Apple spent years keeping its camera-equipped AirPods off the record. It took one routine security patch to give the game away.
Buried in the release candidate for macOS Tahoe 26.7 — a maintenance build Apple pushed out on August 17, mostly to close security holes — MacRumors found a short demonstration video for an unannounced product carrying the internal code name B790. In it, a man wearing what look like AirPods Pro with slightly thicker stems holds a book up in front of him. The earbuds read the cover.
“With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable,” the Siri voiceover says. “See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later.”
It is a few seconds of footage. It is also the clearest evidence yet that Apple intends to put machine vision on the most widely worn consumer device it makes.
What the leaked code actually shows
The release candidate contains more than the clip. MacRumors and 9to5Mac reported multiple references to B790 across the build, including code for an “image stream” and a setup flow for enabling Visual Intelligence on AirPods. Apple even wrote an alert for obstructed sensors. “To get the most accurate information about things in your environment, make sure AirPods are not covered,” it reads — the kind of message you write once you have decided that long hair, hats and hoods are a genuine engineering problem.
Aaron Perris, the MacRumors contributor who posted the clip on X, called it “your first look at AirPods with Cameras in action using Visual Intelligence.” That it came out of a signed Apple build matters: this was no supply-chain leak. Apple shipped the marketing asset itself, alongside references to more than ten other unreleased products.
The code points to sensors built for perception rather than photography — handing Siri a live, low-resolution view of the wearer’s surroundings and feeding it into Visual Intelligence, the recognition layer Apple currently runs through the iPhone camera. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has said the modules are infrared rather than conventional image sensors.
Two projects, one nearly finished
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple spent years developing camera AirPods under the code name B798, part of a broader AI wearables program that also covers smart glasses and a wearable pendant. That model slipped from 2026 to 2027. In his August 2 “Power On” newsletter, Gurman revealed that a second, separate project — B790 — had been progressing in parallel and was closer to production. Apple, he wrote, “famously creates competing versions of the same product internally.”
B790 is reportedly listed internally as a candidate to ship before year end, pointing squarely at Apple’s September iPhone event, where the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max and a foldable iPhone are expected.
None of this is confirmed. Apple has not announced, named, priced or dated the product, or said how the imagery is processed. What is confirmed is narrower but harder to explain away: Apple’s own shipping software contains a finished demo video, a setup flow and error copy for a device that does not officially exist. Gurman has reported Apple is weighing “AirPods Ultra” branding rather than AirPods Pro 4, partly because the hardware will cost more than the $249 AirPods Pro 3.
Why the ear may matter more than the face
The strategic logic here is about distribution, not optics. Meta has spent three years persuading people to wear a computer on their face, and it has worked better than skeptics expected — roughly 7 million Ray-Ban pairs moved in 2025, and Meta held 69.2 percent of the smart glasses market in Q1 2026, with IDC forecasting around 13.6 million smart glasses shipments this year. But that is a category still being built from zero.
Apple does not have to build the category. It already owns the form factor. AirPods sold roughly 80 million units in 2025, and Counterpoint Research expects cumulative AirPods revenue to cross $100 billion in 2026. In the first quarter of this year Apple took about 23 percent of global wireless earbud unit shipments and 44 percent of the revenue. If even a modest slice of that installed base upgrades, Apple ships more ambient-AI sensors in a quarter than the entire smart glasses industry does in a year.
That is the real threat to Meta, and the reason this leak is an AI story rather than an accessories story. Every assistant vendor has hit the same ceiling: the model is capable, but the user has to describe the world to it in text. Vision collapses that step. Whoever owns the sensor that sees what the user sees owns the context layer — and context, not raw model quality, is increasingly where assistants win.
It also creates a privacy problem Apple’s usual playbook does not solve. Apple’s architecture is built around protecting the person holding the device; here the exposed party is everyone else. Glasses announce themselves. Earbuds are socially invisible, and a bystander cannot tell whether the person across the café is listening to a podcast or streaming the room to a language model. The most-upvoted comment on the MacRumors story worried about AirPods being banned from gyms and locker rooms — a fear that would hit the 80 million-a-year business, not just the new model.
What to watch next
Three things at the September event, assuming B790 appears at all. Whether Apple includes a visible recording indicator; Meta learned that an LED is the minimum social contract here. Where the imagery is processed — on-device or through Private Cloud Compute — and whether anything is retained when you ask Siri to save something. And the name: AirPods Ultra rather than AirPods Pro 4 would signal Apple wants this priced as a new category, not a refresh.
If B790 does not ship next month, the leak still stands as the most concrete look yet at where Apple thinks AI hardware is going — not a screen, not a pendant, but a sensor already in a billion ears.
“With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later.”— Siri voiceover, Leaked Apple demo video, macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate