Camera equipped AirPods just leaked in an Apple software update

[Bear]

A leaked video buried inside the latest macOS 26.7 release candidate has effectively confirmed what Apple watchers have been speculating about for years, camera equipped AirPods are real and appear to be close to launch. The footage, spotted by a researcher and reported by MacRumors, shows a man holding up a book while talking to Siri about it, with a voiceover describing a feature where your world becomes savable and you can just ask to save something for later.

The AirPods in question reportedly carry the internal codename B790, distinct from an earlier rumored version called B798 that Bloomberg's Mark Gurman had previously said would not arrive until 2027. According to Gurman's more recent reporting, B790 could actually ship as soon as this September alongside the iPhone 18 Pro lineup, which would put camera equipped AirPods on a much faster timeline than most analysts had been expecting even a few months ago. The design reportedly keeps the familiar AirPods Pro silhouette but embeds tiny infrared cameras into the stems.

The camera's purpose here is not photography in the traditional sense. Apple is apparently positioning it purely as an input for Visual Intelligence, feeding information about your surroundings to Siri so it can answer questions about whatever you happen to be looking at without needing to pull out your phone. There is also a reference in the leaked code to an alert that warns you if your hair or something else is covering the camera, which suggests Apple wants to avoid situations where the feature silently fails without the user realizing it.

Apple also appears to be addressing the privacy angle head on, at least on paper, with a small LED indicator planned to light up whenever visual data is actively being sent to the cloud. That mirrors a similar transparency approach used by other camera equipped wearables currently on the market. Whether a tiny light on an earbud stem is actually visible enough to functionally address the privacy concerns of bystanders is a fair question that early coverage has already started raising.

The timing here matters beyond just Apple's own product roadmap. Camera equipped wearables as a category have developed something of a reputation problem lately, with devices like Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses drawing regular criticism over people being recorded without clearly understanding it is happening. Apple has spent years positioning itself as the privacy focused alternative to competitors in tech, so shipping its own camera wearable is a real test of whether that reputation can survive contact with a product category that inherently makes bystanders uneasy

Apple's Camera-Equipped AirPods Confirmed: See Them in Actionwww.macrumors.com