Do not believe everything you read on the Internet, as the saying goes, especially something that isn't rooted in hard facts and somehow ends up spreading on tech blogs like wildflower. It turns out that the wild rumor that Apple was creating earpods with biometric sensors included is bogus.
The earpods were supposed to rely on the lightning port and offer integrated heart rate as well as blood pressure measurments. Evidence of this was the fact Apple . They were also supposedly being developed with iBeacons included so if they get lost you can easily find them. However, all of these claims turned out to be a spoof.
New details has been uncovered of how this rumor spread and where it originated. It turns out that a post on an anonymous sharing app, called Secret, was sent with this info:
"Apple's new EarPods will have sensors in them, for heart rate & blood pressure. Also iBeacons so they don't get lost. They will require the lightning port, it's why the audio jack was moved to the bottom."
The author of this anonymous post revealed it was a hoax, meant as a joke, through this Tumblr story.
"I made it up, writes the author. "I wrote it 5 minutes after I woke up on the 1st of may. I was blurry eyed, I had a headache, I was using the toilet and worrying about my blood pressure."
It seems the author's creativity got the better of him or her as she or he used Secret as an outlet to make her friends laugh.
"Because of the way Secret works, your posts only go to your friends and so I've been posting stuff there to try and give my friends a laugh," the author of the post said. "I like jokes and funny ideas and so Twitter and Secret are great for this kind of stuff."
This joke shows just how quickly interesting ideas, rumors, or statements can spread online via blogs and social networks. It shows that viral marketing or viral content works and that even fake stories or rumors can take off if it seems plausable enough. What was interesting about this rumor is that it coincides with a lot of plausability on Apple's part. Apple does have patents in place, for instance, for integrated sensors with tracking performance metrics.
The author cites he or she came clean because someone may get in trouble within the company by being wrongly blamed for leaking information, despite not being the culprit at all. However, it is said that this is the silly season for Apple rumors and we should expect many new ones before WWDC, which is roughly a month aways.
Even if this turns out to be a rumor, do not count Apple out from releasing such a product or turning an idea into a reality. Stranger things have happened in Cupertino.
