Leaked macOS Build Reveals Camera AirPods Architecture

Code in an early macOS Tahoe 26.7 build details Apple's camera-equipped AirPods. Each earbud carries an RGB camera capturing stills up to 1 megapixel, synchronized via accelerometers that compensate for head movement. On-device processing — labeled "peripheral inference" in the code — handles preliminary computation. The system captures periodic stills for Visual Intelligence, not video, and discards frames degraded by motion or occlusion.