In this week's Sunday Reboot, the AirPods Pro with cameras are probably the best alternative to smart glasses that Apple could've come up with. Sunday Reboot is a weekly column covering some of the lighter stories within the Apple reality distortion field from the past seven days. All to get the next week underway with a good first step.

Confirmed and capable: AirPods Pro with cameras. There have been rumors about a new breed of AirPods Pro in development at Apple for quite some time. Personal audio devices that somehow dealt with visual elements, not just sound.

The rumors said that Apple was coming up with AirPods Pro with built-in cameras to capture images of the local environment. All to feed data into your iPhone's Visual Intelligence so you can ask queries about your local environment. This isn't entirely out of pocket for Apple, really.

We have got heart rate tracking in AirPods Pro 3, as well as some models of Beats earbuds too. Adding extra sensors in earbuds wasn't hard to believe. That they would be sophisticated enough to read the outside world and to transfer that data to your iPhone, was a tiny bit of a stretch.

While we knew through the rumor mill that they were being worked on in some capacity, we didn't know just how far along the idea had progressed. Cue a leak from Apple itself seemingly confirming they exist. A video in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate gave a demonstration of what the earwear could feasibly do.

Admittedly, the ones shown looked like normal AirPods Pro, and could easily be used as placeholders in the video without revealing the real hardware. However, based on the angle, it could mean the sensor is positioned in the tip where the microphone is usually placed. The video itself showed a person looking at a book, getting [PERSON_NAME] to recognize the cover, and then to save it for later.

We can probably expect a lot more potential capability from it, but it's not a bad explanation that they have some form of imaging sensor onboard. In the days that followed, more capabilities were raised, again from macOS. It was able to capture left and right-paired images, namely images from each AirPods Pro camera, and combine them into images seen by Visual Intelligence.

The stereoscopic view could give Visual Intelligence data about distance, which may give Apple's AI more of an idea of where things are in the world, relatively speaking. They would also be able to compensate for head movements and have passive and active modes. Impressively, the AirPods may even be able to process some of the data onboard instead of letting the iPhone handle it.

Capable, but not too privacy-breaking. There's the obvious issue of privacy, as we have seen with practically all other smart glasses that have ever been created. Cameras on an item that seemingly hides them could lead to weird perverted behavior.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it, but the AirPods Pro with cameras will get the same sort of outrage over everyone's sacred right to privacy. To be fair, it's a justifiable outcry, but one that probably won't be as much of a problem for Apple. For a start, the paired images will just be up to 1 megapixel in size, versus 12MP photos and 3D video on the Meta Ray-Ban glasses.

Someone actually wearing Me...