This might end up having a huge impact on the entire field of treatment for hearing impairment. A big problem in the field is getting products to patients who could use them, but won’t because of stigma. This particularly true of young patients and unfortunately many might go even decades with a known hearing problem and still ignore it, and this can lead to social isolation and has a huge negative impact on their quality of life. Breaking the stigma of having hearing impairment might lead to these patients seeking out help much much sooner, and even if the AirPods aren’t perfect for everyone they might serve as an easy “on ramp” to getting traditional hearing aids for those who need them.
I had stigma before getting my hearing aids. I thought the hearing aids would be easy for others to see plus often the perception is that only elderly people get hearing aids. But the reality is that most people don't easily notice you are wearing hearing aids. Even my family has to stare closely at my ear to tell I'm wearing them.
Can you elaborate more on the stigma? From my perspective, if I were talking to someone with hearing aids I wouldn't give it a second thought (or I would try to speak more clearly). Talking to someone with Airpods in, I might assume they're listening to music and ignoring me.
> Can you elaborate more on the stigma? From my perspective, if I were talking to someone with hearing aids I wouldn't give it a second thought
I think it's mostly perceived stigma (or self-stigma) rather than actual stigma from others, and partially a generational thing where there was more stigma in the past. Attitudes to sight correcting glasses have also massively changed in the last few decades.
> Attitudes to sight correcting glasses have also massively changed in the last few decades.
That's because in the 70s only 25% of the population wore glasses but now 80% of people need to wear them (or contacts). What's the point of making fun of someone who needs glasses when the majority of people around you are in the same boat.
There's a gulf between how people treat workmates/strangers/friends and mate selection. Modern cultural ideas of discrimination go flying out the window for the second category. They might not appear to treat you any worse but will be less inclined to want to have your babies if you seem disabled.
sorta like crocs: god awfully ugly but really comfortable. there's groups (not the groups you'd initially imagine) who are against them because they're 'lame'.
hearing aids are kinda lame. they fix deficiency whereas cool things usually raise normal baselines.
again, a lot of old people wear them and young people often reject old people things reflexively, regardless if it's beneficial or not.
As someone who has had success at turning people you wouldn't expect to like crocs, on to crocs, do you mind sharing: Who are the groups you wouldn't initially imagine to be against crocs who are?
I only have experience proslethyzing, I have little understand of who has fallen.
Everyone said crocs were so comfortable so I got some. Feels like I'm walking on styrofoam, in a bad way. No where near as comfortable as my Birkenstocks though certainly more affordable. I don't hate them, but after trying them I definitely don't "get it."
I have no strong feelings about them, don't find them more comfortable than any other shoe, and while I'll admit that can be rather ugly they aren't all that way.
The most common thing I hear against them are that they are "prison shoes" and so wearing them is like wearing orange jumpsuits. If it isn't wanting to avoid looking like a convict, it's that they leave blisters.
fashion heads. they wear tabi runway shoes but find crocs too much? puzzling. gen z fashion heads seemed to embrace crocs fine however, it's the older ones
Yeah it's a big generational thing, my 90 yr old grandmother wouldn't wear hearing aids despite losing 80% of her hearing in both ears. Said they looked ugly.
My problem is that I'm right at the edge, I can hear most conversation but if it's noisy or someone is talking more quietly I have problems making out the words. So, 95% of the time I'm fine, and it's hard to convince myself it's worth the thousands of dollars traditional hearing aids cost, plus the futzing with wearing them. I have some Air Pod Pros 2 in my cart that I almost pulled the trigger on, but I'm an android guy so I need to see if I can get one of my wife's old iPhones up to configure it.
I won't speak for everyone but my $1,500 hearing aides are terrible Bluetooth earbuds. Music streamed from my phone is full of static and I end up going back to my trusty wired headphones.
If the AirPods work as hearing aides I'm never going back.
I have a set of the Pro 2s. The noise cancellation and adaptive listening is really great, but the damn things will not stay in my ears no matter what tip I use or how I orient the things in my ear.
Talking, chewing gum, and even just leaning my head back is enough to make the things fall out.
I really wanted to like these things as I have terrible hearing, and the assistive hearing on these is already pretty nice, but they don't do me any good if they won't stay in my ears.
I haven't had this issue with any other earbud I've ever owned.
Do yourself a favor and try a pair out first before you buy, if you can.
EDIT: I am very open to specific recommendations on 3rd-party eartips for these things.
I like the Comply foam tips. You can buy the "assorted" pack in different sizes, and use whichever ones fit best.
Both ears need not use the same size tips btw, you can mix and match sizes as many people do. You can also use different tips in summer vs winter for better comfort due to thermal expansion.
I just bought some, thanks. Also happy to have black tips instead of the white ones that Apple is so stubborn about.
After a year the white tips get this embarrassing nicotine yellow color that would be completely unavoidable had Apple offered any other tip color than white.
Yeah, neither are my girlfriend's. But I sweat heavily in them multiple times a daily doing exercise and even wear them to bed. And my ear wax might have special yellowing properties. Either way, nothing that goes in my orifice that could be seen by other people needs to be white.
Don't get me started on the transparent plastic anti-snore nostril dilators.
How is the buttplug industry more accommodating with its color offering than Apple?
Hmm, maybe ill try these. I bought some air pods, but could only use them if totally still, which defeated the point. Then i see everyone jogging with them and i can't even sucessfully walk to the kitchen for a snack.
I've tried these and, at least for me, they are worse than the silicon ones that came with the AirPods. A while ago I heard of someone getting (molded?) ones from their ENT. I might have to look into that.
> but the damn things will not stay in my ears no matter what tip I use
Look at third-party tips. There's no set of 3 tips that can work for everyone, but with third-party tips you're much more likely to find some that work.
It's not just the tips, but the stem and overall shape can be problematic too. EarPods and AirPods hang off the ears by protrusions on ears called tragus and antitragus, and the triangular cavity behind it, but that part can be just wide open hemisphere for some people. Maybe ethnicity has a role in it. If those are, the earphones become cantilevered on ear canals with most of its mass unsupported and just follows Newtonian physics.
And tbh, I have this problem. Most circular shaped earphones are complete non-issue for me, many TWS models included, but not Apple earphones. Supposedly they offer SoTA performances in many domains, so it's kind of sad that I don't get to buy them myself or recommend to anyone unless they change it back to more commonly used shapes.
Yup, my friend has some of these that were custom made based on his ears. They seem to be much much better for him as a result. I don't believe they were inexpensive though, at least what he had made.
As I recall it was a couple hundred bucks for the ear pieces plus the cost of the AirPods. So, yea, probably around the same price as MSRP AirPods Max.
I'm a runner and I'd have no hope of keeping those airpod pros in my ears if it weren't for the airpod hooks that I have. There's a variety of inexpensive ones on Amazon that you can try out. I've had good luck with the ones that nestle inside my ear.
Not the GP but I use these[1] and they work great for workouts. They look pretty much the same on various amazon stores, temu, aliexpress, etc so I'd just get whatever is cheapest if I lose mine. I've also tried over ear hooks for the AirPods Pro but I wear glasses and it's an awkward fit.
This particular iteration doesn't seem to be available anymore - but there are many copy cats. The silicone is usually flexible enough to provide support integrity without being too irritating.
Are you sure you aren't just using tips that are too large?
I've used AirPod Pros for the past ~3-4 years and have spent hundreds of hours walking, running, and biking with them. They have never once come out or even become loose, though I do use the smallest size tip.
Not the person you're replying to but I tried all 3 sets of standard tips as well smaller 3rd party tips and none of them sat in my ears well enough while doing any kind of moving around (or gum chewing) so I ended up giving them to a friend and going back to the standard AirPods because I've never had a problem with them staying in my ears. What's weird is that before AirPods came out my standard earbuds were the Panasonic ErgoFit ones and those always stayed in my ears no problem with the smallest set of tips.
it's a fair question - I tried using all three sets of tips. I settled on the smallest size, but even they won't stay in. I find myself wishing they were a little longer.
I’ve had great luck with Comply. The Apple tips are worthless for me, but Comply tips solve the problem.
The only problem is they last long enough that I can never remember what size I ended up using, so I have to buy a sampler kit instead of my preferred size.
With you on this one. The Pro's just never fit my ears. I tried all sorts of tips. Foam, silicon, even the ones that fit "into" the ear curve fail and leads to a really inconsistent experience.
The regular AirPods work well ENOUGH for me that when I walk I don't need anything to keep them in, but running would be an absolute no go. And I feel like they never actually "stay put" in the ear even when walking. I always have to push them in again.
Will try these new ones, but most likely will fall back to my usual AirPods.
I figured they needed a bit of friction to not move around in my ears. Two small patches (dots) of bandaid material solved the problem. (From the end with the sticky back, not the center). Works great. If you place them right they won't be visible when you wear them. Roughly $0.
There are also silicone wraps for sale that achieve the same effect.
I don't like the foam tips, what works better are silicon sleeves for each AirPods or grippy pads that you can tape on. You don't have to take either off when putting them back in their case.
This is what I do. The foam tips wear out faster, but as mentioned fit and noise isolation are superior. I've also noticed that some brands of foam tips interfere with charging the AirPods. You've got to sort of jam them down into the case to get contact. But that has been very size / brand specific.
Curious as a future patient. How long do the prescribed hearing aids lost? I don't know when the AirPods came but I have used only 2 generations and with a price tag of 200-250 odd, I don't mind replacing every 2-3 years, just trying to see comparison with the medical industry (whether we pay or the insurance pays)
In the US clinical hearing aids cost 2,000 to 7000$ for a pair (half that if you need one) + whatever the audiologist charges. Like a lot of medical expenses you can drop that significantly with over the counter options available for under 1,000$.
That said, hearing loss varies quite a bit and high end devices have meaningful benefits in terms of customization.
My dad’s were in the 2k range and are expected to be good for about three years. Not that they don’t last longer- just that all the features like Bluetooth should last for three years.
Yes, bluetooth in hearing aids is great for answering the phone, but it's disappointing for music. It's not really what hearing aids are for.
But I expect that we will still be switching between hearing aids and AirPods because they are different enough problems that they need different hardware. AirPod battery life isn't good enough and using them when talking to people is off-putting; it's a social signal you're not listening or don't want to be bothered.
While not as cheap as AirPods, there have been a boom of low-cost hearing aids in the last few years. They are finally available OTC, so that has driven prices down. A quick search will yield a few in the $300-range, but tbh I’m not sure about quality. I really hope the FDA keeps expanding OTC access to health tech. Especially devices that don’t typically cause damage or carry much risk.
My in-laws all have hearing problems (genetically?), and they said the prices are starting to reach the “keep a pair in the office, and a pair in the car” prices.
I hope so, too! They recently approved an OTC blood glucose monitor and it's been very eye-opening seeing how food and exercise affect blood glucose and then correlating how I feel with my blood glucose level. It's driving a lot of behavior change, and I would be a lot healthier now if I had access to it years ago.
Have fun with yours, but I'm a bit more reserved in my "reviews" of them. I think it's a cool product, but I've seen quite a bit of pseudo-science on the internet when people discuss them. You really have to grasp sometimes to connect glucose levels to "feelings". If you're a healthy adult without diabetes, there isn't a lot of research saying "X is bad/good", and the signal that people act on is not always reflective of evidence.
Yes it has a "needle". It's a plastic filament, and it's inserted inside a metal needle that gets removed with the applicator.
It was actually entirely "painless" to apply. I braced myself, hit the button, and went "did it happen?" and saw something stuck in my arm. 100% couldn't tell. THAT SAID, I spent the next 3 days going "ughhhhhhh my arm hurts" so I must've hit something. I squished the flesh around a bit, and massaged my arm and it stopped after a few days. I can't tell if I got unlucky, or if this is just what "new thing in my arm" feels like.
Yes and it's fairly intimidating (but I am a bit squeemish), the "painless" they refer to is that the applicator will have a lot of surface area which pretty much drowns out the pain of the needle prick.
It was painless, but painless does not mean no needle.
I am currently trialling a pair of Phonak hearing aides (mid-range audio package, roughly AUD$5K) and I can assure you the sound quality is garbage even at this price point.
Yes, they pick up sounds I don't normally hear, but I would compare the experience to listening to world through a cheap high-school PA system.
Are you used to wearing aids? Like have you worn them for several years? I remember when I first wore hearing aids it sounded like really tinny bluetooth speakers hovering behind my head. It was distracting and a bit depressing to think this was what I was going to have to listen to.
Over a few months my brain priced it in, and now I don't get that at all. Putting them in just means I hear better. It is like my brain has noticed the new sounds and interprets them before I hear them. The audiologist I spoke to said this happens to everybody, however the longer you've had untreated hearing loss and the older you are, the longer it will take your brain to adapt.
I do not own airpods so don't know about quality. But if a hardware company as great as Apple can build a hearing aid earpiece there are some companies that should be very worried.
I'm just googling about this as we speak, but apparently the FDA approved OTC hearing aids last year and there are already many models available at retail from name brands like Sony and Jabra. Apple is definitely going to make a splash in this space, but there are already a lot of options and probably some very good ones (I've never been disappointed by Jabra).
It's a hugely under innovative, insular and overpriced industry that has been begging for disruption for decades.
Now that there's critical mass in an aging population, companies like Apple that have the clout and cash to ignore the threats of patent infringement can finally apply some real technical innovation to the problem.
I'm on my 4th pair of airpods. Sound quality is good for such small in ears, convenience is amazing, but they don't last very long when used daily. They tend to break after about 1.5 year and the warranty is 1 year.
As others have mentioned, though hearing aids are a 4-digit item for many people. Even if you have to rebuy AirPods Pro regularly, you're still likely saving money. Granted, they may not work in all situations or all cases, but if they work for you it could still be a huge quality-of-life upgrade at a fraction of the cost.
I still use my first gen pair bought on day 1. Got sick of waiting for them to die and finally bought Pros last month. Battery life has declined but still work great otherwise.
My biggest gripe is that Apple went for aesthetics over functionality with the charging case. It's impossible to clean the tiny little charging contact far down and curved away from where a straight tool can fit, and when you put them in your case after working out the salt from your sweat corrodes the pins.
If/when the next ones break I might just DIY a "sleeve" design with replaceable contacts.
Huh. I’ve got the AirPod Pros and use them almost everyday for running. Which means they’ve been sweated on like nobody’s business, and they’ve held up to this use for years. I’ve been impressed with their performance.
Yes, this is a clear example of how regulation was harming people (not all regulation is bad, but some of it is, usually the kind that gets between safe things and users)
What do you call "regulation" vs "deregulation". This is technically a new rule that added a category of OTC called "hearing aids" and established guidelines for OTC hearing aids
This is great! Hearing aids are stupidly expensive and I hope we see more solutions leveraging mass production to improve accessibility of hearing aid tech
Another thing I'd love to see is affordable AR glasses with auto captioning for noisy environments with many speakers. My mother struggles with hearing loss, and it's apparent to me that audio-only solutions are not sufficient for many situations and types of hearing loss.
The problem is that folks who are hard of hearing want to be part of the conversation and make eye contact. The transcripts in the audio recorder app on Pixel phones is quite good, though combining computer vision and audio processing is necessary for loud and complex social environments.
One thing I love about Apple is that they are building products for what their leadership team actually needs/wants and uses themselves. This started with iPhone (e.g. what kind of smartphone do we want instead of all that blackberries?) and is very obvious with Apple Watch line.
This is great and one of the reasons why their products offer genuinely best user experience.
It does explain why the Apple Watch tracks of lot of metrics mostly applicable to the elderly - Double Support Time, Walking Asymmetry, Walking Steadiness.
They really are amazing. I've been wearing them to concerts to help with noise... work incredibly well. They're the only earbuds I've had that survived a full summer of sweaty running in the desert.
Grumbling about having to pay $100 for a new case though, while I watch my old case (left on a trail in Sedona) wander around PHX.
I work in this space. These don't replace hearing aids. The gap between needing hearing aids due to significant hearing vs degrading of hearing is about a period of 10 years. During this 10 years your hearing is sub-optimal but not necessarily bad enough for expensive hearing aids.
Apple, like others, are not competing with Cochlear.
The precursor to these features was the "Audio/AirPods Accessibility" settings as "Custom Transparency Mode"). When I last tried them, some settings seemed to process the audio in the "control plane" (as opposed to the regular transparency being "data plane"), leading to loss in quality or delay (compared to plain transparency mode). I remember hoping the 2nd gen AirPods Pro would solve this but I think it remained.
For example I remember amplifying the sound appeared to introduce some kind of extra delay and quality reduction that wasn't there before. I no longer have an iPhone to try this out with but I do wonder if someone knows whether these new features are still subject to this limitation.
Understanding people and listening to music are different problems. I have hearing aids and they’re better for understanding people (for one thing, the battery lasts longer), but they have no bass response, so I use Airpods for music.
Your hearing aid prescription might not be what you want to use for listening to instrumental music. For me it bumps up the treble too much, making a piano sound like a toy piano. An equalizer seems like a better tool for music. I thought Apple’s built in hearing test was pretty good for that, though it would be nice to have more control over the EQ.
Can someone with first hand experience explain how are hearing aids different from in-eat headphones with passthrough? What's the technical difference?
I’m not an expert by I have worked with a hearing aid producer, though not directly with the signal processing. Roughly the thing is that hearing loss doesn’t just mean that you have for instance 30% reduced volume on your hearing. So just naively amplifying all sound won’t help you that much. What you need is to measure the hearing loss at different frequencies and then amplify those frequencies in the input signal. Now thats a very crude simplification and a lot more complex signal processing goes into the actual products based on things like making the signal source more clear for people with high frequency loss, since many people suffering from hearing loss will have issues in crowded spaces or conversations with multiple people because it’s not at easy for them to “tune out” notices unrelated to the person they are listening to.
Then of cause there a a bunch of things you can do to try to isolate typical “useful sounds” compare to environmental sounds.
Hope that helps a little to explain the difference. This is also why you can’t really have a hearing impairment aid without doing the assessment which it sounds like Apple can now do with just the AirPods and an iPhone, because it’s never just “tuning up the volume”
personally, knowing about how apple product development works, I have very little expectations for apple branded hearing aids being any good.
hearing aids are medical devices, not headphones with passthrough.
The tolerances of safety and robustness alone are worlds apart.
Think about it this way: if a pair of apple earpods break, you just buy another one.
If my hearing aids break, there is a very high possibility of death and dismemberment leading to termination of my life.
Also, I would never buy apple branded hearing aids except under the circumstances where Apple and the FDA come to agreement, contractually obligated by the US courts system, that if Apple decides to terminate that product line, that all information, patents, design schematics, and code are passed to a 2ndary company (it could be one of the current hearing aid manufacturers) for continued support.
There can absolutely be no instance where apple can decide to "lay off the department" and "turn off the update servers" and leave the product unusable, for the lifetime of the patient.
That's the real difference between hearing aids and headphones.
as with all medical equipment, your experience may not represent the experience of all who need hearing aids.
I use hearing aids, and without them, my workplace turns into a death zone.
Think about people working in public transportation with hearing disabilities.
Imagine if you are working in an Amazon warehouse where your hearing aid fails and you can't hear a mechanized forklift coming through, or you can't hear announcements pertaining to safety.
Even at regular office, I can't hear fire alarms without hearing aids so literally, if the hearing aids fail, and there are no flash alerts or smoke alerts, I'll just keep working through a fire alarm. Thankfully flash alerts are regulated and mandatory.
I maintain that if your workplace is this dangerous, your hearing aids aren't the problem. That mechanized forklift should have warning lights and safety cutoffs. It's extremely common for industrial workers to be wearing huge amounts of hearing protection; relying on audio for survival in the workplace is almost guaranteed to be an OSHA violation in one way or another.
Looks great! Unfortunately I don't see the option anywhere in macOS with my AirPods Pro 2 connected. I guess it unfortunately can only be configured with an iPhone (and I don't have one).
As an Android-only person, what are the best options for mild hearing assistance?
In particular, I'd like an "open ear" earbud that has Bluetooth support for music.
(It sounds like Airpods 4 would fit the bill, with a new Active Noise Cancellation feature -- except they won't have Android support.)
Unless they changed something, in Canada I was able to try the AirPods Pro and the Pro 2 in store. They sanitize them between customers (IMO, not very well) with alcohol wipes. You just go in and ask someone to try them out.
It's annoying but nothing is stopping you from buying them, trying them on, and then returning them for a full refund a min later if you don't like them.
I'm just concerned people won't like the feature where IRL merchants are muted if they don't agree to give Apple a 30% cut of revenue the airpods helped to facilitate.
If I want a devices, so I could listen to what I said because my voice in my head when I speak is very different to the voice being projected from a mic to speaker. ( Assuming everyone hearing from the speaker will heard roughly the same ).
Is that a hearing aid? If not what devices should I be looking for? Could AirPod be used like that ( without an iPhone ).
That would be what IEMs (In-Ear Monitors) and such are made to do, if you sing or deal with music production your stage would typically have stage monitoring systems that stream your voice from your microphone to your hearing device with low latency. Some desktop mics even comes with a headphones port for you to check the monitoring option in your audio software etc. for monitoring.
People say the stigma on hearing aid. But what about the stigma for people feeling that it is inadequate to walk around with airpods and people thinking that this inappropriate / say impolite?
If someone doesn’t know at least with hearing aid people will be respectful and try to speak clearly, which airpods - hard to tell the difference.
They said it's in the process of FDA (and other agency) approval, which likely means the specific model is being validated for use as a medical device. If they only mentioned it for AirPods Pro 2, I wouldn't expect it on other devices.
Once you get one device approved it's easier to get others approved under one of the new fast track programs (or at least that's what my FDA consultant told me a couple of years ago, I'll admit I'm not personally an expert on this).
Not exactly. A novel device has a higher bar to get clearance. If you are developing something that already exists i.e. a hearing aid then you can go the 510k route.
Every model has to go through the same rigor with design controls and get clearance through the 510k process. There is a lot of process and documentation, and as a medical device you can't just update firmware and swap components as they go end of life. And you can't just discontinue a product. When you submit for approval you have to define the lifetime of the product and how you plan to support it through that lifetime.
I imagine Apple will keep the AirPods Pro 2 around for about a decade as their hearing aid device.
The additional segmentation of the regular AirPods is kind of confusing. Conceptually I know they sit between the base AirPods and the Pros, but am I paying more just for ANC?
That was my first thought. I've used AirPod Pros and an expensive over-ear headset, and the headset was actually worse for ANC because of my sideburns/beard and glasses. Plane rides especially highlighted this, as the low-droning engine noise penetrated the weak ear seal easier. Perhaps the fancy acoustic feedback and ear topology modeling are going to alleviate this issue, but I'm not sure that it's going to resonate with consumers because it requires product knowledge. Give me decent ANC in the base model, and very good ANC in the Pros and it's immediately understandable what I am getting.
extremely happy for this and have been wanting it for years. i think it's panasonic who has a product like this but it's like $700+ after tax. my hearing loss isn't bad enough to go get a hearing aid, it's not a problem 95% of the time. but maybe once a month im in a super loud restaurant for socially obligatory reasons and i cannot hear the conversation basically at all and it's a terrible mixture of feeling super bored and also self aware that i look unengaged and i'm bumming people out/making it weird. really happy for this considering i carry these with me 24/7 anyway and already own them
There was a free app that I used to do this for my father before. Mimi hearing test. They are just bringing this same function to the device by default.
Pretty sure you can do the entire thing with existing functionality on the existing airpods and iphone.
This is helpful even if you don't need a full-on hearing aid. My hearing is worse in the left ear than the right, so with headphones audio will sometimes sound panned right. The audiogram helps correct for that.
Yes, essentially you attached the audiogram in accessibility as others have referenced. It’s systemwide and works across many different types of AirPods not just the airpods pro 2.
Mimi hearing test app[1] works for that as it gives you an audiogram that you can import in Settings -> Accessibility -> Audio & Visual -> Headphone Accommodations -> Audiogram
I just downloaded and tried it for iPhone. Fwiw once you do the hearing test, on the app homepage you can sync to Apple Health and it sends over the audiogram.
> To provide feedback, request an enhancement, or share your story about using the accessibility features of Apple products, send an email to our Accessibility Feedback Team: accessibility@apple.com
Is this just saying commercial transparencey/pass through mode is getting clinical grade? I hope someone comes out with 12+ hour buds for all day "aid".
