Apple's camera-equipped AirPods will not launch until 2027 despite the demo video MacRumors found earlier this week, reports Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
On Monday, MacRumors shared a demo video featuring the camera-equipped AirPods in action. The video was hidden in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate, suggesting Apple was preparing for a launch. That's apparently not the case, and people familiar with the product told Gurman the AirPods with cameras aren't going to launch anytime soon.
The AirPods are not on Apple's 2026 release schedule because the company is still working to resolve supply chain and software challenges.
Gurman's own reporting on the camera AirPods timing has been confusing. In May, he said the AirPods were in an "advanced" testing stage with mass production to begin soon, and then in June, he said the AirPods had been delayed until late 2027.
In early August, he reversed course and said the camera-equipped AirPods could launch as soon as September. In that report, he clarified that there were two variants of the camera-equipped AirPods in the works, one with a B790 codename and one with a B798 codename. "Apple famously creates competing versions of the same product internally," he wrote.
In today's report, Gurman says the B790 product is a version of the AirPods Pro 3 with cameras, while the B798 model is a new generation of AirPods Pro with cameras. The B790 AirPods were shown off in the video, which featured a man holding a book up to the AirPods so Siri could read the title and save it for later.
The B790 model was apparently "on the 2026 road map until recently," but Apple no longer plans to release it.
The AirPods planned for 2027 will include low-resolution cameras that feed information to Siri AI for Visual Intelligence features as demonstrated in the video. The AirPods cameras will not be able to capture photos and videos.
Apple could launch the new AirPods in fall 2027 alongside the 20th-anniversary iPhone.
