If you thought pervert glasses weren’t bad enough, Apple is taking it up a notch by adding cameras to its AirPods.

Apple is working on camera-equipped AirPods that appear to be nearly ready to launch, based on a video MacRumors found in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate.

In a short demo, a man holds a book up so the camera in the AirPods can see the title. “With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later,” says the voiceover text.

↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors

AirPods are tiny. I’ve seen people use them at the gym. I’ve seen them on playgrounds. I’ve seen them around swimming pools. People use them at the beach. They’re used at schools. In locker rooms. Tiny cameras in tiny AirPods that can photograph anything in front of the user are a pervert’s wet dream. Abusers are going to love this. Why wear bulky glasses anyone can see and try to demand you take off, when you can wear tiny AirPods that have already been fully normalised in society? Was there not a single woman or parent on the team that made this?

All over the United States, people are destroying Flock surveillance cameras. More and more communities are rising up and demanding these things removed from their streets and neighbourhoods. The awareness of just how pervasive mass government surveillance has become is growing, and Silicon Valley’s complicity is not exactly a secret. And in this climate of rapidly growing concern and anger, Apple is going to add tiny cameras to its tiny AirPods. Was there not a single person of colour or protester on the team that made this?

How detached from reality do you have to be to greenlight something like this? Does anyone – regardless of skin colour, gender, or political leaning – want even more cameras around them?

The Touch Bar arrived in 2016 seemingly already pre-doomed, on a generation of machines that had a “we’ve run out of ideas” smell all around them. The arrow keys were reshaped, the keyboard got a slimming down, and even the beloved MagSafe wasn’t, in fact, safe. All of these changes would prove unpopular and get reverted in time, and the axe would eventually come for the Touch Bar, too.

With an enormous benefit of hindsight, a decade after its arrival, and on the (rumored) eve of fully multitouch MacBooks, I wanted to look critically at the Touch Bar in more detail. I put a spicy title above this post, and while I’m not sure I can answer it in the affirmative, I feel I got surprisingly close to that.

↫ Marcin Wichary

I have never spent this much reading about and pondering a technology seemingly nobody liked and that I never really used. I still think there’s merit to the idea of screen on a keyboard, but only if the screens are integrated into the individual keys (as some products have tried over the years). Of course, this would also be astronomically expensive, delicate, and virtually impossible to repair, so I’m not sure something like that can be reasonably made at an affordable price.