If you were itching for a new pair of AirPods Pro, you may want to clip those fingernails because that itch could persist for another year. According to yet another Apple analyst, the AirPods Pro 3 might be delayed until 2026, extending the previous rumored timeline that projected a release this year. The rumored delay comes courtesy of Apple analyst Jeff Pu, who corroborates previous intel from fellow analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. If Pu and Kuo’s info are correct, it would make the AirPods Pro 2 three years old before the release of the next generation.
Apple Product Timeline by Jeff Pu, GF Securities Hong Kong pic.twitter.com/jEIGMi7Twv
— Jukan Choi (@Jukanlosreve) June 15, 2025
In modern Apple time, three years is basically a century. In iPad years, it’s even longer—those guys can’t go 14 minutes without releasing another iteration. And as for regular, non-Apple, human years, I think it still seems like a long time to wait for another iteration of AirPods, though if the rumors are to be believed, the update could be worth the wait. Apple is reportedly considering some major upgrades that include the addition of a health sensor and potentially—and this is a weird one—cameras.
According to a previous report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, infrared cameras might be coming for your next pair of AirPods Pro, which sounds strange on the surface but makes a lot of sense once you start to unpack some potential use cases. For one, infrared cameras could enable new hand gestures, making them part earbuds and part wearable—a move that Apple is clearly interested in based on rumors of a health sensor. What’s even more interesting, however, are the cameras’ implications for AI. According to Gurman’s report, the cameras will “feed data to AI,” which could mean really any number of things, but it would mean one thing for sure, and that’s that AirPods Pro are going to get some kind of AI infusion. That dose of AI could be the problem.
While we can’t say for sure what’s delaying Apple’s next-gen AirPods Pro, if I had to guess, Apple Intelligence has more to do with the holdup than you think. Wireless earbuds, outside of AirPods, have been trending in the direction of AI for a couple of years now. Nothing’s Ear wireless earbuds, for example, were the first wireless earbuds to roll out a ChatGPT integration, which, as I wrote back then, is theoretically kind of an ideal gadget to showcase AI. There’s a chance that Apple might be following in that direction with its next pair of AirPods, which is interesting and potentially useful but problematic when you consider that Apple Intelligence—in particular, its AI Siri upgrade—hasn’t exactly gone off without a hitch. If Apple is really interested in infusing its AirPods Pro 3 with AI and the whole AI thing isn’t exactly going well, then…
It’s hard to say for sure what’s causing the delay, but there’s pretty much only one thing Apple has been struggling with as of late, and it’s AI. Adding some credence to that theory is the fact that, according to Bloomberg, AI Siri won’t arrive until spring of next year. The timing, then, could be ideal, but if the two products are tied together, then I wouldn’t hold your breath since, according to Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, Apple wants to “have [Siri] very much in hand” before it starts talking about dates for “obvious reasons.”
