AirPods Pro hearing aid feature took six years to develop

In a new interview, Apple executives who worked on the AirPods Pro 2 hearing feature reveal how long the development was, and how the H2 chip proved to be crucial.

Apple has allowed journalists into its AirPods Pro audio testing labs before. But now that the hearing aid feature has been released in Australia, the company has discussed more details of the development with local media.

Bergeron said that it was really with the release of the first generation of AirPods Pro in 2019 that the company to think it might have the ability to create a hearing aid feature. Even then, it was not a full development program, and she implies it wouldn't become so until the H2 was being designed.

The H2 processor was designed to improved audio quality in the AirPods Pro, and it was included in the AirPods Pro 2, which was released in 2022. Bergeron says that H2 "really unlocked a level of computational power that we would not have been able to create the hearing feature without."

Alongside the technology, Apple's physician-researcer Dr Rajiv Kumar, credits the company's hearing study. With some 150,000 participants, Kumar says that Apple unsurprisingly found a number of people who had hearing loss without knowing it.

However, he also says that during the course of the study, they found a lot of participants had hearing loss and knew it. Surprisingly, about 75% of them never chose to do anything about it.

According to Kumar, the study showed that people avoided hearing aids for obvious reasons such as cost, but also less obvious ones such as stigma. Apple then focused its AirPods Pro 2 hearing aid project on these people.

From then on, it was reportedly less an issue of comparing AirPods Pro 2 to existing hearing aids. It was more about how Apple might be able to lower what Kumar calls the activation barrier.

If Kumar was surprised at the number of people avoiding hearing aid technology, Bergeron says she was surprised at how much such people were adopting the AirPods Pro 2.

"I think when people realize how profound the impact is on their lives," she said, "they're wearing them more than we would have expected."

Apple released the hearing aid feature for AirPods Pro 2 in the US in October 2024, and it's only now reached Australia. As a medical feature, the hearing aid technology has to be approved country by country, and, separately, Canadian regulators look set to never approve it.