Personalized spatial audio is also coming to AirPods 4, along with the ability to interact with Siri with gestures like nodding your head to accept a call. There’s a new charging case that gives you a total battery life of 30 hours and can be charged with either USB-C or, if you have the ANC version, wireless charging. Both variants of the new AirPods 4 are available for preorder now and will be released September 20.
Apple also revealed some new colors for the over-ear AirPods Max headphones, which now charge over USB-C instead of Lightning. The new colors include midnight, blue, orange, purple, and starlight. Apple released its first AirPods Max in 2020. They were very nice—and also very expensive—so it seems like not much will be changing on that front. The new AirPods Max hold steady at the same price, $549, and will also be available September 20.
Apple isn’t making a new set of AirPods Pro, but it is enhancing its hearing protection technology for the AirPods Pro 2. One feature reduces the decibels coming into your ears in loud environments, so you can wear them like earplugs. (It’ll be fun to go to a concert and see everyone wearing AirPods while the band is playing.) In the Pro 2 models, Apple is also offering a clinical hearing test to gauge your hearing loss, as well as over-the-counter hearing aid certification that let the AirPods double as true hearing aids. This is sure to be disruptive to the growing OTC hearing aid market. —Boone Ashworth
Siri and Apple Intelligence
The newly revamped Siri and Apple Intelligence features will not be available at the launch of iOS 18 nor the release of the iPhone 16. They’ll arrive via an iOS 18.1 software update in the coming weeks. We’ve gone into more detail about these features in our iOS 18 feature roundup, but to summarize (as AI likes to do), these new additions help bring artificial intelligence features to the forefront on the iPhone.
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