Apple’s hardware roadmap has a way of leaking through its own software, and the second iOS 27 developer beta is no exception. Hidden inside a system configuration file, a reference to a mystery device codenamed B790 is fuelling serious speculation that AirPods Ultra — Apple’s rumoured premium earbuds with built-in cameras — is further along in development than anyone outside Cupertino officially admits.
- AirPods Ultra may feature dual cameras that relay images from both sides of a user’s head, per iOS 27 beta code.
- A mystery device codenamed B790 in iOS 27 hints at AirPods Ultra or Apple smart glasses launching in late 2027.
- Visual Intelligence — already on iPhone 15 Pro — is expected to be central to Apple’s upcoming camera-equipped wearables.
- AirPods Pro 3 carries the codename B788, making B790 a distinct, unannounced product further up Apple’s lineup.
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What the iOS 27 Beta Code Actually Says
The discovery comes from Sam Henri Gold, an app designer and developer who has a track record of digging useful signal out of Apple’s beta noise. Gold found the B790 reference buried inside a JSON file at a system path related to Visual Intelligence — specifically, the component that handles how the feature processes what a device’s camera sees. The file instructs Visual Intelligence to work with landmarks, text, and known objects, with the Eiffel Tower and a standard coffee mug offered as example targets.
That framing matters. This isn’t a vague mention of a new SKU buried in a plist. It’s a set of functional instructions that describes how a piece of hardware with cameras on both sides of a user’s head should hand imagery to Apple’s AI layer. Wording like “relay two images from cameras on either side of user’s head” is specific enough to tell you this isn’t a next iPhone camera upgrade — it’s something you wear.
AirPods Ultra or Smart Glasses — or Both?
Gold’s first instinct was that B790 might refer to Apple’s rumoured smart glasses project, and that’s a reasonable read. But the codename sequencing tells a slightly different story. AirPods Pro 3 is internally known as B788. B790 sits just two steps above that in Apple’s numbering — a gap that suggests a closely related product category rather than an entirely different form factor like glasses. The logical candidate is AirPods Ultra, a name that’s surfaced consistently in supply chain and analyst reports over the past year.
Still, it’s worth keeping both possibilities open. Apple is reportedly developing smart glasses in parallel, and a single codename could theoretically belong to either product at this stage. What the code makes clear is that Apple is engineering a wearable — or wearables, plural — that capture visual data from around a user’s head and feed it into the same Visual Intelligence pipeline already running on the iPhone 15 Pro.
AirPods Ultra and the Visual Intelligence Play
Visual Intelligence is the feature that lets you point your iPhone’s camera at something — a restaurant, a dog breed, a circuit board — and have Siri pull up contextual information almost instantly. Apple introduced it as part of Apple Intelligence, and it’s currently accessible on iPhone 15 Pro and newer via a dedicated Siri mode inside the Camera app on iOS 27. It’s genuinely useful in a hand-held context. But the real value proposition expands dramatically once you remove the phone from the equation.
Imagine walking past a building and having information surface in your ear without reaching into your pocket. Or identifying a plant in your garden just by glancing at it while your hands are busy. That’s the use case Apple is apparently designing AirPods Ultra around, and it’s the same pitch Meta has been making for its Ray-Ban smart glasses — products that have sold in the millions and demonstrated genuine consumer appetite for hands-free AI-assisted vision.
Apple’s version would layer in Siri, Apple Maps data, and potentially integration with apps in ways that Meta’s current hardware can’t match. If Visual Intelligence on the iPhone is already good enough to identify obscure landmarks and read complex text, the same engine running from a sensor position next to your ear — with cameras pointing outward on both sides — could cover a wider field of view than a phone you’re holding at arm’s length.
The 2027 Timeline and What It Means
Bloomberg’s reporting, which has consistently been Apple’s most reliable external signal, has both AirPods Ultra and the smart glasses project pencilled in for late 2027. That’s a meaningful detail. It means whatever B790 is, it’s not imminent — but it’s also not vaporware. The fact that Visual Intelligence instruction sets for the device are already baked into an iOS 27 developer beta, released in mid-2026, suggests Apple’s software teams are well ahead of the hardware launch. That’s standard Apple practice: build the software stack early so it’s polished by the time the product ships.
Late 2027 also positions Apple carefully against the competitive landscape. Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses are already on their second generation and are reportedly getting a display upgrade. Google has confirmed it’s back in the smart glasses space after the spectacular misfire that was Google Glass. Samsung is rumoured to be working on its own camera-equipped wearable. Apple doesn’t want to be last to a category it didn’t invent — but it also won’t ship until the product is ready, a lesson the company learned the hard way with early Siri and, to some extent, the original HomePod’s market timing.
A Small File with a Large Implication
One JSON configuration file isn’t a product announcement. Apple has buried codenames in betas before that never materialized, got renamed, or shipped years later in a form nobody predicted. But B790 isn’t an idle reference — it comes attached to functional logic that describes how a real piece of hardware should process real visual data. That’s not placeholder code. That’s engineering in progress.
What’s increasingly clear is that Apple sees camera-equipped audio wearables as a natural next step in the AirPods line, not an entirely separate category. AirPods Ultra — if that’s what B790 turns out to be — would sit above the AirPods Pro in both price and capability, adding spatial awareness and Visual Intelligence to a product that’s already Apple’s most worn piece of hardware. For a company that’s been quietly building its AI infrastructure around on-device processing and privacy, earbuds that see the world around you are a more Apple-shaped bet than many observers initially assumed. The question now isn’t really whether it’s coming — it’s how much you’ll pay for the privilege of letting your AirPods look where you’re looking.
Source: MacRumors
