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Comment by WheelsAtLarge | Hacker News Reader

Lower price is good but I'm looking forward to the variety of hearing aids and the improvements to them that are bound to happen.

Apple has been interested in getting into the health space. This is a perfect new product for them. The only problem I see is that the market might be too small to make a difference in their profits.

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AirPods Pro essentially function as hearing aids already, with their "transparency mode" which routes sound from the microphone to the speakers. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if they'd eventually make a "hearing aid mode" which lets you calibrate the volume and frequency response to more appropriately fit a person's individual hearing issues.

If your hearing aid is made from Apple, you're probably going to be locked in to Apple products for as long as you don't replace your hearing aid.

I love hating on Apple as much as the next guy, but I doubt that would happen. They'd probably have some fancy features that could only be controlled from Apple devices, but surely none of the core functionality.

I very highly doubt it: They cannot very well have people's hearing aids fail to work if some sort of doom destroys the phone.

It is probably simply that it isn't so absolutely difficult for Apple to start making these. The company is already experienced in making small electronics, earbuds, and things like this.

They know how to make feedback-based sound equalization via their latest generations of airpods. This bit is very important for adapting the devices to the hearing loss profiles of patients.

This is what made them extremely expensive for a good part of their history. Adaptability and auto-adaptability.

Also, they're very small electronics for what they do.

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