Read the changelog. That's the lesson Apple apparently forgot before shipping macOS Tahoe 26.7 RC, which contained a short promotional video of camera-equipped AirPods in action — found and published by MacRumors and X user @aaronp613 before any official announcement.
The clip shows a man wearing the new AirPods holding up a book so that Visual Intelligence can read the cover. A Siri voice-over plays: 'With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later.' Subtle product marketing. Accidental, but effective.
The hardware itself looks like a slightly chunkier AirPods Pro 3 — thicker stems, same general silhouette. Bloomberg's Gurman had previously reported the cameras are designed to capture 'visual information in low resolution,' feeding Apple's AI features rather than snapping photos or video. Potential use cases include turn-by-turn directions and real-time answers about the wearer's surroundings. The demo video only shows the AirPods from the back, so the cameras and any indicator lights remain out of frame.
The internal codename for the new model is B790, per references found in Tahoe 26.7. Gurman has also reported on a separate camera AirPod model — B798 — expected in 2027, suggesting Apple has a longer roadmap here than a single product.
Here's the thing. The obvious competitive frame is Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses, which already do ambient visual AI and have already absorbed a round of 'pervert glasses' backlash. Apple's form factor is arguably stealthier — earbuds don't read as cameras the way glasses frames do — which cuts both ways on the privacy question. Gurman reports the AirPods may include some indicator of when the cameras are active, which would be, as Engadget noted, 'the minimum for such a wearable.'
With the demo already loose in a public beta, the camera AirPods are widely expected to appear at Apple's iPhone 18 event, anticipated in September alongside an improved version of Siri.
The demo is not the product — but it's close enough that Apple's PR team is probably having a very long Monday. What the leak does confirm is that Apple is serious about ambient AI hardware, and that the walled garden occasionally has gaps in the fence. Whether regulators, privacy advocates, or consumers decide that low-resolution always-on cameras in your ears require more than a blinking LED is a conversation Apple will now have to have on someone else's timeline, not its own.
