Photo: Ignacio R
By: Nick Gambino
We expected an announcement on the next-gen Airpods Pro at the last WWDC in June, but alas they opted to push it for a later hardware-centric event. Said event should occur sometime in September or October, though there is no official announcement.
Until then, we’ll have to speculate on what we’ll get with the AirPods Pro 2. We’ve been rocking the original Pros for almost three years which, in the world of tech, might as well be thirty. Plenty of rumors have been flying around about what we may or may not see, so we thought we’d round them up here.
Heart Rate Sensor is out
One of the biggest rumors was the integration of health monitoring into the souped-up earbuds. Plenty of outlets were reporting that Apple was looking to insert a heart rate sensor into the AirPods Pro 2. The idea was that they would be able to measure from within the ear, giving an accurate reading. An additional rumor suggested they would even be able to monitor your body temperature.
Now, Mark Gurman of Bloomberg is quashing both rumors. He doesn’t outright say we’ll never get these integrations but that they’re not going to happen in the next AirPods Pro iteration.
“Over the past few months, there have been rumors about this year’s model gaining the ability to determine a wearer’s heart rate or body temperature,” Gurman said in the Power On newsletter. “I’m told that neither feature is likely to arrive in the 2022 upgrade, though both enhancements have been explored inside the company and could arrive one day.”
Rumors still hanging on
While Gurman has dashed our hopes of any sort of Health integration, we can still expect to see a new version of the AirPods Pro this fall. Even Gurman expects it.
If that’s the case, then we should get cool new additions to the high-end earbuds, including fast charging, hearing aid functions, a longer-lasting battery, and possibly a USB-C charging port to more closely align with other Apple products.
As always, when it comes to rumors, you have to take it all with a grain of salt. Even if there is truth to the rumor, Apple could choose to pivot at the last moment, leaving us holding the empty hope bag.
All that said, I hope we see new and improved AirPods Pro before the year’s out because we’re coming to the end of life for a lot of users who bought them way back in 2019.
