AI Pods: The Future of Artificial Intelligence Technology

Rumors have been heating up over the past few months about Apple’s work on a new lineup of camera-equipped AI wearables, from smart glasses to camera-equipped AirPods Pro and even a mysterious AI ‘pendant’. However, while there’s enough buzz to suggest that Apple is indeed working on all of these things, a launch timeline has been less clear.

Although reliable sources like Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and analyst Ming-Chi Kuo had suggested Apple was aiming for a late 2026 or early 2027 — possibly to compete with whatever OpenAI is up to — Gurman revised that earlier this month to add that the smart glasses aren’t coming until late 2027.

Now, it looks like Gurman has heard a similar take on the camera-equipped AirPods. While he reported last month that the new AirPods are in advanced testing and approaching their final prototype, the hardware still has a long road to walk before it’s ready to go into mass production.

A Big 20th Anniversary Bash?

That timeline places them squarely in the fall of 2027, alongside Apple’s smart glasses — timing that could turn September 2027 into one of the biggest release events in recent Apple history.

While the jury is still out on how big of a deal Apple plans to make of the new hardware, there’s no arguing that 2027 marks the 20th anniversary of the iPhone. Granted, that won’t be to the precise month — the original iPhone was announced in January 2007 and released the following June — but it’s close enough, considering that only the first four iPhone releases were spring affairs; every iPhone since 2011 has been announced and released in the fall.

At one point there was speculation that Apple was preparing a “Special Anniversary Edition” iPhone model to mark the occasion, but that always seemed like a long shot, considering that Apple tends to be more practical than sentimental about its products. However, it’s a given that we’ll see the next-generation iPhone Pro models — the successors to this year’s iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max — and Apple could certainly use those to mark the occasion with some groundbreaking design changes and new features to usher in a new decade, similar to what it did with the iPhone X in 2017.

By now it’s also common knowledge that Apple will release its first foldable iPhone this fall. That could be an “iPhone Fold” or “iPhone Ultra” depending on which side of the rumor mill you’re listening to, although we can’t rule out Apple giving it an entirely different name, as that’s chosen by Apple’s marketing department — not the supply chain partners where most of these leaks come from. As groundbreaking as the new foldable iPhone will be, it’s not going to be a one-off or sparse release. According to Gurman’s sources, Apple is already preparing the foldable’s second act.

It’s worth noting that Gurman is much more circumspect about names for Apple’s upcoming products. He’s only ever referred to Apple’s foldable with that descriptive name, and while he acknowledges that the anniversary models, which are code-named V73 and V74, will succeed the iPhone 18 Pro models, he’s not even speculating in his article on whether Apple will call them the iPhone 19 Pro, iPhone 20 Pro, or something more whimsical like the “iPhone XX.” Although he did casually drop “iPhone 20 Pro” and “iPhone 20 Max” in a tweet earlier today, it’s not clear if he’s making a prediction or merely trying to catch people’s eyes.

The AI Wearable Parade

As if a full iPhone design refresh and second-generation foldable iPhone weren’t enough for late 2027, Gurman believes Apple is also going to use the opportunity to unveil its “first AI-focused wearable product” in the form of “AirPods for AI.”

Apple reportedly aimed to release its camera-equipped AirPods, which bear the code name B798, this year, but was forced to push them off for much the same reason we’re still waiting for Apple’s long-rumored home hub: Siri wasn’t ready for prime time.

Now that Siri AI is out, the new home devices could be just around the corner, and may even form this fall’s hit parade. However, camera-equipped AI wearables are a whole other ball of wax, as they require more sophisticated visual AI models that can reliably identify objects in everyday surroundings — and do that in real time.

Apple is well on its way with Visual Intelligence in iOS 27, but that’s still not fast enough — or lightweight enough — to function as part of a camera-equipped wearable ecosystem. After all, it’s one thing to point your iPhone at an object and wait for Siri to come up with a description; it’s quite another to expect an object to be analyzed and described when you’re moving in the world around you.

For now, the Vision Pro is serving as a proving ground for the new technology. With visionOS 27, Apple’s spatial computing headset will allow its wearer to identify objects just by looking at them, but it’s worth keeping in mind the $3,500 headset is also powered by an M5 chip, and the Visual Intelligence features remain a niche use case for it as not too many folks are walking the streets with a 1.5-pound device strapped to their heads.

The stakes are much higher for the AirPods, which will undoubtedly need to rely on a paired iPhone to handle the heavy AI lifting, thereby introducing another factor into the image processing pipeline.