Apple might roll out a pair of wireless earbuds packed with extended battery life, a source from inside the company points out.
The insider notes that the most plausible time for the unveiling of the new product is September, as Apple is already preparing to showcase its newest generation of iPhones at the beginning of the month. Rumors have surfaced for some time now that the latest generation iPhone will renounce the 3.5 mm headphone jack.
According to the source cited by Forbes, the wireless earbuds, which are yet to receive a name, have been in development for a "few years."
The biggest challenge manufacturers are facing when crafting wireless earbuds is the same with all wearable devices: battery capacity. According to the recent report, Apple will employ technology from Passif Semiconductor, a specialist in power efficient chipsets that Apple bought three years ago.
It comes to little surprise that Apple is building a set of Bluetooth-capable headphones, as all major tech players are toying with side projects that may or may not reach the shelves or get embedded into the main products of the company. However, Apple using in-house technology to develop the new device is entirely plausible.
What the company usually does is it tries to buy advanced components from quality suppliers, such as Qualcomm. When the solution is not available outside the enterprise, Apple puts its resources to work and asks its own engineering team to build said components.
Despite the high cost and resource-intensive process that designing, fabricating, testing and producing computer chips yields, the strategy grants the company high-quality parts that make it a global leader in tech. A good example for this is the A-series chips that stand behind the chassis of the iOS devices.
When it comes to wireless earbuds, Apple dabbled into the product class before. The company has a lot of experience and know-how about cramming audio wireless technology in incredibly tiny designs. The iPhone Bluetooth Headset, which fluked, and the Beats models, which are massively popular, are such examples.
At its upcoming event in the fall, Apple is rumored to release a couple of novel iPhone handsets. The September release will probably take place sometime at the beginning of the month, and the new variant of phones will be slightly different from previous models. In 2016, Apple is believed to stay faithful to the design language that iPhone 6 brought on in 2014.
It remains to be seen if the company will indeed ditch the iPhone's 3.5mm headphone jack, leading the way to a Lightning-to-audio adaptor or an all-wireless audio solution.
"If the headphone jack is removed, we estimate that shift to Bluetooth to become more accelerated," says Ben Arnold, an analyst with NPD.
