Apple's AirPods Ultra will have cameras — and they're Siri's eyes, not yours

By: Anton Kratiuk | today, 13:10

Apple's next flagship earbuds will include built-in cameras — not for taking photos, but to feed Siri a live view of your surroundings. A demo video found inside the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate, spotted on August 18, 2026, shows the feature in action and removes any remaining doubt about the product's existence.

What the cameras actually do

The earbuds use small infrared cameras mounted in each stem. They don't capture photos or video you can save. Instead, they pipe low-resolution visual data to Siri's Visual Intelligence system, letting the assistant understand what's in front of you in real time. In the leaked video, a person holds a book up and Siri identifies it — title, author, context — without the user typing anything. Journalist Mark Gurman, who first reported the feature, described a similar scenario: hold up a vegetable and Siri can instantly suggest ways to cook it.

A small LED indicator on each earbud lights up when the cameras are active and sending data to Apple's servers — a privacy signal that puts some distance between this and Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses, which drew criticism for lacking obvious capture indicators.

The Ultra tier, the price, and the timeline

Apple is expected to brand these as AirPods Ultra — a new tier sitting above AirPods Pro 3, which currently starts at $249. Pricing will likely land north of that, with estimates pointing toward $299 or higher. Two internal hardware variants exist: codename B790, expected to launch in September 2026 alongside the iPhone 18 Pro, and a second version (B798) scheduled for late 2027.

Visual Intelligence requires an iPhone 15 Pro or later, so the feature won't work with older handsets. That's a meaningful limitation if you're not already on a recent Pro model — and it deepens Apple's ecosystem lock compared to Meta's glasses, which work across more devices.

The September launch window is consistent across MacRumors reporting and iOS 27 code references, though Apple has not made an official announcement. No confirmed price or exact date has been released.

Worth watching

Camera earbuds are a genuine shift in what wearable AI can do — moving Siri from a voice assistant that reacts to questions into one that sees what you see. Whether that's useful or unsettling will depend on how transparent Apple is about when the cameras are running and what data leaves the device. The LED indicator is a start, but the details of cloud data logging will matter when regulators take a closer look.