New AirPods leak reveals built-in cameras and Visual Intelligence
Rather than functioning as conventional cameras, the sensors are expected to feed information into Visual Intelligence. This would allow Siri to answer questions about what is around the wearer or save information they encounter throughout the day.
This is not the first report suggesting Apple is developing AirPods with cameras. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman previously claimed the earbuds would collect “visual information in low resolution,” effectively acting as eyes for Apple’s AI features.
Potential uses could include asking Siri questions about nearby objects, saving information without taking out your iPhone, or receiving more detailed turn-by-turn directions based on the wearer’s surroundings.
The AirPods shown in the video resemble a slightly thicker version of the AirPods Pro 3, with longer stems seemingly providing room for the additional hardware.
Apple has not officially announced the device, so its final name, price, features, and launch date remain unknown. However, previous reports suggest the AirPods could arrive as early as September alongside Apple’s next generation of iPhones.
spyPods
The world is moving to a risk management style surveillance network inspired by the Gestapo. If we treat everyone like a criminal, is the new world government’s ideology then we will eventually catch you. I think there was a novel talking about mass surveillance networks to enforce government policies like a dystopian novel.
You must be a criminal because if you don’t have anything to hide why are you worried?
A surveilled society is a polite one.
Either this was an attempt at sarcasm that didn’t work or you are a naive kid who lives in a bubble, and if so read some history books and some diverse news sources
He never uses /s and I’ve seen him eat way more downvotes than this. But yes, he’s playing on a Robert A Heinlein quote.
Tag the account. They’re doing a bit
Polite is what horrifying brutality wears to an interview.
Go. Fuck. Yourself. Then go read 1984. Then show me your browser history and all the pictures on your phone, since you have nothing to hide.
or pervPods?
The issue of mass surveillance goes far beyond being a pervert, SpyPods definitely captures that better, just isn’t as emotionally gripping.
But, like, why though? Who asked for this?
Palantir and flock
Because they have to compete with other tech giants and their AI initiatives or they will be left behind and eventually bought out by one of them. All these companies are in fierce competition with each other for survival right now. You still think they make products for our benefit? Those benefits are necessary for us to participate, it isn’t why they make those products.
These better be very visually distinct from ordinary AirPods - I do not want to be mistaken for the sort of twat who would wear something with a camera in it 🫤
I’m hoping this is bullshit, but this is a fast track out of the Apple ecosystem for me.
If anyone actually wants this they they don’t have the intelligence to consider the consequences.
Either way I hope it’s announced this month as I need new headphones.
Maybe BS, but I’d wager only partly true, because the kind of sensors needed for basic local environment awareness aren’t “cameras” in the usual sense even if the have an array of photoreceptors like a camera uses. It might be better described as a higher resolution version of the IR light detectors currently used.
Regardless, given a few undeniable technical realities, like ridiculously tiny batteries and the bandwidth requirements of video vs available BT throughput, there is 0% chance of these earbuds becoming pervglasses-like surveillance wear.
Reactionaries and sourgrapists don’t give a rats ass about truth, however, so prepare for sensationalist headlines no matter what.
That’s a really good point about the sort of image quality they could capture and transmit given the tiny battery… but if they sacrifice the battery life or NC development to add in some AI data gathering it’s a step too far for me.
Yeah, as a glasses-wearer, I am seriously thinking about getting some totally rimless glasses so no one thinks I have the pervert glasses…
I grew up on TNG and always wanted my glasses to have the powers of Geordi’s VISOR… but not like this…
I did exactly that when I bought my new glasses a few months ago. I chose thin wire frames.
We’re gonna bring wire rims back in style!
“People don’t want cameras on their glasses”
“What if we put them on their airpods?”
We ostracized the glasses by calling them “pervert glasses”
We can do the same with “pervert pods”
Or pPods, if you will
Oh so they’ve learnt nothing from Meta’s pervert glasses?
Amazon has these.
It’s happening.
🤢 every day I’m disappointed that Amazon is somehow still in business.
Using pervert glasses for work is a whole other layer of cyberpunk bullshit.
They know. They’re willing to risk it for the data they’ll get.
They make them more expensive and put an apple on it, to make sure idiots buy it.
Seems like Apple didn’t get the memo as public opinion has turned on having cameras absolutely everywhere. I get that it’s for “visual intelligence”, but that’s just some marketing to try and convince people this doesn’t make you look as pervy as wearing the Meta Raybans.
Thiel needs the data. Remember they’re working together.
Visible cameras being everywhere. People are dangerously tolerant of what they can’t see.
PervPods
You were SO close.
StarePods
PornoPods?
Where the hell do they find their focus groups that encourage this crap?
They’re building the surveillance state.
They literally want to have surveillance cameras sticking out of our fucking ears and have us pay for it. And no doubt a bunch of idiots cannot wait to comply.
A very large bunch, long identified as sheeple
They are pursuing strategic goals, they don’t give a fuck about what consumers want.
So pervert air pods
Tech is so fucking cooked. They are clearly out of ideas and grasping at straws. This is the dumbest thing I’ve heard… So far.
They are building a mobile surveillance device that will collect them the data they need to compete with the other tech giants pursuing AI. They aren’t grasping, it’s calculated and intentional. You seem to still think they build consumer goods for our use and not for their own.
Agreed, but will people even buy them? I like to think not, but how many morons got new iPhones for “Apple intelligence”
Of course they will. The Apple tech ecosystem is intentionally restrictive for a reason. Their cultish consumer base will keep buying whatever over prices nonsense they sell next.
I bet you every latest iPhone carrier individual thinks that this is the coolest thing on the planet
It’s joever, pack up
If you care about privacy move to a country that actually allows pro-human laws to pass instead of pro-capital
Enters a Mexican restaurant. ICE arrives minutes after.
I’m already kicking myself for buying into them in the first place. Fuck cameras, I’m going back to wired headphones. My $20 IEMs sound better than my AirPod pros, without all the fancy over processing.
I got myself a pair of moondrop chu’s and this is the way
In addition to privacy concerns, why is it that every time battery capacity is improved, they find a new way to drain it? They don’t even last a full day
Why the fuck
Sounds like a camera to me.
At this point, it seems like the only way out of this situation is the weaponization of EMPs. I’m not supporting that, I’d personally prefer if medical technology and refrigerators and similar things still worked, but if people don’t like cameras everywhere (and we can now very clearly see that they don’t) and companies insist on putting cameras into all types of technologies where they’re not always visible, where else could this lead?
“Hey siri what is on my foot” “hey siri” “hey siri” “hey siri what is on my foot”
That’s a quick way to get a cauliflower ear.
punch the face
punch the ears
you wear this shit, no your not …
Sounds like they come with Visual Idiocy.
You can tell by seeing someone with them that they’re a fucking idiot.
That already works today.
Indeed!
any marketing garbage is a leak these days…
marketing = lies
companies do nothing but rape, murder, commit fraud and theft.
none of them deserve money or oxygen at this point
I guess they’re out of ideas. When the original idea was to listen to shit in your ear.
So either private changing stalls in every locker room, or we go the starship troopers route where they have mixed showers and no one cares.
[deleted]
finally, i can livestream my ear canal 24/7
it’s inevitable imo. I’ll never wear this tech but we’re not too far off from a dystopian cyberpunk future, next it’ll be smart contact lenses, then implants, then genetic splicing (the technology prob already exists). stopped using apple a decade ago for several reasons
Honestly, if the data stays on device and it’s not recording then idgaf. Local stuff has never really bothered me.
Even local only (which you know won’t be the case here) is an issue. It still allows one to record stuff that one shouldn’t.
We know literally nothing about the end product beyond the fact that it is rumored to have cameras and visual intelligence. And of course that it will have the other features current gen AirPods have.
There’s no reason to assume it will be able to record, or that the visual intelligence won’t require a new phone with local models.
If you know how either a camera or an LLM works, you sure the fuck do have reason to assume that.
Just because Apple uses a bunch of stupid fucking corpo buzzwords that say Visual Intelligence isn’t an LLM (they call it an “AFM” which just stands for “Apple Foundational Model”) doesn’t make it true. It’s an LLM; just a proprietary model Apple has made. It’s machine learning “AI.”
Eh? An LLM is a large language model. A language model would have no way to analyze an image. No matter the name assigned to it, it is literally impossible for it to be an LLM.
If you are misusing LLM to mean machine learning model, then… I mean stop using LLM because it’s just plainly incorrect.
There’s also the fact that current generation visual intelligence is image only. It doesn’t support video. Which makes a lot of sense, because streaming out high definition video would be quite the bandwidth requirement, and doing that constantly while someone is wearing AirPods would be insane.
The idea that cameras inherently imply recording is also kinda silly. Eye tracking in VR headsets use cameras, I promise that unless you do some hijinks those camera feeds are not recorded. Just like the camera on my robot vacuum, or the rear view camera on my car. All video recording requires cameras, but not all cameras require video recording.
They have to record to process the data. The recording may be limited to just living in the active memory, but it still records something in all those cases. The vaccuums even phone that data home; the most popular ones have been hacked numerous times, including one that let the hacker see other people’s robot vacuum camera feeds live.
Recording inherently means saving. The exact definition includes the word “permanent”. Arguing that recording in this case means “the image data exists in memory” is a level of semantics that means literally nothing in this argument. Yes, we are all quite aware that the image data exists in one form or another when the camera is on. The question is, is it creating a recording, streaming that out, or handling the data locally and disposing of the data before it reaches permanent storage.
But it won’t. We both know this.
We don’t even know if there will actually be cameras.
I hope it can live feed into Apple Vision Pro so I can walk around with almost 360 vision like prey animals. It would be disorienting at first but after a while it would be some kind of super power. Can’t sneak up on me mfers.