A hidden demo video buried inside the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate appears to show Apple’s next AirPods — and this time, they have a camera. The clip, independently confirmed by MacRumors, 9to5Mac, and AppleInsider, shows a man wearing earbuds with a noticeably thicker stem while Siri narrates a new feature called Visual Intelligence: “See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later.” Apple didn’t mean for anyone to see this yet.
What Actually Leaked
This isn’t a hardware teardown or an FCC filing — it’s a software slip-up. The demo clip was found inside a beta release candidate, alongside code references to an “image stream” that 9to5Mac flagged in the same build. Together, that points to a real low-resolution camera feed feeding Siri’s object and scene recognition, not a photo or video camera in the traditional sense. Apple reportedly built in an LED indicator that lights up when the camera feature is active — a privacy nod that suggests the company has thought through the “always-listening earbud with a camera” optics problem before it ships.
Two internal codenames have surfaced around this: B790, the model shown in this specific leak, and B798, a separate and later camera AirPods variant Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has referenced before. B790 was reportedly on Apple’s roadmap for a 2026 release “until recently.”
So When Is It Actually Launching?
Here’s where it gets messy. Gurman’s own reporting has flip-flopped within the same month: in early August he suggested a launch “as soon as September” was possible, but by August 19 — one day before this article — MacRumors’ latest Gurman-sourced update walked that back to a 2027 launch, with B790 reportedly pulled from the 2026 roadmap over supply chain and software issues. Some outlets ran with the imminent-launch framing when the RC leak first surfaced on August 17; the most current reporting doesn’t support that anymore.
Treat this one skeptically until Apple actually confirms it. Beta code and demo videos are real evidence that a feature exists internally, but they’re a poor predictor of exact ship dates — Apple has delayed or quietly killed speculative features found in beta builds before, and Gurman’s own timeline whiplash here is itself evidence the plan is still moving inside Apple.
Why Apple Wants This Now
Camera-equipped wearables are no longer a novelty pitch — they’re a category other companies are already shipping into. Meta’s Ray-Ban and Ray-Ban Display glasses combine a camera with an AI assistant, and Samsung’s Galaxy Glasses are reportedly close behind them. Apple putting a camera in an earbud rather than a lens is a genuinely different form-factor bet: no obvious place to mount a camera on something that sits inside your ear, which is likely part of why the LED indicator and low-res “assistant only” framing matter — Apple needs this to read as an AI feature, not a surveillance device.
It also lines up with Apple’s broader Visual Intelligence push, which the company has been building out as part of the wider Apple Intelligence platform across iOS and macOS this year. A camera-equipped AirPods isn’t a standalone gadget bet so much as another sensor feeding the same assistant Apple is trying to make useful everywhere at once.
The privacy question is the one Apple will have to answer loudest. Meta’s camera glasses already draw complaints about bystanders not knowing when they’re being recorded, even with a recording light built in — critics point out that a small LED is easy to miss or ignore in practice. An earbud is a harder problem still: there’s no obvious visual cue that “this thing has a camera” the way there is with a lens on a pair of glasses. If the leaked demo’s LED indicator is Apple’s actual answer to that, expect it to get scrutinized the moment real units surface, not just praised as a thoughtful touch.
What’s Next
Don’t expect an announcement soon. If the 2027 timeline holds, this is a story that resurfaces in leaks and roadmap chatter for over a year before Apple says anything official — likely tied, per Gurman’s reporting, to the iPhone’s 20th-anniversary product cycle. For now, the most concrete thing this leak confirms is that the feature exists in some working form inside Apple’s software stack today, and that Apple accidentally showed its hand a year or more before it planned to.
We’ll update this piece if Apple’s own communications — rather than beta code — confirm anything more specific about hardware, pricing, or a firmer release window.
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