this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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Apple
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AirPods Pro are surprisingly good and affordable hearing aids already (and certified as such in some countries IIRC). Apple does good things sometimes. Of course they’ll use it for marketing because why wouldn’t they.
I get that real hearing aids are expensive, but there's no way in fuck they're actually decent hearing aids. Maybe they can function as the auditory equivalent of drug store reading glasses, but cheapo hearing aids are unpleasant and can make it more difficult to understand speech in many situations.
As someone who's been wearing hearing aids for 20+ years, if you need them, go to an audiologist, and discuss your use cases and needs. Cheaping out will result in hearing aids you're less open to using and learning to use. None are as comfortable as natural hearing, but they aren't just a microphone and selective amplifier anymore.
Wow.
The affordability comes at the cost of relying on an accessibility device that is actively spying on you, and if you're in the US, probably reporting your activities to your insurance company via a data broker. It's the same as Teslas or Ring cameras being used as an accessibility device.
I take it you don’t own a phone.
I own a GrapheneOS phone.
Did you remove all the radios from it?
Yes, cause hearing aids are big business. They're really trying to corner the hearing aid market with this...
You might not care about accessibility. I do and will praise Apple for making a good use of their audio engineering expertise.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/120992
I do care, but there are devices out there better suited for it, that don't have privacy issues, and will ultimately work better in the long run... Like a dog. And you'd trust grampa with these running on apple AI/maps?
I want my phone to have a microphone so that I can do voice calls and that means there are multiple parties that could be spying on me. No reason to single out the microphone in my headphones.
There's a huge difference between a microphone, and microphone+camera. And just like metas pervert glasses, there's no need for this. Your convenience doesn't mean anything to my rights. Just because you're not worried about it, doesn't mean I should have to deal with it.
I very much doubt cameras embedded into tiny headphones have quality/resolution that’s suited for being an equivalent of pervert glasses but we’ll see how it works when it’s presented.