Apple glossed over AirPods' new custom EQ - but it's a big deal

Jada Jones/ZDNET

This year's WWDC is packed with announcements, including customization to the Liquid Glass display, important upgrades to Siri, and much intuitive instrumentality functionality.

Also: Apple WWDC 2026: Live updates connected iOS 27, Siri, and Tim Cook's past lawsuit arsenic CEO

If you're an avid AirPods user, there's 1 announcement that whitethorn excite you, but speakers breezed past it, offering hardly immoderate details. Still, Apple promised a existent equalizer successful iOS 27, yet giving users the accidental to customize the dependable of their AirPods. 

Apple didn't accidental overmuch astir the equalizer, but a little animation showed a graphic EQ, with options to make a customized EQ illustration oregon take Apple's recommended EQ settings. Users tin set lows, mids, and highs, though it's unclear however precise the equalizer volition be.

Apple

Previously, Apple had afloat religion successful its headphones' dependable profile, vowing that its dependable engineers crafted AirPods to dependable arsenic champion arsenic possible. Still, users similar immoderate power implicit their devices, and a customized EQ is simply a invited addition.

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AirPods users could lone alteration their AirPods dependable profiles successful Apple Music settings, and this customization diagnostic inactive constricted them to preset EQ profiles. 

An equalizer is simply a staple diagnostic for user headphones, and adjacent the astir constricted equalizers are amended than none. Bose's equalizer, for example, allows users to toggle bass, mids, and treble connected a 20-point scale. 

Other companies, similar JBL, connection a elaborate equalizer with 10 frequence bands, adjustable successful Hz. I don't expect Apple's equalizer to beryllium arsenic thorough arsenic JBL's, but alternatively to beryllium connected par with Bose's. Either way, adjacent if you're contented with your AirPods' dependable profile, the enactment to alteration it is what matters.