Apple Just Leaked Its Own Camera-Equipped AirPods — a Demo Video Shipped Inside macOS 26.7
A demo video found in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate shows AirPods with a built-in camera feeding Visual Intelligence. A system file labels them 'AirPods Pro' — and the software looks launch-ready.
Apple confirmed its camera-equipped AirPods by accident. A demo video buried in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate, surfaced by MacRumors on August 17, shows the earbuds in action: a person holds a book up toward the AirPods camera while a voiceover explains, “With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later.”
That single file ends months of speculation. The product — codenamed B790 — is real, and the software around it looks mature enough to ship.
What the leak shows
The camera feeds low-resolution imagery to Visual Intelligence, Apple’s scene-understanding layer for Siri. The assistant can answer questions about what the wearer is looking at and log things for later. The system even handles edge cases: users get a notification if their hair covers the AirPods, because a blocked camera can’t read the environment.
This is Apple’s answer to the AI-wearable wave — always-available visual context without strapping a display to your face. Where Meta put cameras in glasses, Apple is putting them in the product it already sells by the hundreds of millions.
”AirPods Pro,” not “AirPods Ultra”
A day after the video surfaced, MacRumors found a second clue: a macOS Tahoe 26.7 system file references the new earbuds as “AirPods Pro.” Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman had previously reported Apple considered an “AirPods Ultra” tier to justify a higher price. The “Pro” label suggests the camera folds into the existing premium line instead — which matters for pricing, since the current AirPods Pro 3 sit at $249. A separate Ultra tier would have signaled something meaningfully more expensive.
The timeline just moved up
Gurman’s earlier reporting had camera AirPods slipping to September 2027, blamed on delays in Siri’s AI overhaul. But shipping a polished demo video and final-sounding product name inside a current macOS release candidate is not what a product a year away looks like. Gurman himself has since suggested a launch as soon as September, potentially alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and Apple’s foldable.
The unanswered question is privacy. A camera you wear in your ears, pointed wherever you look, will need visible recording indicators and tight on-device processing to avoid the backlash that met Google Glass. Apple has said nothing yet — because officially, this product doesn’t exist. Its own software says otherwise.