When AirPods first came out, I remember someone saying that it was Apple's first cybernetic product. Though it's not implanted in one's body, it might as well be for how often I find myself accidentally leaving them in my ears, sometimes for many hours at a time without listening to anything. Like Apple Watch, they're a wearable—something that once you put on, you might leave on all day unless you have a specific reason to take them off. It's so bad that I find myself manually checking my ears with my hands to make sure they're not still in when I go swimming.

AirPods might as well be embedded into your skull. In fact, as with so much in tech, it increasingly seems that the only reason that they can't be is battery life. Mark my words, we can't be that far from devices that use your body's own metabolism to charge.

And at 9/9/24's launch event, Apple announced that AirPods can now be used as a clinical-grade, soon-to-be-FDA-approved hearing aid. This (somewhat understandably) didn't get a ton of attention amidst shiny new iPhones, but it's easily the biggest news to come out of that event.

But all of this is really just the start. Even more than a device worn on the wrist (a watch), a device worn in the ear canal can access a remarkable amount of information. People have talked about AirPods being used for everything from very accurately detecting temperature (after all, nearly every doctor will just measure your temperature from your ear) to literally detecting your brainwaves:

Cybernetic devices are all about reducing the boundary between a device's I/O (screens, speakers, sensory detection, etc.) and your body's (your eyes, ears, mouth, etc.) down to zero, or as near to it as possible. When a device's input is immediately proximate to your body's output and vice versa, and when it just works, you start to forget it's even there and it becomes a true extension of your own body.

At Eight Sleep, we were creating a cybernetic device, too: the bed's sensing strip is right against your body, so with nothing to remember to wear, charge, or turn on, the bed closes a feedback loop between your physiology and your environment, automatically. We'd always refer to this great quote from Bill Stumpf, one of the designers of the famous Aeron chair: "True comfort is the absence of awareness."

For me, no device has ever more effectively blurred this boundary of awareness between the physical and virtual world than AirPods has.