Soon, people with AirPods in their ears might not be drowning you out — they might be wearing them to hear you better.
Apple announced on Monday that its AirPods Pro 2 headphones will become an FDA-cleared hearing aid in the coming weeks through a software update. That means that adults with mild or moderate hearing loss — about 30 million Americans, according to the Food and Drug Administration — will be able to use Apple earphones to amplify specific sounds they want to hear better.
“After you take a hearing test, your AirPods Pro are transformed into a personalized hearing aid, boosting the specific sounds you need in real time, like parts of speech, or elements within your environment,” Apple’s vice president of health, Sumbul Desai, said in the feature’s launch video.
The announcement is the latest example of Apple’s strategy to break into the health industry, a potential $15 trillion market by the year 2030, according to RBC Capital Markets. Apple CEO Tim Cook has highlighted health features as the company’s “most important contribution to mankind.”
That strategy includes developing FDA-cleared features for its wearable products and replacing what are often more expensive purpose-built medical devices. Since 2020, Apple has added a notification service for irregular heartbeats, an atrial fibrillation reader and an electrocardiogram reader to its Apple Watch, according to FDA filings.
The new feature is a free software update for some AirPods models and will be included with Apple’s $249 AirPods Pro 2.
Many over-the-counter hearing aids are much more expensive, according to buyers guides cited by the Hearing Loss Association of America, an advocacy group. While some OTC hearing aids cost as little as $99, most range from $799 into the thousands of dollars.
“What is really cool about Apple now saying their AirPods can be over-the-counter hearing aids, is we’re seeing that technology innovation at a price point and in a product that’s very mainstream,” said Barbara Kelley, executive director of the Hearing Loss Association of America.
Apple is trying to jump-start AirPods sales after a few soft years.
The company doesn’t break out AirPods stats individually, but its Wearables category declined 2% annually for the most recent quarter that sales are available. Analysts say that adding health features like a hearing aid expands the market for the device, which could help sales.
“The hearing aid piece is a very specific use case,” said Deepwater Asset Management founder Gene Munster, who estimates that AirPods account for about 5% of Apple’s total revenue. “It does open it up to a different market.”
How it works
Apple’s hearing health experience requires a pair of Apple’s AirPods Pro headphones and an iPhone.
The company has built a hearing test into its devices inside the Settings app. After the program checks to make sure the headphones fit the user’s ears correctly, it plays a series of tones over about five minutes. The user has to tap the screen when or if they hear a tone.
This creates a profile of various frequencies and volume settings that the user may have trouble hearing, which are stored in the Health app. That profile can be applied to turn the AirPods Pro into personalized hearing aids.
Apple said that the test was scientifically valid and based on data it collected from its noise detection apps and a study with 160,000 participants that started in 2019.
In a promotional video, Apple showed a mom putting in AirPods to better hear her son on her birthday.
Over the counter
Apple’s launch has been boosted by a recent regulatory change.
Previously, all hearing aids required a prescription after testing from a licensed audiologist. In 2022, the FDA opened up the market to over-the-counter hearing aids that were significantly cheaper due to the use of audio testing software or at-home fittings.
However, Apple’s AirPods won’t immediately make other hearing aids obsolete.
Among its limitations are the battery, which lasts six hours. That’s not enough for the kind of all-day wear that some OTC hearing aids can manage.
Also, the AirPods Pro are only for those with mild or moderate hearing loss, meaning people who have trouble making out speech in noisy settings. Anyone with “severe” or “profound” hearing loss still needs to see a licensed audiologist, experts said.
Additionally, Apple’s hearing aids still need FDA clearance.
Devices that use technology or software to customize hearing aid fit or settings require premarket clearance from the agency, an FDA press officer told CNBC. Apple is awaiting FDA clearance as well as clearance from regulators around the world, the company said Monday.
Bridget Dobyan, executive director of the Hearing Industries Association, said that she welcomed Apple’s entrance into the market to increase awareness of hearing health, but there are still many hearing loss situations that require a doctor-based approach.
“OTC hearing aids may be suitable for adults with mild to moderate hearing loss, but seeing a licensed hearing care professional can also help determine unique hearing health needs,” Dobyan said.
It’s not uncommon for Apple’s foray into health to draw criticism from incumbents who say the tech company’s features aren’t a replacement for actual medical devices.
For example, Joe Kiani, CEO of Masimo, a medical device company that is currently in litigation with Apple over intellectual property and trade practices, said earlier this year that the Apple Watch’s pulse oximeter feature was “masquerading” as “a reliable, medical pulse oximeter.”
After a legal victory over patents, Masimo forced Apple in January to turn off the pulse oximeter on newly sold Apple Watch devices.
Microsoft owns lots of Nvidia graphics processing units, but it isn’t using them to develop state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.
There are good reasons for that position, Mustafa Suleyman, the company’s CEO of AI, told CNBC’s Steve Kovach in an interview on Friday. Waiting to build models that are “three or six months behind” offers several advantages, including lower costs and the ability to concentrate on specific use cases, Suleyman said.
It’s “cheaper to give a specific answer once you’ve waited for the first three or six months for the frontier to go first. We call that off-frontier,” he said. “That’s actually our strategy, is to really play a very tight second, given the capital-intensiveness of these models.”
Suleyman made a name for himself as a co-founder of DeepMind, the AI lab that Google bought in 2014, reportedly for $400 million to $650 million. Suleyman arrived at Microsoft last year alongside other employees of the startup Inflection, where he had been CEO.
More than ever, Microsoft counts on relationships with other companies to grow.
It gets AI models from San Francisco startup OpenAI and supplemental computing power from newly public CoreWeave in New Jersey. Microsoft has repeatedly enriched Bing, Windows and other products with OpenAI’s latest systems for writing human-like language and generating images.
Microsoft’s Copilot will gain “memory” to retain key facts about people who repeatedly use the assistant, Suleyman said Friday at an event in Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to commemorate the company’s 50th birthday. That feature came first to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has 500 million weekly users.
Through ChatGPT, people can access top-flight large language models such as the o1 reasoning model that takes time before spitting out an answer. OpenAI introduced that capability in September — only weeks later did Microsoft bring a similar capability called Think Deeper to Copilot.
Microsoft occasionally releases open-source small-language models that can run on PCs. They don’t require powerful server GPUs, making them different from OpenAI’s o1.
OpenAI and Microsoft have held a tight relationship shortly after the startup launched its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, effectively kicking off the generative AI race. In total, Microsoft has invested $13.75 billion in the startup, but more recently, fissures in the relationship between the two companies have begun to show.
Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors in July 2024, and OpenAI in January announced that it was working with rival cloud provider Oracle on the $500 billion Stargate project. That came after years of OpenAI exclusively relying on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Despite OpenAI partnering with Oracle, Microsoft in a blog post announced that the startup had “recently made a new, large Azure commitment.”
“Look, it’s absolutely mission-critical that long-term, we are able to do AI self-sufficiently at Microsoft,” Suleyman said. “At the same time, I think about these things over five and 10 year periods. You know, until 2030 at least, we are deeply partnered with OpenAI, who have [had an] enormously successful relationship for us.
Microsoft is focused on building its own AI internally, but the company is not pushing itself to build the most cutting-edge models, Suleyman said.
“We have an incredibly strong AI team, huge amounts of compute, and it’s very important to us that, you know, maybe we don’t develop the absolute frontier, the best model in the world first,” he said. “That’s very, very expensive to do and unnecessary to cause that duplication.”
President Trump’s new tariffs on goods that the U.S. imports from over 100 countries will have an effect on consumers, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told CNBC on Friday. Investors will feel the pain, too.
Microsoft’s stock dropped almost 6% in the past two days, as the Nasdaq wrapped up its worst week in five years.
“As a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good,” Ballmer said, in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin that was tied to Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebration. “It creates opportunity to be a serious, long-term player.”
Ballmer was sandwiched in between Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and current CEO Satya Nadella for the interview.
“I took just enough economics in college — that tariffs are actually going to bring some turmoil,” said Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014. Gates, Microsoft’s first CEO, convinced Ballmer to join the company in 1980.
Gates, Ballmer and Nadella attended proceedings at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus on Friday to celebrate its first half-century.
Between the tariffs and weak quarterly revenue guidance announced in January, Microsoft’s stock is on track for its fifth straight month of declines, which would be the worst stretch since 2009. But the company remains a leader in the PC operating system and productivity software markets, and its partnership with startup OpenAI has led to gains in cloud computing.
“I think that disruption is very hard on people, and so the decision to do something for which disruption was inevitable, that needs a lot of popular support, and nobody could game theorize exactly who is going to do what in response,” Ballmer said, regarding the tariffs. “So, I think citizens really like stability a lot. And I hope people — individuals who will feel this, because people are feeling it, not just the stock market, people are going to feel it.”
Ballmer, who owns the Los Angeles Clippers, is among Microsoft’s biggest fans. He said he’s the company’s largest investor. In 2014, shortly after he bought the basketball team for $2 billion, he held over 333 million shares of the stock, according to a regulatory filing.
“I’m not going to probably have 50 more years on the planet,” he said. “But whatever minutes I have, I’m gonna be a large Microsoft shareholder.” He said there’s a bright future for computing, storage and intelligence. Microsoft launched the first Azure services while Ballmer was CEO.
Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that Microsoft, which pledged to spend $80 billion on AI-enabled data center infrastructure in the current fiscal year, has stopped discussions or pushed back the opening of facilities in the U.S. and abroad.
JPMorgan Chase’s chief economist, Bruce Kasman, said in a Thursday note that the chance of a global recession will be 60% if Trump’s tariffs kick in as described. His previous estimate was 40%.
“Fifty years from now, or 25 years from now, what is the one thing you can be guaranteed of, is the world needs more compute,” Nadella said. “So I want to keep those two thoughts and then take one step at a time, and then whatever are the geopolitical or economic shifts, we’ll adjust to it.”
Gates, who along with co-founder Paul Allen, sought to build a software company rather than sell both software and hardware, said he wasn’t sure what the economic effects of the tariffs will be. Today, most of Microsoft’s revenue comes from software. It also sells Surface PCs and Xbox consoles.
“So far, it’s just on goods, but you know, will it eventually be on services? Who knows?” said Gates, who reportedly donated around $50 million to a nonprofit that supported Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ losing campaign.
AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.
Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.
“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.
The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid.
“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.
AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.
Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.