Apple seeded the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate on Monday and left a finished demo video inside it for AirPods it has never announced. A man holds a book up so the camera in the earbuds can see the title, and the voiceover copy reads "With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later". Visual Intelligence is the Apple feature that looks at what a camera sees and answers questions about it. The buds get their own setup screen for it. They also get a warning for the obvious problem with putting a camera in an earbud: "To get the most accurate information about things in your environment, make sure AirPods are not covered".
The same build holds MacRumors' full run of unreleased codenames, a wall-mounted home hub through to the foldable iPhone Ultra, and two of them are camera AirPods. B790 is the pair in the demo. B798 is the 2027 model earlier reporting pointed at. One line in that code is not marketing copy: "B790 start image stream failed for left bud." Updated 20 August: this piece originally said B790 could arrive as soon as September, which was the state of the reporting on 18 August. Mark Gurman has since put the camera AirPods off Apple's 2026 release schedule, with 2027 the expectation.