AirPods Pro 2 users get the new health features starting next week
From the moment Apple unveiled its hearing health feature suite for the AirPods Pro at its September 9 It’s Glowtime event, my curiosity peaked. Building upon on Apple’s other health features, this upgrade is intended to, among other things, turn the AirPods Pro second-generation into over-the-counter hearing aids for folks with mild to moderate hearing loss via a free software update. The potential benefits for millions of people were obvious, and enormous.
The feature was promised to arrive in October, and soon after the event Apple received approval in the United States via the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on September 12, 2024. Now, we can reveal that Apple plans to start rolling out its hearing health feature for AirPods Pro 2 during the week of October 28, 2024. I’ve spent the last week using a pair of AirPods Pro 2 with hearing health features – and my father, Henry Krol, who suffers from mild hearing issues, has been using another.
While I’ve frequently used the AirPods Pro and other AirPods since their inception in 2016, my father has never used wireless earbuds, and has had little to no experience of wearing headphones. He is a big music fan, but he prefers speaker playback – likely from a Bose or Sonos setup.
I was keen to take the Hearing Test and see what condition my ears were in; after all, I frequently test earbuds, headphones, and speakers, but I also attend lots of concerts – I am a big Bruce Springsteen fan from New Jersey – and I’ve seen the noise-level alerts on my Apple Watch trend upwards of 100 decibels.
Given my father’s age and his work – he was a car mechanic by trade for many years – his hearing is a bit more worn. He has, however, been hesitant to even consider using hearing aids. Still, the idea of trying the AirPods Pro 2, with a comprehensive set of features including easy integration with his Apple TV 4K streaming box, sold him more, and he agreed to help me out with my experiential and, I should stress, non-scientific testing.
We started by connecting the AirPods Pro 2 to an iPhone by opening the case and waiting for the splash screen to appear. From there, we hit ‘connect’ when the option appeared, and the set-up screens ran us through the expected features like media controls and Personalized Spatial Audio. Then we got to the interesting stuff: ‘Protect and Enhance Your Hearing,’ Apple’s title card for Hearing Protection, which reduces loud environmental sounds to protect your ears; Hearing Test; and Hearing Assistance – the hearing-aid feature.
