Apple is planning three new "Ultra" products this year, per Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The foldable iPhone Ultra at around $2,000. A MacBook Ultra with an OLED touchscreen sitting above the M5 Pro and M5 Max. And AirPods Ultra with infrared cameras built in, priced above the $249 AirPods Pro.
The iPhone Ultra and MacBook Ultra are about Apple charging more for products you already understand. A foldable phone is still a phone. A touchscreen Mac is still a Mac. Bigger, more expensive, more experimental versions of categories Apple has owned for years.
The AirPods story is different because of where it picks up. AirPods Pro 3 already track your heart rate using a tiny infrared sensor that pulses 256 times per second to measure blood flow in your ear canal. They can track over 50 workout types in the Fitness app without an Apple Watch. The earbuds in your ears right now are already a health sensor.
AirPods Ultra would push that further. The cameras inside are not for taking photos. They are infrared cameras, the same kind of sensor that runs Face ID on your iPhone. Their job is to read your surroundings and feed that information to Siri, so the assistant can see what you are looking at the way Visual Intelligence already does on iPhone. Ming-Chi Kuo has also reported the cameras could enable in-air gesture control, so you could pinch or wave to control the earbuds without touching them.
What you would have on your head is earbuds that hear you, watch your pulse, see what you see, and respond to your hands. That is a wearable computer that happens to play music.
If AirPods Ultra ship this fall and Visual Intelligence works the way Apple wants it to, it may be the most interesting wearable Apple has ever shipped.