Apple calls AirPods design ‘the snorkel,’ plus other AirPods 4 details

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AirPods 4 are available today, and Engadget has a great new interview with the team behind the product. Details include the timing of when development started, how ANC is made possible on an open-ear design, use of the term ‘snorkel,’ and more.

Snorkel, the term we all needed

Apparently, Apple’s team refers to the front end of AirPods as the ‘snorkel.’ A technical term, clearly.

Engadget’s Billy Steele writes:

The front end of the buds, which Bergeron revealed the team calls the “snorkel,” is very different from the AirPods 3…With the new version, the driver had to be adjusted so that it didn’t reflect sound to the internal microphone that monitors noise inside your ear. That’s why the drivers are now pointed down your ear canal, and why they’re slightly recessed.

ANC makes the H2 work hard

At several points in the piece, Apple’s team explains how much harder it is to provide active noise cancellation and transparency mode in an open-ear design.

Unlike AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods Max, with AirPods 4 Apple has to offset and accommodate for significantly more environmental noise, otherwise ANC and transparency wouldn’t work well.

The H2 chip does heavier lifting in the AirPods 4 as a result.

“It’s really, really hard to create this great ANC quality in a non-ear-tip product,” [marketing director Eric Treski] said. “The power of the H2 allows that, so we’re actually doing a lot with the H2 chip to manage ANC quality and listen from the mics for environmental noise to make sure we’re canceling as much as possible.”

For transparency, Apple has to “blend ambient sound from the microphones with what you’re hearing naturally through your unplugged ears. There’s a perfect mix that will seem real to your brain, but also it has to all be done with extremely low latency so the automatic adjustments don’t lead to any delays in what comes through the AirPods.”

AirPods 4 development timeline

Apple’s products are in the works for so long, but we often don’t get specifics on those internal timelines. One interesting tidbit from the piece, though, is that the AirPods team started trying to bring ANC to the standard AirPods in “the dark days of COVID”—presumably 2020. Their work was then ready to present for approval from higher ups in 2021, and that’s when they knew they had something.

Kate Bergeron, Apple’s Vice President of Hardware Engineering, recalls, “We were just blown away. We said ‘we absolutely have something here, we need to go after this and we’ve got to make it happen.’”

So the journey toward ANC on AirPods started over four years ago. Not too long after the feature first debuted in AirPods Pro.

The full interview is well worth a read for other AirPods 4 tidbits. You can find it here.

What surprised you most about the AirPods 4 piece? Let us know in the comments.

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