It's a huge deal! Complete market disruption level deal.
Hearing aids are expen$ive, and don't work well in some situations like restaurants or anywhere else where there's a large amount of background noise. AirPods Pro already had three modes: Noise Cancellation (which is active/ANR), Off, and Transparency which amplifies ambient sounds. But Apple has been doing a bunch of engineering around audio for a while now to make their music sound REALLY good, especially when you listen to it on their hardware. Music files that have been updated to take advantage of this effectively give you perfect surround sound - You can listen to a string quartet in the AirPods Pro and you can point to where the cello is, and when you turn your head the positioning of the cello doesn't move with your head even though the "speakers" (headphones) do.
They've also done a lot to try to isolate your voice from background noises when you're talking on the phone with your AirPods. Put all of that together, and a smart hearing aid was kind of the next logical step. It has the potential to be a FAR better experience than a regular hearing aid. I'm not sure if it does this yet, but the goal is that you'll be able to use them in a restaurant and it'll be able to amplify the voice(s) of the people you're talking to while muting the rest of the background chatter.
So, we're looking at a product that doesn't require a visit with an audiologist, that costs an order of magnitude less, works far better than existing products, and has more functions than just being a hearing aid. It's likely to be a big-time game changer for anyone with hearing loss, even those of us without enough to justify traditional hearing aids.
I don't have the new ones yet, but I do have the original AirPod Pros and at least a bit of hearing loss on the left side thanks to breaking a bone in my left ear years ago (along with my skull and collarbone, so my ear didn't get much attention) as well as likely some age-related (and airplane-related?) loss on both sides - I often have to get my older son to repeat himself and speak up. So, I've been following the development of this for a while.
Meh... That's mostly software. I'm sure there will be some improved processing in later versions that may allow for even better software, but I wouldn't wait for technological reasons at this point.
Can you change over to "Transparency" mode or something in between to change this?
All the better for eavesdropping.
But seriously, LOTS of people are wearing AirPods all the time at this point. I wouldn't be too concerned with the look.
I would add that when I wear my gen-1 AirPods Pro which appear to be physically the same, the inside of my ears get itchy. It's not where the rubber is touching them, but inside of that. I don't know if I'm just sweating inside my ears or what but if I've got them in for a long time I do need to take them out for a sec here and there.
Yes. I don't know how close they are to their end goal yet, but I'm looking forward to trying them out when I finally buy them, and I'm sure they'll be steadily improving for the next year or two.
) Hopefully this not only makes better hearing accessible to a lot more people, but also makes everyone's life better who suffers from hearing loss even if they can afford "normal" hearing aids.