Oops! Apple Just Leaked Its AirPods With Cameras
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In an ironic twist, it’s often Apple itself that gives us the best leaks. After all, nobody had even guessed the name “MacBook Neo” until Apple slipped up the day before the announcement.
Now it’s given us another even juicier one thanks to a video file that someone seemingly forgot to remove.
Yesterday, Apple pushed out a final release candidate for macOS 26.7 Tahoe. While most of the world is paying far more attention to macOS 27 Golden Gate, MacRumors contributor and code sleuth Aaron Perris took a deep dive and found a video file giving us a first look at the much-rumored AirPods with Cameras.
As we’ve long expected, the camera-equipped earbuds won’t be about capturing photos on the go, but rather acting as yet another injection point into Apple’s Visual Intelligence, letting Siri answer questions about the world around you.
The short thirteen-second video clip shows a man wearing AirPods picking up a book as Siri’s voice explains the feature:
With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes saveable. See something you like, just ask me to save it for later.
This will likely work similarly to how the iPhone camera can already capture items and analyze them with Visual Intelligence — a feature that’s getting blended directly into the camera in iOS 27. However, the voiceover sounds like the AirPods version will rely more on Siri voice commands to capture images that can then be reviewed on the iPhone. It’s unclear whether it will be possible to trigger Visual Intelligence and get immediate answers, although that certainly seems likely.
The folks at MacRumors also found a code string that says, “To get the most accurate information about things in your environment, make sure AirPods are not covered.”
We’ve been hearing about cameras on AirPods since at least 2024, when Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and analyst Ming-Chi Kuo independently reported that Apple was exploring the technology. However, it’s only over the past few months that this has solidified into something on Apple’s actual product roadmap. This makes sense given recent rumors of smart glasses and a mysterious AI “pendant,” alongside Apple’s continued work on its Visual Intelligence technology.
What’s interesting is that while the AirPods with Cameras were once pegged for a late 2026 release, Gurman said in June that they’d been pushed off into 2027, where they were more likely to launch alongside the major iPhone update that’s expected for the product’s 20th anniversary.
However, that was apparently a device codenamed B798. Earlier this month, Gurman noted that Apple also has a set of AirPods code-named B790 that could come this fall. The implication at the time was that these would be a set of AirPods without cameras that Apple could release as a stop-gap, but Gurman never explicitly says that, and the presence of this video in macOS 26.7 Tahoe — not even the next-gen macOS 27 Golden Gate — suggests they might indeed be just around the corner.
Contrary to speculation earlier this year, Apple may also just brand these as the next-generation AirPods Pro, rather than going with the “Ultra” moniker that pundits have been stamping on nearly everything from the MacBook to the foldable iPhone. To be fair, Gurman, who has generally avoided using labels in his everyday reporting, suggested in March a whole “Ultra” lineup was coming, but he also made it clear that the suffix was merely “under consideration,” at best.
The argument for “AirPods Ultra” is that Apple plans to release these as a third tier, above the existing AirPods Pro. However, it’s equally possible Apple might just call them something as simple as “AirPods Pro with Cameras,” in much the same way it already has the “AirPods 4” and “AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation.” That may not sound as exciting, but if the cameras are the only differentiator, it’s not hard to see how Apple may prefer to keep everything under the “AirPods Pro” brand instead of suggesting that the higher-end earbuds offer other improvements in sound quality, ANC, or anything else.
