RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Below is a video spotted by MacRumors contributor Aaron Perris and posted to X on Monday night:
Here is your first look at AirPods with Cameras in action using Visual Intelligence.
This video file came from macOS 26.7 RC pic.twitter.com/yo7RI4MCeu
In it, a guy wearing AirPods picks up a book called Could Should Might Don't . A voice says "With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later." The guy in the video's mouth moves as he apparently asks what I'm going to assume is Siri to "save" the book for later.
This video, and the book it contains, both raise many questions: Could Apple release something like this? Should it? Might it reconsider? And how many will say "no, don't release this"?
What we can say for certain about this video is… very little. MacRumors says it found it somewhere in a new "release candidate" version of macOS Tahoe, and it's reasonable to conclude that the AirPods in the video are equipped with at least one camera—or something like a camera. Apple insider Ming-Chi Kuo has been claiming Apple would release something like this since Joe Biden was President, and it very much looks like that prediction could soon come true.
This is a sensitive matter for Apple. As I wrote last month , anonymously-sourced reporting from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says the company is a bit worried about releasing a smart glasses product, a move that could tarnish its privacy-friendly image. AirPods with cameras—if they existed—would arguably come across as even sneakier than glasses with cameras.
But other Gurman reports have suggested that a camera-equipped AirPods product would have an LED indicator that turns on whenever the device is taking in visual information. Perhaps more importantly, Gurman has hinted that it might be a camera product that can only do the kind of thing you see in the video: take in imagery and process it into information, and that it won't ever allow the user to decode any of that imagery as photos or videos.
Gizmodo reached out to Apple for comment. We will update if we hear back.
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