Apple CEO Tim Cook delivers remarks before the start of an Apple event at the Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, on Sept. 9, 2024.
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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.
Bluesky has surged in popularity since the presidential election earlier this month, suddenly becoming a competitor to Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Threads. But CEO Jay Graber has some cautionary words for potential acquirers: Bluesky is “billionaire proof.”
In an interview on Thursday with CNBC’s “Money Movers,” Graber said Bluesky’s open design is intended to give users the option of leaving the service with all of their followers, which could thwart potential acquisition efforts.
“The billionaire proof is in the way everything is designed, and so if someone bought or if the Bluesky company went down, everything is open source,” Graber said. “What happened to Twitter couldn’t happen to us in the same ways, because you would always have the option to immediately move without having to start over.”
Graber was referring to the way millions of users left Twitter, now X, after Musk purchased the company in 2022. Bluesky now has over 21 million users, still dwarfed by X and Threads, which Facebook’s parent debuted in July 2023.
X and Meta didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Threads has roughly 275 million monthly users, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in October. Although Musk said in May that X has 600 million monthly users, market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimates 318 million monthly users as of October.
Bluesky was created in 2019 as an internal Twitter project during Jack Dorsey’s second stint as CEO, and became an independent public benefit corporation in 2022. In May of this year, Dorsey said he is no longer a member of Bluesky’s board.
“In 2019, Jack had a vision for something better for social media, and so that’s why he chose me to build this, and we’re really thankful for him for setting this up, and we’ve continued to carry this out,” said Graber, who previously founded Happening, a social network focused on events. “We’re building an open-source social network that anyone can take into their own hands and build on, and it’s something that is radically different from anything that’s been done in social media before. Nobody’s been this open, this transparent and put this much control in the users hands.”
Part of Bluesky’s business plan involves offering subscriptions that would let users access special features, Graber noted. She also said that Bluesky will add more services for third-party coders as part of the startup’s “developer ecosystem.”
Graber said Bluesky has ruled out the possibility of letting advertisers send algorithmically recommended ads to users.
“There’s a lot on the road map, and I’ll tell you what we’re not going to do for monetization,” Graber said. “We’re not going to build an algorithm that just shoves ads at you, locking users in. That’s not our model.”
Bluesky has previously experienced major growth spurts. In September, it added 2 million users following X’s suspension in Brazil over content moderation policy violations in the country and related legal matters.
In October, Bluesky announced that it raised $15 million in a funding round led by Blockchain Capital. The company has raised a total of $36 million, according to Pitchbook.
Alphabet shares slid 6% Thursday, following news that the Department of Justice is calling for Google to divest its Chrome browser to put an end to its search monopoly.
The proposed break-up would, according to the DOJ in its Wednesday filing, “permanently stop Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet.”
This development is the latest in a years-long, bipartisan antitrust case that found in an August ruling that the search giant held an illegal monopoly in both search and text advertising, violating Section 2 of the Sherman Act.
The potential break-up would include preventing Google from entering into exclusionary agreements with competitors like Apple and Samsung, part of a set of remedies that would last 10 years.
POLAND – 2024/11/13: In this photo illustration, the NVIDIA company logo is seen displayed on a smartphone screen. (Photo Illustration by Piotr Swat/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Nvidia shares dropped in U.S. premarket trading Thursday after the tech giant’s third-quarter earnings failed to impress investors.
Shares of the chipmaker slumped 3.21% at around 5:03 a.m. ET, following the Wednesday release of Nvidia’s quarterly results, which beat on both the top and bottom lines.
Revenue came in at $35.08 billion, up 94% year-on-year and exceeding the $33.16 billion forecast by LSEG analysts. Earnings per share was 81 cents adjusted, also above analyst expectations.
Other chipmakers fell on the back of the market reaction to Nvidia’s third-quarter results. Shares of Intel, Qualcomm and Micron Technology all lost 1% or more in value, while AMD declined 0.6%.
The slump in Nvidia also had a knock-on effect on European semiconductor firms. ASML, a key chip equipment supplier, dropped 0.9%, while compatriot Dutch chip firm ASMI fell 0.5%. Chipmakers BE Semiconductor, STMicroelectronics and Infineon slipped 0.8%, 0.7 and 0.6%, respectively.
Several notable chip names were also in negative territory in Asia. TSMC, which makes Nvidia’s high-performance graphics processing units, eased as much as 1.5%. Contract electronics manufacturer Foxconn dropped 1.9%.
Why are Nvidia shares falling?
Nvidia has largely cornered the market for the high-powered chips powering the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Despite nearly doubling sales year-on-year, Nvidia’s third-quarter results showed a slowdown from previous quarters. Nvidia previously reported growth of 122% in the second quarter, 262% in the first quarter, and 265% in the fourth quarter of 2023.
Derren Nathan, head of equity research at Hargreaves Lansdown, said in emailed comments Wednesday that the dip in Nvidia’s share price “suggests even outstanding isn’t enough for some investors,” adding that he expects the stock to bounce back once markets open.
“NVIDIA’s generated stellar gains for shareholders over many years now, and right now it’s pretty hard to see any major holes in the investment case,” Nathan added.
Analysts are looking ahead to the much-anticipated launch of Nvidia’s next-generation chip called Blackwell. On the firm’s earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang said that demand for the chip is exceeding supply.
