- Elon Musk praised Apple’s new hearing aid feature for AirPods.
- The FDA approved the feature as the first over-the-counter hearing aid software.
- Musk has previously been critical of Apple, including its partnership with ChatGPT.
Elon Musk, who has previously criticized Apple, appears to have been won over by one new feature.
Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday shared an advertisement for the company’s new hearing aid offering on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. It shows a hard-of-hearing father using the feature on the Apple AirPods Pro 2 to hear his daughter opening Christmas presents.
“This is cool,” Musk said about the ad on Friday. Musk also shared Cook’s Thanksgiving message on X, where he said he was thankful for “our team at Apple, our users, and all those dedicated to making the world a better place.”
The Tesla founder’s relationship with Apple has not always been so friendly. His beef with the tech giant started in 2015 when he joked in a German newspaper interview that Apple had employed Tesla’s rejects.
He stepped up the criticism again in June after Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI. Musk posted a series of statements on X denouncing Apple’s move to integrate ChatGPT as an opt-in feature across its software on iOS 18, calling it an “unacceptable security violation” and vowing to ban Apple products at his companies if the integration goes through.
Musk, whose Grok AI chatbot is a ChatGPT competitor and who was a cofounder of OpenAI, also mocked Apple’s foray into artificial-intelligence, posting that the company wasn’t “smart enough to make their own AI.”
“Don’t want it,” Musk wrote in a June response to a Tim Cook post promoting Apple Intelligence on X. “Either stop this creepy spyware or all Apple devices will be banned from the premises of my companies.”
More than 30 million Americans suffer from some degree of hearing loss, according to the FDA. The hearing aid feature on Apple’s AirPods Pro 2 lets users take a hearing test or use their own hearing test results from a healthcare professional to adjust sounds to match their hearing range when wearing the AirPods.
