Apple's Camera AirPods Delayed to 2027 Despite Accidental Software Leak

Apple's push into AI-powered wearables is hitting the usual walls: supply chain bottlenecks, software that won't cooperate, and the simple fact that making something work in a lab is not the same as making it work at scale. The company's camera-equipped AirPods, originally slated to arrive in 2026, won't reach customers until 2027, according to people familiar with the product roadmap who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The earbuds represent Apple's latest bet on a category it helped define—wearables that sit close to the body and feed information directly to the user. These particular earbuds would do something new: they'd carry tiny cameras, low-resolution sensors designed not to record video or take photos, but to scan what's around you and feed that visual context to Siri and other AI tools. The feature is called Visual Intelligence, and it's meant to let the assistant understand your surroundings and act on them in real time. It's a logical extension of what Apple has been building, but it's also technically ambitious, and ambition has a cost.

The product had been moving forward. In spring of this year, Apple had advanced prototypes in the hands of employees for testing. By summer, the company was preparing to move into production. That's when things stalled. Supply chain problems—the perennial challenge of manufacturing at Apple's scale—combined with software issues that the company couldn't resolve quickly enough. The decision came down: push it to 2027 and get it right, rather than ship it broken or late.

Then, this week, someone made a mistake. A developer version of a Mac software update, the kind that's distributed to programmers building apps for Apple's ecosystem, accidentally included references to several unreleased products. Among them was a video of the camera AirPods in action. The video made its way to MacRumors, a site that covers Apple news obsessively, and suddenly the internet knew something Apple hadn't officially announced. The leak fueled speculation that the product might be coming sooner than expected, perhaps in time for Apple's September iPhone event. But Apple's position hasn't changed. The earbuds remain off the 2026 schedule. They're coming in 2027.

The company has been working on two versions of the product. One, code-named B790, is essentially a modified version of last year's AirPods Pro 3 with the new sensors and AI features bolted on. That's the version in the leaked video. The other, B798, is a ground-up redesign—a new generation of AirPods Pro that incorporates the cameras from the start. Both have been delayed.

Privacy has become a live issue. On social media, some people have expressed discomfort with the idea of Apple selling earbuds with cameras, even low-resolution ones. Some have taken to calling them "pervertpods," a crude shorthand for the fear that the devices could be used to record or photograph people without consent. Apple is acutely aware of this risk. The company has built its brand partly on privacy, positioning itself as the alternative to companies like Meta, which faced significant backlash over its smart glasses. Apple will need to be careful about how it frames these earbuds when they finally arrive—emphasizing what the cameras can't do as much as what they can.

The delay of the camera AirPods is just one piece of a much larger product calendar. If the earbuds do launch in 2027, they'll be joining a wave of new hardware: Apple's first smart glasses, a foldable iPhone, a smart home display with an AI-enhanced Siri, a MacBook with a touch screen, a smart home security camera, a robotic-arm version of the smart display, a new TV set-top box, an updated HomePod mini, refreshed Macs with faster processors, and new iPads. The releases are scheduled to roll out between this fall and the end of 2027. It's an ambitious slate, and it falls to a new chief executive, John Ternus, to deliver it. For now, the camera AirPods wait.