Apple just delivered one surprise new AirPods feature that I've been waiting years for
EQ customisation, at long, long last
It's always a bit of a task to sift through everything that Apple announces at WWDC, and this year is no different. It was a big year for the tech giant, with huge changes unveiled for Siri and showcases of all its new operating systems to get through in around an hour and a half of keynote time.
Still, Apple managed to run through it all, and that was partly by skipping through some surprisingly impactful announcements really quickly. My pick of the bunch? A tweak to how AirPods and AirPods Pro work that could mean way more control for people when they listen to music.
We're now almost a decade into the AirPods era, and for much of that time, some audio experts have been clamouring for one thing – EQ customisation on the earbuds. Apple has long taken the simplest possible approach by shipping its earbuds with a fixed tuning setup and ensuring that everyone therefore gets the exact same experience.
However, plenty of much more affordable earbuds let you tweak their sound signature to get something a little more personalised, and since the release of the AirPods Pro 3 these demands have been louder than ever. I love the Pro 3, but some people feel that its sound is a little less natural than the Pro 2's, despite clear improvements in other areas like ANC and battery life.
Perhaps because of that reaction from some of its audience, Apple's finally bringing a very limited form of EQ customisation to its AirPods in iOS 27, which is a game-changer in many regards. It showed off the feature in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it part of the WWDC presentation, but that confirmed a few things for us.
Firstly, this is just a three-band EQ system that lets you adjust the strength of lows, mids and highs, without any more granular control than that. Secondly, Apple isn't labelling these segments with frequency ranges, and it also doesn't give a scale of how much you're boosting or limiting frequencies, so you'll be mostly going off a graph and your ears.
That makes this a pretty rudimentary version of the system that others use for their earbuds, but in this case, something is a million miles better than nothing. I've been wanting any control over my AirPods for years (since I used the Pro 2 for their entire lifespan), so I'll definitely be jumping on it the moment iOS 27 drops later this year.
I'm adamant that the AirPods 3 are the best earbuds going for the majority of iPhone users even without EQ, but you can always improve things. It's great to see Apple leaning more into customisation, and the only big question left is which AirPods models will support the feature. The more the better, of course, so let's hope it's all of those still on sale, and a couple of generations back, too.
