Apple CEO Tim Cook delivers remarks before the start of an Apple event at the Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, on Sept. 9, 2024.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
I tested the new hearing health features coming to Apple‘s AirPods Pro 2 headphones, and they saved me a long-overdue trip to the audiologist.
Apple unveiled the features during an event in September, and they will be publicly available through a free software update next week. Users can take a clinically validated hearing test with the AirPods Pro 2, and the buds will serve as an over-the-counter hearing aid if applicable. The headphones will also be equipped with new hearing protection capabilities, such as loud sound reduction, that are switched on by default.
More than 1.5 billion people are living with hearing loss, according to the World Health Organization. Tapping into this market could help Apple juice sales for the $249 AirPods Pro 2, which the company first launched two years ago.
If you already own the headphones, the hearing health features are worth exploring. They take just a few minutes to set up, and they’re easy to use from the comfort of your home. The AirPods Pro 2 are also a cost-effective option for those looking for assistive hearing technology. Other over-the-counter hearing aids can cost thousands of dollars without insurance, for instance.
Taking the hearing test
Kif Leswing/CNBC
I have a pair of third-generation AirPods that I use every day, but this was my first time trying the AirPods Pro 2. I took them straight out of the box, flipped open the lid to the charging case and paired them with an iPhone. After that, I popped them in my ears and prepared to take Apple’s hearing test.
During its event in September, Apple said 80% of adults in the U.S. have not had their hearing checked in the past five years. That’s certainly true in my case. The last time I remember getting my hearing tested was in elementary school.
Admittedly, I haven’t gone out of my way to protect my hearing, so I wasn’t sure what my results would look like. I felt a little nervous beforehand.
To access the test, you can go into the Health app or into the earbuds’ settings menu. I pulled it up, and it prompted me with a few basic questions about my age, my health and whether I’d been exposed to a loud environment in the past 24 hours.
You need to be in a very quiet space to take the test. Apple runs a background noise test to ensure your environment is suitable, and then it assesses the fit of your headphones within your ears. The AirPods Pro 2 come with medium-sized flexible ear tips attached, but there are extra small, small and large tip sizes included in the box. Apple sells a set of ear tips on its website for about $13 if you’ve misplaced yours.
I took the test in my apartment, and I didn’t need to adjust the fit of the headphones. I read the test’s instructions and then it was time to get started.
The hearing test plays a series of tones at different volumes and frequencies, and you tap the screen each time you hear a sound. It started with my left ear and moved to my right, and it took a little more than five minutes.
The hearing test was easy. There are some long pauses between tones, so I felt like I second-guessed myself occasionally. And Apple isn’t kidding about finding a quiet space to take this test. Some of the tones were so soft that I practically had to hold my breath to hear them. My test also automatically paused a few times as traffic passed by outside, so I’d recommend finding a room that’s as close to silent as possible.
You can take the test as many times as you want, and you’ll get your results as soon as you’re done. A copy is stored in the Health app, and you can share it with your doctor.
I learned that I have little to no hearing loss in both ears, though there are some frequencies that might be harder for me to pick up on. It’s nice to have that peace of mind.
Using your headphones as a hearing aid
Since I have minimal hearing loss, I was prompted to turn on a feature called “Media Assist,” which uses my hearing test results to adjust the clarity of my calls, music and videos based on my specific profile.
I had Media Assist enabled as I used the AirPods Pro 2 to FaceTime friends and family, watch CNBC and listen to different genres of music on Spotify. I didn’t hear much of a difference with music or TV, but I did notice that voices seemed amplified on my FaceTime calls. It’s a subtle change, but I found it helpful.
If your test results show you have mild to moderate hearing loss, you’ll be prompted to set up and use your headphones as a clinical-grade hearing aid. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Apple’s hearing aid software in September.
“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,” Dr. Sumbul Desai, Apple’s vice president of health, said in a prerecorded video last month.
The hearing aid feature is intended for adults with mild to moderate hearing loss, but users can turn it on in their settings even if they don’t fall under that category. Out of curiosity, I switched it on while walking around New York City, running errands, watching TV and chatting with my roommates.
The feature instantly amplified the world around me, and I joked that it felt like a superpower. It was easier for me to hear quiet dialogue on TV, and my conversations were magnified. Interestingly, I didn’t feel overwhelmed by the loud sounds of the city, which I suspect is due to the earbuds’ new hearing protection features.
Using a hearing aid can take some getting used to, so don’t worry if it doesn’t feel natural right away. You can also make specific adjustments to your liking in your settings and the iOS Control Center.
The hearing aid feature was cool to try, even if I don’t need to use it. It would be nice to switch it on in a crowded New York City restaurant, but otherwise, I got the support I needed from the Media Assist feature.
If you have mild to moderate hearing loss and are prompted to turn on the hearing aid feature, Media Assist will also be activated. Your AirPods Pro 2 will automatically adjust as you make calls, watch videos and listen to music across all your Apple devices.
Though I wasn’t the ideal candidate for the hearing aid, I’m excited to tell my parents and grandparents about it. Since the AirPods Pro 2 look like any other pair of Apple headphones, they’re less conspicuous than many existing hearing aids, which I expect will be an added perk for many users.
If the U.S. continues to impose AI semiconductor restrictions on China, then chipmaker Huawei will take advantage of its position in the world’s second-largest economy, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC Thursday.
“Our technology is a generation ahead of theirs,” Huang told CNBC at the sidelines of the Viva Technology conference in Paris.
However, he warned that: “If the United States doesn’t want to partake, participate in China, Huawei has got China covered, and Huawei has got everybody else covered.”
In the face of U.S. export curbs that restrict Chinese firms from buying advanced semiconductors used in the development of AI, Beijing has focused on nurturing domestic firms such as Huawei in a bid to build its own AI chip ecosystem.
Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei this week told the People’s Daily Newspaper of the governing Communist party that Huawei’s single chip is still behind the U.S. by a generation.
“The United States has exaggerated Huawei’s achievements. Huawei is not that great. We have to work hard to reach their evaluation,” Ren said in comments reported by Reuters.
This is a developing news story and will be updated shortly.
Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., left, and Emmanuel Macron, France’s president at the 2025 VivaTech conference in Paris, France, on Wednesday, June 11, 2025.
Nathan Laine | Bloomberg | Getty Images
French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday made a pitch for his country to manufacture the most advanced chips in the world, in a bid to position itself as a critical tech hub in Europe.
The comments come as European tech companies and countries are reassessing their reliance on foreign technology firms for critical technology and infrastructure.
Chipmaking in particular arose as a topic after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who was doing a panel talk alongside Macron and Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch, said on Wednesday that the company’s first graphics processing unit (GPU) was manufactured in France by SGS Thomson Microelectronics, now known as STMicroelectronics.
Yet STMicroelectronics is currently not at the leading edge of semiconductor manufacturing. Most of the chips it makes are for industries like the automotive one, which don’t required the most cutting-edge semiconductors.
Macron nevertheless laid his ambition out for France to be able to manufacture semiconductors in the range of 2 nanometers to 10 nanometers.
“If we want to consolidate our industry, we have now to get more and more of the chips at the right scale,” Macron said on Wednesday.
The smaller the nanometer number, the more transistors that can be fit into a chip, leading to a more powerful semiconductor. Apple’s latest iPhone chips, for instance, are based on 3 nanometer technology.
Very few companies are able to manufacture chips at this level and on a large scale, with Samsung and Nvidia provider Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) leading the pack.
If France wants to produce these cutting-edge chips, it will likely need TSMC or Samsung to build a factory locally — something that has been happening in the U.S. TSMC has now committed billions of dollars to build more factories Stateside.
Macron touted a deal between Thales, Radiall and Taiwan’s Foxconn, which are exploring setting up a semiconductor assembly and test facility in France.
One key partnership announced by Huang is between Nvidia and French AI model firm Mistral to build a so-called “AI cloud.”
France has looked to build out its AI infrastructure and Macron in February said that the country’s AI sector would receive 109 billion euros ($125.6 billion) in private investments in the coming years. Macron touted the Nvidia and Mistral deal as an extension of France’s AI buildout.
“We are deepening them [investments] and we are accelerating. And what Mistral AI and Nvidia announced this morning is a game-changer as well,” Macron told CNBC on Wednesday.
With the U.S. restricting China from buying advanced semiconductors used in artificial intelligence development, Beijing is placing hopes on domestic alternatives such as Huawei.
The task has been made more challenging by the fact that U.S. curbs not only inhibit China’s access to the world’s most advanced chips, but also restrict availing technology vital for creating an AI chip ecosystem.
Those constraints span the entire semiconductor value chain, ranging from design and manufacturing equipment used to produce AI chips to supporting elements such as memory chips.
Beijing has mobilized tens of billions of dollars to try to fill those gaps, but while it has been able to “brute force” its way into some breakthroughs, it still has a long way to go, according to experts.
“U.S. export controls on advanced Nvidia AI chips have incentivized China’s industry to develop alternatives, while also making it more difficult for domestic firms to do so,” said Paul Triolo, partner and senior vice president for China at advisory firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group.
Here’s how China stacks up against the rest of the world in four key segments needed to build AI chips.
AI chip design
Nvidia is regarded as the world’s leading AI chip company, but it’s important to understand that it doesn’t actually manufacture the physical chips that are used for AI training and computing.
Rather, the company designs AI chips, or more precisely, graphics processing units. Orders of the company’s patented GPU designs are then sent to chip foundries — manufacturers that specialize in the mass production of other companies’ semiconductor products.
While American competitors such as AMD and Broadcom offer varying alternatives, GPU designs from Nvidia are widely recognized as the industry standard. The demand for Nvidia chips is so strong that Chinese customers have continued to buy any of the company’s chips they can get their hands on.
But Nvidia is grappling with Washington’s tightening restrictions. The company revealed in April that additional curbs had prevented it from selling its H20 processor to Chinese clients.
Nvidia’s H20 was a less sophisticated version of its H100 processor, designed specifically to skirt previous export controls. Nevertheless, experts say, it was still more advanced than anything available domestically. But China hopes to change that.
In response to restrictions, more Chinese semiconductor players have been entering the AI processor arena. They’ve included a wide array of upstarts, such as Enflame Technology and Biren Technology, seeking to soak up billions of dollars in GPU demand left by Nvidia.
But no Chinese firm appears closer to providing a true alternative to Nvidia than Huawei’s chip design arm, HiSilicon.
Huawei’s most advanced GPU in mass production is its Ascend 910B. The next-generation Ascend 910C was reportedly expected to begin mass shipments as early as May, though no updates have emerged.
Dylan Patel, founder, CEO and chief analyst at SemiAnalysis, told CNBC that while the Ascend chips remain behind Nvidia, they show that Huawei has been making significant progress.
“Compared to Nvidia’s export-restricted chips, the performance gap between Huawei and the H20 is less than a full generation. Huawei is not far behind the products Nvidia is permitted to sell into China,” Patel said.
He added that the 910B was two years behind Nvidia as of last year, while the Ascend 910C is only a year behind.
But while that suggests China’s GPU design capabilities have made great strides, design is just one aspect that stands in the way of creating a competitive AI chip ecosystem.
AI chip fabrication
To manufacture its GPUs, Nvidia relies on TSMC, the world’s largest contract chip foundry, which produces most of the world’s advanced chips.
TSMC complies with U.S. chip controls and is also barred from taking any chip orders from companies on the U.S. trade blacklist. Huawei was placed on the list in 2019.
That has led to Chinese chip designers like Huawei to enlist local chip foundries, the largest of which is SMIC.
SMIC is far behind TSMC — it’s officially known to be able to produce 7-nanometer chips, requiring less advance tech than TSMC’s 3-nanometer production. Smaller nanometer sizes lead to greater chip processing power and efficiency.
There are signs that SMIC has made progress. The company is suspected to have been behind a 5-nanometer 5G chip for Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro, which had rocked confidence in U.S. chip controls in 2023. The company, however, has a long way to go before it can mass-produce advanced GPUs in a cost-efficient manner.
According to independent chip and technology analyst Ray Wang, SMIC’s known operation capacity is dwarfed by TSMC’s.
“Huawei is a very good chip design company, but they are still without good domestic chipmakers,” Wang said, noting that Huawei is reportedly working on its own fabrication capabilities.
But the lack of key manufacturing equipment stands in the way of both companies.
Advanced Chip equipment
SMIC’s ability to fulfill Huawei’s GPU requirements is limited by the familiar problem of export controls, but in this case, from the Netherlands.
While Netherlands may not have any prominent semiconductor designers or manufacturers, it’s home to ASML, the world’s leading supplier of advanced chipmaking equipment — machines that use light or electron beams to transfer complex patterns onto silicon wafers, forming the basis of microchips.
In accordance with U.S. export controls, the country has agreed to block the sale of ASML’s most advanced ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines. The tools are critical to making advanced GPUs at scale and cost-effectively.
EUV is the most significant barrier for Chinese advanced chip production, according to Jeff Koch, an analyst at SemiAnalysis. “They have most of the other tooling available, but lithography is limiting their ability to scale towards 3nm and below process nodes,” he told CNBC.
SMIC has found methods to work around lithography restrictions using ASML’s less advanced deep ultraviolet lithography systems, which have seen comparatively fewer restrictions.
Through this “brute forcing,” producing chips at 7 nm is doable, but the yields are not good, and the strategy is likely reaching its limit, Koch said, adding that “at current yields it appears SMIC cannot produce enough domestic accelerators to meet demand.”
SiCarrier Technologies, a Chinese company working on lithography technology, has reportedly been linked to Huawei.
But imitating existing lithography tools could take years, if not decades, to achieve, Koch said. Instead, China is likely to pursue other technologies and different lithography techniques to push innovation rather than imitation, he added.
AI memory components
While GPUs are often identified as the most critical components in AI computing, they’re far from the only ones. In order to operate AI training and computing, GPUs must work alongside memory chips, which are able to store data within a broader “chipset.”
In AI applications, a specific type of memory known as HBM has become the industry standard. South Korea’s SK Hynix has taken the industry lead in HBM. Other companies in the field include Samsung and U.S.-based Micron.
“High bandwidth memory at this stage of AI progression has become essential for training and running AI models,” said analyst Wang.
As with the Netherlands, South Korea is cooperating with U.S.-led chip restrictions and began complying with fresh curbs on the sale of certain HBM memory chips to China in December.
In response, Chinese memory chip maker ChangXin Memory Technologies, or CXMT, in partnership with chip-packaging and testing company Tongfu Microelectronics, is in the early stages of producing HBM, according to a report by Reuters.
According to Wang, CXMT is expected to be three to four years behind global leaders in HBM development, though it faces major roadblocks, including export controls on chipmaking equipment.
SemiAnalysis estimated in April that CXMT remained a year away from ramping any reasonable volume.
Chinese foundry Wuhan Xinxin Semiconductor Manufacturing is reportedly building a factory to produce HBM wafers. A report from SCMP said that Huawei Technologies had partnered with the firm in producing HBM chips, although the companies did not confirm the partnership.
Huawei has leaned on HBM stockpiles from suppliers like Samsung for use in their Ascend 910C AI processor, SemiAnalysis said in an April report, noting that while the chip was designed domestically, it still relies on foreign products obtained prior to or despite restrictions.
“Whether it be HBM from Samsung, wafers from TSMC, or equipment from America, Netherlands, and Japan, there is a big reliance on foreign industry,” SemiAnalysis said.
