How can Apple's famous wireless headphones, AirPods, be adapted to serve the needs of photographers, you might ask? With Apple's annual developers' event, WWDC, set to start on Monday, plenty of rumors are suggesting that it will happen – perhaps even with head gestures!
Don't worry, it seems unlikely that Apple will have you capturing a photo every time you nod along with the beat. But motion-sensing technology has been discussed in a roundup of claims made by Apple fan site 9to5Mac.
Its piece reports that the option to "Control Your AirPods by Moving Your Head" will appear as an option (with the "Turn On" or "Not Now" choice) when the next version of iOS is installed.
That, incidentally, will not be called iOS 19 (as you might have been expecting, after the current iOS 18) but iOS 26.
All new versions of Apple's operating systems – MacOS, iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS and the like will make the jump to 26 for consistency and to reduce confusion. (If this were to apply to VisionOS, too, that'd be quite the jump from version 2.)
Okay, but what about photography? If you can remember far enough back, the old EarBuds could be set to control the camera. Now, according to the piece, "AirPods Camera Control" will allow users to click the stem of the AirPod (as you might to pause the music most of the time) to activate the camera.
Questions remain, but something that would make it potentially even more useful, given the tiny and wireless nature of the pods, is the possibility that it could be triggered even (or only) when the pods were not being worn.
Another interesting feature for photographers who were wowed by last year's AI audio features (switching to In-frame, Studio and Cinematic modes when shooting ProRes video) is that a "Studio Quality" option might use the microphones in the AirPods to simulate a lavilier mic.
How soon will we know? Digital Camera World will be reporting the highlights from the WWDC keynote, which is June 09 at 10:00 PDT / 18:00 BST / 03:00 AEST.
Features are typically available to developers the same day, then to the public around a month later as part of a Public Beta that can be downloaded optionally "at your own risk". The official version of the new OS will not likely be pushed to all Apple phones (or at least all capable of running it) until the fall.
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Check our guides to the best iPhone for photography, the best wireless microphones, and the best microphones for iPhones.
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