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Apple AirPods Pro

Apple

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

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.

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AppLovin and Robinhood added to S&P 500

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AppLovin and Robinhood added to S&P 500

Robinhood finally wins spot in S&P 500

Shares of advertising technology company AppLovin and stock trading app Robinhood Markets each jumped about 7% in extended trading on Friday after S&P Global said the two will join the S&P 500 index.

The changes will go into effect before the beginning of trading on Sept. 22, S&P Global announced in a statement. AppLovin will replace MarketAxess Holdings, while Robinhood will take the place of Caesars Entertainment.

In March, short-seller Fuzzy Panda Research advised the committee for the large-cap U.S. index to keep AppLovin from becoming a constituent. AppLovin shares dropped 15% in December, when the committee picked Workday to join the S&P 500. Robinhood, for its part, saw shares slip 2% in June when it was excluded from a quarterly rebalancing of the index.

The S&P 500 already has a heavy concentration of large technology companies. Datadog and DoorDash entered earlier this year.

It’s normal for stocks to go up on news of their inclusion in a major index such as the S&P 500. Fund managers need to buy shares to reflect the updates.

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AppLovin and Robinhood both went public on Nasdaq in 2021.

Robinhood has been a favorite among retail investors who have bid up shares of meme stocks such as AMC Entertainment and GameStop.

AppLovin itself became a stock to watch, with shares gaining 278% in 2023 and over 700% in 2024. As of Friday’s close, the stock had gained only 51% so far in 2025. AppLovin’s software brings targeted ads to mobile apps and games.

Earlier this year, AppLovin offered to buy the U.S. TikTok business from China’s ByteDance. U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly extended the deadline for a sale, most recently in June.

At Robinhood’s annual general meeting in June, a shareholder asked Vlad Tenev, the company’s co-founder and CEO, if there were plans for getting into the S&P 500.

“It’s a difficult thing to plan for,” Tenev said. “I think it’s one of those things that hopefully happens.”

He said he believed the company was eligible.

Shares of MarketAxess, which specializes in fixed-income trading, have fallen 17% year to date, while shares of Caesars, which runs hotels and casinos, are down 21%.

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FTC commissioner questions status of Snap AI chatbot complaint: ‘People deserve answers’

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FTC commissioner questions status of Snap AI chatbot complaint: 'People deserve answers'

FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter on President Trump's latest attempt to fire her

U.S. Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter raised questions on Friday about the status of an artificial intelligence chatbot complaint against Snap that the agency referred to the Department of Justice earlier this year.

In January, the FTC announced that it would refer a non-public complaint regarding allegations that Snap’s My AI chatbot posed potential “risks and harms” to young users and said it would refer the suit to the DOJ “in the public interest.”

“We don’t know what has happened to that complaint,” Slaughter said on CNBC’s ‘The Exchange.” “The public does not know what has happened to that complaint, and that’s the kind of thing that I think people deserve answers on.”

Snap’s My AI chatbot, which debuted in 2023, is powered by large language models from OpenAI and Google and has drawn scrutiny for problematic responses.

The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Snap declined to comment.

Slaugther’s comments came a day after President Donald Trump held a White House dinner with several tech executives, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook.

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“The president is hosting Big Tech CEOs in the White House even as we’re reading about truly horrifying reports of chatbots engaging with small children,” she said.

Trump has been attempting to remove Slaughter from her FTC position, but earlier this week, U.S. appeals court allowed her to maintain her role.

On Thursday, the president asked the Supreme Court to allow him to fire her from the post.

FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, who was selected by Trump to lead the commission, publicly opposed the complaint against Snap in January, prior to succeeding Lina Khan at the helm.

At the time, he said he would “release a more detailed statement about this affront to the Constitution and the rule of law” if the DOJ were to eventually file a complaint.

WATCH: FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter on President Trump’s latest attempt to fire her.

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Google leads monster week for tech, pushing megacaps to combined $21 trillion in market cap

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Google leads monster week for tech, pushing megacaps to combined  trillion in market cap

Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai meets with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at Google for Startups in Warsaw, Poland, on February 13, 2025.

Klaudia Radecka | Nurphoto | Getty Images

From the courtroom to the boardroom, it was a big week for tech investors.

The resolution of Google’s antitrust case led to sharp rallies for Alphabet and Apple. Broadcom shareholders cheered a new $10 billion customer. And Tesla’s stock was buoyed by a freshly proposed pay package for CEO Elon Musk.

Add it up, and the U.S. tech industry’s eight trillion-dollar companies gained a combined $420 billion in market cap this week, lifting their total value to $21 trillion, despite a slide in Nvidia shares.

Those companies now account for roughly 36% of the S&P 500, a proportion so great by historical standards that Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices, told CNBC by email, “there are no comparisons.”

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There was a certain irony to this week’s gains.

Alphabet’s 9% jump on Wednesday was directly tied to the U.S. government effort to diminish the search giant’s market control, which was part of a years-long campaign to break up Big Tech. Since 2020, Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta have all been hit with antitrust allegations by the Department of Justice or Federal Trade Commission.

A year ago, Google lost to the DOJ, a result viewed by many as the most-significant antitrust decision for the tech industry since the case against Microsoft more than two decades earlier. But in the remedies ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said Google won’t be forced to sell its Chrome browser despite its loss in court and instead handed down a more limited punishment, including a requirement to share search data with competitors.

The decision lifted Apple along with Alphabet, because the companies can stick with an arrangement that involves Google paying Apple billions of dollars per year to be the default search engine on iPhones. Alphabet rose more than 10% for the week and Apple added 3.2%, helping boost the Nasdaq 1.1%.

Analysts at Wedbush Securities wrote in a note after the decision that the ruling “removed a huge overhang” on Google’s stock and a “black cloud worry” that hung over Apple. Further, they said it clears the path for the companies to pursue a bigger artificial intelligence deal involving Gemini, Google’s AI models.

“This now lays the groundwork for Apple to continue its deal and ultimately likely double down on more AI related partnerships with Google Gemini down the road,” the analysts wrote.

Mehta explained that a major factor in his decision was the emergence of generative AI, which has become a much more competitive market than traditional search and has dramatically changed the market dynamics.

New players like OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity have altered Google’s dominance, Mehta said, noting that generative AI technologies “may yet prove to be game changers.”

On Friday, Alphabet investors shrugged off a separate antitrust matter out of Europe. The company was hit with a 2.95-billion-euro ($3.45 billion) fine from European Union regulators for anti-competitive practices in its advertising technology business.

Broadcom pops

Broadcom shares spike briefly on Q4 beat

While OpenAI was an indirect catalyst for Google and Apple this week, it was more directly tied to the huge rally in Broadcom’s stock.

Following Broadcom’s better-than-expected earnings report on Thursday, CEO Hock Tan told analysts that his chipmaker had secured a $10 billion contract with a new customer, which would be the company’s fourth large AI client.

Several analysts said the new customer is OpenAI, and the Financial Times reported on a partnership between the two companies.

Broadcom is the newest entrant into the trillion-dollar club, thanks to the company’s custom chips for AI, already used by Google, Meta and TikTok parent ByteDance. With Its 13% jump this week, the stock is now up 120% in the past year, lifting Broadcom’s market cap to around $1.6 trillion.

“The company is firing on all cylinders with clear line of sight for growth supported by significant backlog,” analysts at Barclays wrote in a note, maintaining their buy recommendation and lifting their price target on the stock.

For the other giant AI chipmaker, the past week wasn’t so good.

Nvidia shares fell more than 4% in the holiday-shortened week, the worst performance among the megacaps. There was no apparent negative news for Nvidia, but the stock has now dropped for four consecutive weeks.

Still, Nvidia remains the largest company by market cap, valued at over $4 trillion, with its stock up 56% in the past 12 months.

Microsoft also fell this week and is on an extended slide, dropping for five straight weeks. Shares are still up 21% over the last 12 months.

On the flipside, Tesla has been the laggard in the group. Shares of the electric vehicle maker are down 13% this year due to a multi-quarter sales slump that reflects rising competition from lower-cost Chinese manufacturers and an aging lineup of EVs.

But Tesla shares climbed 5% this week, sparked mostly by gains on Friday after the company said it wants investors to approve a pay plan for Musk that could be worth up to almost $1 trillion.

The payouts, split into 12 tranches, would require Tesla to see significant value appreciation, starting with the first award that won’t kick in until the company almost doubles its market cap to $2 trillion.

Tesla Chairwoman Robyn Denholm told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin the plan was designed to keep Musk, the world’s richest person, “motivated and focused on delivering for the company.”

WATCH: Tesla board chair on Elon Musk’s pay plan

Tesla Chair Denholm: New pay plan designed to keep Musk motivated & focused on delivering for Tesla

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