iOS 18.1, out today, brings a “clinical-grade” hearing test to the iPhone.
In a fit of funny but fortuitous timing, Apple flipped the proverbial switch on iOS 18.1 and its brethren point updates mere minutes after I published my piece on Apple Intelligence earlier this morning. In doing so, the company also pushed out a new support document detailing where in the world the AirPods Pro’s hearing health features are available. As I reported last week, today’s iOS update is equally significant as it brings the much-ballyhooed hearing aid functionality.
It’s a big week if you live and breathe by accessibility in Apple devices.
The bulk of Apple’s knowledge base article is nothing more than a choose-your-adventure cavalcade of countries. The hearing aid feature, and its commensurate baked-in hearing test, is available in a far greater number of worldwide locales than the hearing protection feature. To wit, Apple writes some of the hearing health features “are not currently available in every region,” adding that the hearing aid function is available “on AirPods Pro 2 with the latest firmware paired with a compatible iPhone or iPad with iOS 18 or iPadOS 18 and later and are intended for people 18 years old or older.” Of particular note, the company further says the hearing aid feature is also compatible with Macs running macOS Sequoia 15.1 and later. This is a detail I was unaware of until now, so I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that sentence. Even more notable is how Apple yet again emphasizes that the hearing aid feature is meant only for people who cope with what the company describes as “perceived mild-to-moderate hearing loss.”
An important detail I’ll reemphasize is AirPods Pro 2 have sported both Lightning and USB-C ports—not at once, obviously—on their respective charging case. I mentioned this in a follow-up piece to my initial reporting last week, but the current AirPods Pro equipped with USB-C didn’t ship until last year. Ipso facto, the previous version of AirPods Pro, which itself debuted in 2019, shipped for several years with Lightning. The mistake in my reporting stemmed from a place of confusion, as I fell under the false premise that AirPods Pro 2 were synonymous with the newer USB-C port. As I’ve been reliably informed in recent days, that isn’t the case. AirPods Pro 2 has seen both ports.
Like Apple Intelligence’s advent bringing with it new forms of accessible productivity for disabled people interested in the new technologies, the hearing health features in iOS 18.1 push the value proposition for AirPods Pro into the stratosphere—all the while destroying the stigma around hearing loss and wearing hearing aids. It’s with it to reiterate how hugely consequential AirPods hearing aids are; people who’ve heretofore been trepidatious, if not downright dead set against, traditional hearing aids can now use the same, culturally captivating set of earbuds they use to listen to music, podcasts, and other forms of audio. That sort of having their cake and eating it too is, again, non-trivial if the goal is to (finally) address one’s problems with hearing.
