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Apple’s AirPods Pro hearing health features are as good as they sound

Apple announced a trio of major new hearing health features for the AirPods Pro 2 in September, including clinical-grade hearing aid functionality, a hearing test, and more robust hearing protection. All three will roll out next week with the release of iOS 18.1, and they could mark a watershed moment for hearing health awareness. Apple is about to instantly turn the world’s most popular earbuds into an over-the-counter hearing aid.

That also means we’re about to enter an era where we’ll need to get comfortable with people wearing earbuds at all times. There’s a perception that leaving your earbuds in while talking with other people is rude. Transparency mode in many of today’s earbuds sounds totally natural and lifelike, yet I still constantly remove my buds to show someone they’ve got my undivided attention. That way of thinking has to change when popular earbuds start pulling double duty as hearing aids. It’s a powerful way to reduce the stigma that’s all too common with hearing aids, but this shift will take time.

Over the last several days, I’ve been able to preview Apple’s hearing health features. At times, the experience has been emotionally intense. I’m someone who grew up with a Discman and iPod basically attached to my hip, and I’ve been to countless concerts over the decades. I also haven’t seen an audiologist since 2018 or so. That’s anything but unusual; Apple says 80 percent of adults in the US haven’t had their hearing checked in at least five years. Putting a test right on your iPhone is a great way to improve that trend.

The AirPods Pro 2 are transforming into something much more than wireless earbuds.

Prevention: hearing protection

Did you know there are people who’ve already been replacing earplugs with the AirPods Pro at concerts? Until this fall, Apple had never endorsed such a use case or advertised its earbuds as hearing protection devices. The company knew people were doing it but kept quiet on the subject.

That’s now changed. With iOS 18.1 and the soon-to-be-released AirPods firmware update, the AirPods Pro 2 will offer hearing protection at all times across noise cancellation, transparency, and adaptive audio modes. There’s no “concert mode” or a specific setting to toggle. You can think of this as an expansion of the loud sound reduction option that was already in place. Hearing protection is on by default, and Apple says “an all-new multiband high dynamic range algorithm” helps to preserve the natural sound of concerts and other live events.

This chart shows the effectiveness of Apple’s hearing protection across the different sound modes of the AirPods Pro 2.
Image: Apple

Which listening mode you’ll use for concerts comes down to personal preference. I’ve found adaptive audio works well since it lets you customize whether you prefer more noise cancellation or more passthrough. But even in full transparency mode, some level of hearing protection is active. The more noise cancellation that’s applied, the longer you can remain in relatively loud environments.

There are limits to what the AirPods Pro 2 can handle; Apple’s hearing protection isn’t cut out for extremely loud, sudden noises like gunfire, fireworks, or a jackhammer. Sustained noises over 110dBA are also too much for the earbuds. Some clubs and concerts can definitely exceed that threshold, so be aware.

The AirPods Pro aren’t as discreet as some hearing aids, but their popularity and ubiquity could help reduce stigma.

Awareness: the Apple hearing test

You’ll need a quiet space when taking Apple’s hearing test. Before getting started, your iPhone will do a quick analysis of ear tip fit and environmental noise to ensure you’re good to go. All of these hearing health features are calibrated for Apple’s stock silicone tips, so if you’re using aftermarket third-party tips (including foam), there’s no guarantee you’ll get the optimal experience. Once the test begins, you just tap the screen whenever you hear any of the three-beep tone sequences.

There are a few key things to know about Apple’s hearing test. For one, it’s designed so that you can’t predict or game it. The test can play any frequency at any time, so no two are the same. Apple tests your left ear first, and here’s something I wish I’d known going in: it’s completely normal to hear nothing at all for several seconds at a time. It was in those moments, when five, six, or even 10 seconds would pass without an obvious tone sequence, where I’d start feeling pretty anxious. 

My best advice is to avoid wondering if you should be hearing something at a given moment and instead just focus on the tones as they come. Some can be incredibly faint. There are visual cues that let you know the test is still moving along even during silence — the most obvious one being a large circle that animates onscreen throughout the process. (You’ll also notice a progress dial for each ear that fills as you take it.)

My left ear has a bit more hearing loss than my right.
Screenshot: Chris Welch / The Verge

I took the test twice several days apart, and my results for both ears fall under “little to no hearing loss.” Having recently turned 40, I’ll take that. The ranges are as follows:

  • Little to no loss: up to 25dBHL
  • Mild loss: 26–40dBHL
  • Moderate loss: 41–60dBHL
  • Severe loss: 61–80dBHL
  • Profound loss: above 80dBHL

I also learned that my left ear has definitely lost a bit more over the years than my right, which is something I’ve never noticed in daily life. The slight difference between my two tests is exactly the margin that Apple expects for people who take it multiple times. Results are stored in the Health app, where you can export individual tests (or all of them) as a PDF. Here’s how one of mine charts out:

Hearing test results can easily be accessed from the Health app.
Screenshot: Chris Welch / The Verge

You can also import charts from tests you’ve taken with a hearing professional. This data is what’s used to configure the hearing aid feature.

Apple’s hearing test only takes about five minutes, but it felt like a long five minutes for me and everyone else I’ve let try it. Again, that’s probably because it’s been too long since many of us have done this. The second time wasn’t nearly as stressful. I can definitely see the hearing test having a viral moment on TikTok and other social media, which seems like a great thing for awareness all around. Hearing loss is incredibly common: 1.5 billion people around the world are living with some extent of it, according to the World Health Organization.

Assistance: AirPods as hearing aids

For those 18 years and older with mild to moderate hearing loss, the AirPods Pro 2 can now serve as a clinical-grade hearing aid. Once enabled, you can also toggle on a “Media Assist” setting that uses your hearing test results to optimize the sound of music, phone calls, and video content.

Within the settings menu, you can use sliders to fine-tune the hearing aid feature’s amplification, tone, and balance. These options are also accessible via Control Center on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Much like you can slide a finger on the AirPods Pro 2 stem to adjust volume, you can use that same gesture to control amplification when the hearing aid mode is active. You can only use the hearing aid feature when in transparency mode. Apple’s instructions for the hearing aid feature advise that it takes time — in some cases, weeks — for customers to get fully accustomed to the sound.

Jerry Saltz, the art critic at New York Magazine (and someone with diagnosed hearing loss), took Apple’s hearing test at our Manhattan office and was impressed in his brief time trying out the hearing aid feature. But no one has had access to it long enough for an in-depth assessment. I’m sure there’ll be detailed comparisons between the AirPods Pro 2 and existing OTC devices in the near future once iOS 18.1 is widely available.

You can make hearing aid adjustments from the iOS settings menu.

Being able to use Apple’s $250 earbuds as a hearing aid is a huge deal for those who can benefit from this capability. That’s substantially less expensive than over-the-counter hearing aids from Jabra, Sony, and other brands. But the AirPods won’t be right for everyone. People with more severe hearing loss will still need to seek out other solutions (including those pricier products). And the main tradeoff with the AirPods Pro 2 is battery life: they can last for around six hours with the hearing aid engaged, which doesn’t match what you’ll get from many OTC and prescription hearing aids.

But this is a big milestone — and it seems inevitable that Samsung, Google, and other tech heavyweights will follow Apple’s lead fairly quickly. I’m all for that, even if it feels strange that hearing aid functionality has become the latest aspect of ecosystem lock-in. We spent a long time bemoaning the loss of the headphone jack. With advancements like this, and earbuds helping to improve so many people’s quality of life, we’re finally starting to see a worthwhile payoff.

Photography by Chris Welch / The Verge

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Trump Says US Banks Can’t Do Business in Canada. It’s Not That Simple.

Hours after imposing steep tariffs on Canada, President Trump raised an issue that even the American lenders whose cause he’s championing find perplexing: the access, or lack thereof, of U.S. banks to the Canadian market.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, “Canada doesn’t allow American Banks to do business in Canada, but their banks flood the American Market.” He added sarcastically, “Oh, that seems fair to me, doesn’t it?”

While this issue doesn’t often come up in conversations with prominent American bank executives, it appears to be increasingly on the president’s mind.

Mr. Trump mentioned the Canada banking issue early last month as part of a broader criticism against what he views as the unequal economic balance between the United States and its northern neighbor. Writing on Truth Social, Mr. Trump said Canada “doesn’t even allow U.S. Banks to open or do business.”

Here is the actual state of play for U.S. banks in Canada:

Canada’s banking sector is dominated by the “Big Six,” the half-dozen institutions including the Royal Bank of Canada and TD Bank. They are permitted to take deposits, extend mortgages and advise corporate clients — all the core activities for banks. And Canadian customers disproportionately still prefer to do their banking in person, as opposed to online, meaning it would require a major physical presence for any entrant to attempt to enter the market.

Additionally, U.S. banks are restricted in what they can do in Canada.

Foreign banks, including American ones, must either work with a Canadian middleman, establish a Canadian subsidiary or receive special government permission to do business. Unless they agree to follow Canada’s stringent banking rules that include holding a hefty sum of cash-like assets in reserve at all times, they cannot operate retail branches that take deposits under around $100,000.

Given how dominant Canada’s homegrown banks are, any international bank that tries to compete faces “an additional regulatory burden for what would begin as a small prize,” said James R. Thompson, associate professor of finance at the University of Waterloo.

The upshot is that U.S. banks have minimal operations in Canada. The largest American lender, JPMorgan Chase, says it has roughly 600 employees in Canada, out of more than 300,000 worldwide. Many international banks limit themselves to areas that don’t involve lending, such as offering investment advice to wealthy Canadians or local companies.

So Mr. Trump is incorrect in asserting that American banks cannot do any business in Canada, but it is true that they are hamstrung in their activities.

While there are more than 4,000 banks in the United States, Canada has just a few dozen, and more than three-quarters of deposits are held by the Big Six.

For decades, Canadian political leaders have crowed about that restrictive financial regulatory model. They argue that fending off foreign entrants in the country’s mortgage market helped the country largely avoid the 2008 collapse south of its border.

In light of Mr. Trump’s criticism, Maggie Cheung, a spokeswoman for the Canadian Bankers Association, was quick to point out on Tuesday that foreign banks were an integral part of the banking landscape. She said 16 U.S. banks were operating to some degree in Canada, with a cumulative of nearly $79 billion in assets — a statistic that the nation’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, also cited on Tuesday.

“American banks are alive and well and prospering in Canada,” Mr. Trudeau said.

But in relative terms, their successes are small. U.S. bank assets represent 1 to 2 percent of the $6.5 trillion held by banks operating in Canada writ large.

“The major impediment faced by U.S. banks,” said Laurence Booth, professor of finance at the University of Toronto, “is simply they can’t compete with the Canadian banks as they don’t have the scale, while they can’t take any of them over as there are restrictions on foreign ownership.”

International banks — including Canadian ones — are largely free to establish U.S. arms. The United States is a more attractive target for international banks than Canada, both because it is a hub for world finance and because its market permits more exotic, higher-profit lending activities like 30-year mortgages. (The most common mortgage in Canada carries a five-year term.)

The largest Canadian bank in America, TD Bank, operates more than 1,000 U.S. branches through a Delaware subsidiary. That size puts it in line with well-known regional lenders like Citizens and Fifth Third.

The Canadian Bankers Association said the six largest Canadian lenders held less than 3.5 percent of U.S. bank assets.

Big U.S. banks had plenty of hopes that Mr. Trump would decrease regulations, encourage merger activity and slash taxes. Expanding their presence in Canada was not on the list.

A U.S. banking industry trade group, the Bank Policy Institute, said Tuesday that it had released no statements on the matter, and no bank chief executive has taken up the rallying cry.

More pressing for the global banking industry are Mr. Trump’s tariffs, which have helped push the industry’s stocks down 8 percent over the past month, according to the KBW Nasdaq Bank Index.

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Trump’s New Tariffs Could Strain Collection of Customs Fees

The sweeping tariffs on Canadian, Mexican and Chinese products that President Trump imposed on Tuesday could strain the system that collects import duties and the government agencies that enforce those fees, trade and legal experts said.

Collecting import duties is usually a routine task, but the new tariffs are being imposed on Mexican and Canadian goods, many of which have been imported into the United States duty-free for many years. Adding to the challenge is the sheer volume of goods subject to the new tariffs — U.S. imports from China, Mexico and Canada totaled over $1.3 trillion last year, or about two-fifths of all imports.

The tariffs apply a 25 percent duty on goods from Mexico and Canada and an additional 10 percent on imports from China.

Importers typically employ customs brokers to calculate and pay tariffs to the government agency that collects them, U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Adam Lewis, a co-founder and the president of Clearit, a customs broker, said that it would not be hard to tweak software to collect the new tariffs, but that a crucial part of the tariffs payment system might need significant adjustments. Importers must buy a “customs bond,” a type of insurance that guarantees the duties will be paid. Mr. Lewis said some customers might have to increase the size of their bonds to cover the extra tariff payments.

“Many of their products were coming in duty-free, and all of a sudden there’s going to be a 25 percent increase,” he said. “It’s quite large.”

In addition, policing importers for tariff evasion will now become a much bigger task for Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Justice. Some importers may try to avoid tariffs by understating the cost of goods in customs declarations or by falsely claiming they were imported from countries not subject to tariffs.

“The greater the breadth and severity of these new tariffs, the greater the likelihood that at least some potential importers may want to misrepresent the value or the origin of their goods,” said Kirti Vaidya Reddy, a former federal prosecutor who is now a partner at the law firm Quarles.

If the government finds that an importer has not paid duties, customs officials are likely to demand that the importer pay what is owed and a penalty that can double or even triple the amount due.

In a statement, a customs agency spokeswoman said: “The dynamic nature of our mission, along with evolving threats and challenges, requires C.B.P. to remain flexible and adapt quickly while ensuring seamless operations and mission resilience. These tariffs will help maintain America’s global competitiveness and protect American industries from unfair trade practices.”

Some evasion cases have become the subject of criminal prosecutions. Last year, a Miami importer pleaded guilty to participating in an import scheme involving Chinese truck tires that the Justice Department said had cost the United States more than $1.9 million in forgone tariff revenue.

But stepping up enforcement efforts is likely to require that the Justice Department devote significantly more staff to pursuing tariff evasion cases, which, lawyers said, can take time to build.

“The Department of Justice has the personnel and infrastructure to do it, but these cases are complex, transnational and document-heavy,” said Artie McConnell, a former federal prosecutor who is a partner at the law firm BakerHostetler. “You can’t rush it, and prosecutions likely won’t come quickly.”

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China Retaliates Against Trump, Imposing Tariffs and Blacklisting U.S. Companies

Minutes after President Trump’s latest tariffs took effect, the Chinese government said on Tuesday that it was imposing its own broad tariffs on food imported from the United States and would essentially halt sales to 15 American companies.

China’s Ministry of Finance put tariffs of 15 percent on imports of American chicken, wheat, corn and cotton and 10 percent tariffs on other foods, ranging from soybeans to dairy products. In addition, the Ministry of Commerce said 15 U.S. companies would no longer be allowed to buy products from China except with special permission, including Skydio, which is the largest American maker of drones and a supplier to the U.S. military and emergency services.

Lou Qinjian, a spokesman for China’s National People’s Congress, chastised the United States for violating the World Trade Organization’s free trade rules. “By imposing unilateral tariffs, the U.S. has violated W.T.O. rules and disrupted the security and stability of the global industrial and supply chains,” he said.

President Trump has contended his tariffs are essential to stopping the flow into the United States of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths through overdoses.

But the U.S. imposition of tariffs “will deal a heavy blow to counternarcotics dialogue and cooperation,” Lin Jian, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said at a news briefing.

Mr. Trump has now tagged almost all goods from China with an extra 20 percent in tariffs since taking office in January. He announced 10 percent tariffs on Feb. 4 and another round on Tuesday. Mr. Trump also moved ahead on 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada on Tuesday, after a monthlong delay.

China had responded to the February tariffs by immediately announcing that it would start collecting, six days later, additional tariffs on liquefied natural gas, coal and farm machinery from the United States. But those tariffs combined hit only about a tenth of American exports to China, making them much narrower than Mr. Trump’s comprehensive tariffs.

China’s action on Tuesday was much broader. China is the top overseas market for American farmers, wielding considerable influence over prices and demand in the commodities markets of the Midwest.

By targeting imports of food, Beijing repeated its response to tariffs that Mr. Trump imposed during his first term. China put tariffs on American soybeans in 2018 and shifted much of its purchasing to Brazil.

But the strategy backfired then: Mr. Trump responded by placing more tariffs on Chinese goods. Because China sells much more to the United States than it buys, it quickly ran out of American goods to impose tariffs on. And American farmers had some success in finding other markets for their crops.

China’s tariffs in 2018 also had less of a political impact in the United States than Beijing’s leaders had hoped. In 2018 Senate elections in three of the top soybean-exporting states, voters gave little evidence they held the Chinese action against Mr. Trump or the Republican Party. All three states saw Democratic senators replaced with Republicans that year, as social issues proved more compelling for many voters than trade disputes.

Yet China has potential trade weapons that go beyond tariffs on food. In early February, Beijing implemented restrictions on exports to the United States of certain critical minerals, which are used in the production of some semiconductors and other technology products.

Blocking key materials from reaching the United States, a tactic known as supply chain warfare, carries considerable risks for China. Beijing is struggling to attract foreign investment. China’s leaders have also stated that attempting to bolster the country’s domestic economy, weighed down by the fallout of a devastating real estate slowdown, is a priority.

Beijing could make it even harder for American companies to do business in China, but that could also hurt foreign investment. In addition to effectively preventing 15 companies from buying Chinese goods, China’s Ministry of Commerce added another 10 American companies on Tuesday to what it calls an “unreliable entities list,” preventing them from doing any business in China.

Many of the companies that China penalized on Tuesday are military contractors. But the Ministry of Commerce also blocked imports from the biotech firm Illumina. It accused Illumina, which is based in San Diego, of violating market transaction rules and discriminating against Chinese companies.

Chinese market regulators said in early February, after Mr. Trump imposed tariffs, that they had launched an antimonopoly investigation into Google. Google has been blocked from China’s internet for more than a decade, but the move could disrupt the company’s dealings with Chinese companies.

Mr. Lou, the National People’s Congress spokesman, signaled his country’s emerging strategy in dealing with Mr. Trump’s tariffs by calling for closer trade relations with Europe.

“China and Europe can complement each other’s strengths and achieve mutual benefit in many areas of cooperation,” he said at a news conference ahead of the opening on Wednesday of the annual weeklong session of China’s legislature.

But Europe has its own trade disputes with China, notably over electric vehicles. European politicians and business leaders have voiced concern about how to cope with an expected further flood of exports this year from China, which has embarked on a far-reaching factory construction program.

China’s rapid rise since 2000 to global pre-eminence in manufacturing, with a third of the world’s output, has come to a considerable extent at the expense of the American share of global industrial production, according to United Nations data. European nations have been wary of closing factories and relying on low-cost imports from China.

Mr. Trump has moved much faster on China tariffs during his second term than he did in his first. In 2018 and 2019, he imposed tariffs of up to 25 percent, in stages, on imports worth about $300 billion a year. He then concluded a trade agreement with China in January 2020, leaving in place 25 percent tariffs on many industrial goods while cutting 15 percent tariffs on some consumer products to 7.5 percent and canceling a few other tariffs.

By contrast, Mr. Trump has now imposed 20 percent tariffs on all goods that the United States imports from China, worth about $440 billion a year. That includes some products, like smartphones, that he omitted during his first term.

Mr. Trump’s actions this year have raised average tariffs on the affected Chinese imports to 39 percent — compared with just 3 percent before he took office in 2017. Apart from China, Canada and Mexico, the United States imposes tariffs averaging about 3 percent on most trading partners.

China’s average tariffs on goods from most of the world are twice as high, and much higher on imports from the United States.

In Mr. Trump’s first term, the Chinese government reduced taxes that it charges the country’s exporters. That gave them room to cut prices and offset at least part of the tariffs for their customers, which include many small American businesses as well as big retailers like Walmart, Amazon and Home Depot.

As another way around tariffs, some Chinese exporters shifted the final assembly of their products to countries like Vietnam, Thailand or Mexico, while keeping the production of core components in China. Mr. Trump is now trying to stop some of the trade through Mexico, which critics of Chinese exports see as a backdoor into the U.S. market.

Many Chinese exporters resorted to using the so-called de minimis exception to tariffs: dividing shipments into many packages, each with a value of less than $800. Each shipment is then exempt from tariffs and customs processing fees and mostly omitted from customs inspections and American imports data.

At least $1 of every $6 worth of American imports from China is now arriving through these de minimis shipments.

In early February, Mr. Trump issued an order briefly halting the de minimis tariff exemption for goods from China, Mexico and Canada. After packages quickly accumulated at American airports, he delayed the order for shipments from China until procedures could be developed to handle them, and postponed for a month his order for de minimis imports from Canada and Mexico. On Sunday, he again delayed action on those imports from Canada and Mexico.

Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, said that by retaliating now, “China sends a strong signal to the Trump administration that a unilateral tariff doesn’t work — you have to sit down to talk to us and to negotiate with us.”

Alexandra Stevenson contributed reporting from Beijing, and Chris Buckley and Amy Chang Chien from Taipei. Li You contributed research.

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