirmed by an Apple patent application discovered the following summer (although Apple files many patents, only a few of which make it to production hardware).
Kuo returned to the topic last year, saying that cameras could see gestures that could then be used to control apps or system functions. It has also been suggested that the cameras will work with unspecified Apple Intelligence functions, most recently by Mark Gurman: he said exploring the cameras was part of the “big problem” of “turning them into AI devices.”
If cameras are indeed coming to the next generation of AirPods, it seems highly unlikely to me that Apple will include them in the AirPods 5: those are the less premium versions, and Apple likes to differentiate the Pros from the more affordable models. Gurman says it’s unlikely Apple will add heart rate sensors to that product line, and that makes cameras seem even less likely.
I don’t see cameras built into the AirPods Max either, because those headphones are in limbo between “too popular to be discontinued” and “not popular enough to justify big investments.”
So we’re left with the AirPods Pro 4 as your AI friends with hearing technology. And that means that even the year 2027 looks wildly optimistic. The first generation was from 2019 to 2022, and the AirPods Pro 2 ran from 2022 to 2025. If Apple sticks to that timeline, then we shouldn’t expect to see the AirPods Pro 3 replacement run from 2025 until 2028. If cameras are actually coming to AirPods, they’ll still be a while away.
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