Airpods Live Translation Blocked for EU Users with EU Apple Accounts
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Apple's AirPods live translation feature is blocked for EU users with EU Apple accounts, sparking debate about the impact of EU regulations on innovation and consumer experience.
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(I live in NYC where the mix of languages is thick, but I rarely have to reach even for my Spanish, because English is still commonly understood everywhere, at least to some degree.)
That kindly old man making noodles behind the counter on that restaurant you frequent off Canal St? The one that always has a stoic face and never says a word? He doesn’t speak any English, but try chatting with him in Mandarin and he’ll talk your ear off with his life story.
Perhaps the regulations treat is as if you’re “recording” the person you’re speaking with, without their consent?
The audio is captured by the outward facing microphones used for active noise cancellations. That’s why it only works for AirPods Pro 2, 3 and AirPods 4 with ANC. That wouldn’t just work with any headphones.
Even the AirPods Pro 2 will need a firmware update. They won’t work with just any old headphones and seeing that even the AirPods Pro 2 need a firmware update tells me that it is something they are doing with their H2 chip in their headphones in concert with the iPhone.
That it only works with AirPods is just Apple discriminating in favour of their own product which is exactly what the EU was going after.
But their $60 ANC headphones with cheap audio processing hardware in the headphones aren’t going to be sufficient.
They may even be able to use the exposed models on the phone.
The equivalent feature on Android tells me it would. I mean it already does technically.
Are we supposed to treat Apple being late to the party as usual as some kind of exceptional thing only them could do?
https://support.google.com/googlepixelbuds/answer/7573100?hl...
Which are the same price as Apple’s AirPods with ANC.
So Google also didn’t try to support the feature with generic earbuds.
But I mean, you are free to buy overpriced Apple headphones which sounds worse than Sony, only properly works paired with an Apple phone or laptop and whose killer feature was available on their competitors buds years ago if that rocks your boat.
Maybe, maybe not. Assuming Apple's motivation isn't pure self-dealing, it's very consistent with Apple's behavior to forbid or impede doing things that are absolutely possible but sometimes result in a sub-par experience.
I dislike Apple's malicious compliance with the EU too, but it seems unrelated here, at least without any proof.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws
As this is HackerNews, you should expect to see at least a couple commenters who believe they should have control over devices they own, including interoperability without artificial, anticompetitive limitations.
Not really. They are complying by not offering features that would be considered anti-competitive. It’s not untoward, it’s just following their interpretation of the law. We obviously don’t know the discussions between Apple and the EC, but in public it’s American nerds who are complaining that the EU is bad.
It is my understanding that this is what apple has chosen to do in areas where this iOS feature is available. Is that not the case?
This isn’t the first time that Apple has been withholding features from the EU without ever providing a clear and understandable explanation, so there isn’t much basis for giving them the benefit of the doubt.
So Apple is throwing a huge tantrum and withholding features from the EU to act like this is a much bigger deal than it is. This gives Apple a lot more bargaining room after the EU bitch slapped them.
Apple likely already has an API they could enable and be done with this. They won't do that. Apple needs exclusivity with new feature releases because they don't do things all that well anymore(Siri, maps, etc, nobody uses those because there are better alts available on ios).
But yeah Apple is just starting way to the extreme so they have more room to bargain. Hopefully the EU sees through this, again, and doesn't budge.
>Apple needs exclusivity with new feature releases because they don't do things all that well anymore(Siri, maps, etc, nobody uses those because there are better alts available on ios).
Siri was okay for a very brief window after release and then dreadful ever since and Apple Maps was never good, but has gotten better. Etc maybe more valid idk
I mean they absolutely are especially as EU regulators categorically refuse to review anything in advance just in-case their get a budget shortfalls and need to go looking for fines.
If I were Apple, I'd say you got what you want EU, it works on ALL earphones in EU. But it will be absolutely terribly shitty because we will use the same model trained for our AirPods on your random headphones.
You're using a third party BLE airtag and clicking on UWB? Enjoy tracking this approximate noisy location that we're basing off of some noise pattern we didn't lock on.
Feature provided, just not well. Goes against Apple's ethos of trying to make things polished but don't let some bureaucrats weaponize that against you.
The issue arises when Apple leverages their position as gatekeeper to anticompetitively preference their own headphones in the iPhone/iOS ecosystem. Can't do that.
> If I were Apple, I'd say you got what you want EU, it works on ALL earphones in EU. But it will be absolutely terribly shitty because we will use the same model trained for our AirPods on your random headphones.
The problem for Apple is that they have no secret sauce here: absent any ratfuckery, it would probably work just as well with competing headsets, if not better (particularly since many of Apple's competitors' headsets have better sound quality, better microphone quality, and better noise cancellation). That's probably why they aren't taking your suggestion and are instead choosing anticompetitive behavior.
Yeah, I'd believe it. There is a good chance that is very much the case here.
For reference, we are seeing it more and more - sensor design changes to improve loss curve performance - there’s even a term being bandied about : “AI-friendly sensor design”. This does have a nasty side effect of basically breaking abstraction - but that’s the price you pay for using the bitter lesson and letting the model come up with features instead of doing it yourself. (Basically - the sensor->computer abstraction eats details the RL could use to infer stuff)
audio goes into mic => STT engine => translation model => TTS engine => audio comes out of speaker
a change in hardware would be a change in the "audio goes into mic" component of the model, which is not the critical part of the model.
All the parts of the above architecture already exist: we already have mics, STT, translation models, TTS, and speakers, and they all worked on other systems before apple even announced this, much less came up with a redesign. Most likely the redesign is aesthetic or just has slightly better sound transmission or reception – none of those were necessary for the functioning of the above architecture in other, non-apple systems.
I am, of course, assuming apple's architecture is a rough approximation of above. An alternative theoretical architecture might resemble the one below, but I have seen no evidence apple is doing this.
audio goes into mic => direct audio-to-audio translation model => audio comes out of speaker
If we were using Whisper in that pipeline, we could for example generate speaker embeddings for each segment whisper generates, then group by matching the speaker embeddings - and in reality, this doesn't really work all that well.
But we are still left with the question of _WHO_ to feed to the translation model - so, ideally, the person facing us or talking at us - so we'd have to classify the 3 people all talking to each other given their angle in relation to the listener's head, etc.. This is what the diarization model would have to do - and the more sophisticated diarization models certainly could use the precise angle input can only be computed if you have super-close timings.
For example, maybe Apple purposefully trained the model to not only optimizing working with AirPods, but to optimize not working with any other input devices? If Apple could be in trouble if it became known they did such specific training, could it also mean there is the potential for them to have legal issues due the potential for them to have done such?
(I think we can also make a similar argument when it comes to the hardware being made to optimally run one specific model and possible allegations it doesn't run other models as well.)
If the government doesn't crack down on this sort of behavior, a company could use it to try to meet the legal requirements technically while also still hurting competitors. But if the government does crack down on it, then a company could be caught up under an accusation of doing this even if they didn't (they just didn't care to optimize for competitors at all, but never negatively optimized for them either).
Alternatively it might have something to do with the translation being performed in iOS, and the capability not being exposed to competitor audio devices, and therefore Apple needs assurance the EU won't consider it anticompetitive?
Or both.
I recently explored building a real-time STT system for sales calls to support cold-calling efforts. However, the consensus from my research was that, even if audio is streamed live without storage, consent laws could still present significant hurdles.
Common sense says that a recording that only exists for a few seconds, and is utilized only by the person a speaker is intending to speak to, and is never permanently stored, should be fine. And we can assume Apple has made sure this is legal in its home state of California.
But EU law might not have sufficient legal clarity on this if it was written in a particularly open-ended way.
You have to specify usage however. Which is what most companies bark about because they want to store things for later use and unknown purpose. Which is frowned upon. You also need to protect personal data adequately which is deliberately vague. Storing it unencrypted for instance is not considered adequate. This also applies in transit.
Even in a two party state public spaces are fair game. The Constitution supersedes state law.
You’re probably thinking about warrantless recordings of conversations and the reasonable expectation of privacy requirement. This doesn’t apply here.
Also, the US Constitution does constrain private actors, all the time. It bans slavery for a very simple example.
The constitutional view of the 13th Amendment is that it withdrew from government the power to promulgate or enforce laws that allowed slavery to exist. If a slave escaped after the 13th Amendment passed, the government then lacked the power to assist the former slaveholder in capturing and returning him. Similarly, without the power to enforce property rights, there became effectively no property interest in a slave.
If I tried to draw up an indentured servitude contract, what federal or state laws would explicitly forbid enforcing it myself? If state laws, do all states have equivalent laws?
[1]: https://www.freedomforum.org/recording-in-public/
How do you self-enforce an indentured servitude contract? Or any contract, for that matter? Only a court can compel performance or restitution for a breach of contract.
It won't. Regulations permit sound recording, as long as it's not stored. Speech-to-text and hearing aids for disabled people are an example of permitted uses.
Or even more likely, as others have suggested, it’s Apple being petty and withholding features from EU users to put pressure on the EU.
The EU has threatened massive fines for creating features not available to competitors. And the EU refuses to vet a feature officially in advance.
Under such conditions, how would you distinguish being petty from complying with the law?
The EU probably imagined the outcome would be: change your business practices entirely for the EU, and make all new features open to all, immediately, perpetually, everywhere.
But that's not the norm for the vast majority of companies, for a variety of sensible reasons. Given that it's actually hard to do that, witholding new features until you're told "yes this is ok" is a rational response to the law.
Waiting the way you describe only makes sense if they think the implementation probably follows the law, but they're not sure it will be accepted. We could make that argument for privacy rules, we can't in good faith make that argument for interoperability rules.
The law does not say you must make all features available in the EU. Generally speaking business regulations don't force companies to offer services. They instead regulate how the service can be offered if offered.
The hidden downside of regulation is a lot of stuff doesn't get built. It's just normally not so visible, but software is distributed worldwide so we can see the effect.
You misread me.
"it" in the phrase "they need to make it available to all headsets in the EU" was referring to features they release in the EU.
So yes you're interpreting the law right, and so am I.
> The hidden downside of regulation is a lot of stuff doesn't get built. It's just normally not so visible, but software is distributed worldwide so we can see the effect.
If the deciding factor in whether something gets built is whether they can lock it to another product, it's usually okay for that thing to not be built.
In this case, they obviously did build it. So now it's a matter of figuring out what the hold up is.
If it's because they don't want to, even though it would make them money and make people in the EU happy, then that's pettiness.
Now there's a difference between building a feature and building interoperability. You have to actually work at it. And if you rush to do so on every feature:
1. You may modify features you didn't need to
2. You open yourself up to other countries demanding specific software changes
The simplest thing is just to make one version for the world, and wait for an ok. Big downsides to either rushing to release as is or rushing to make a change you may not need to make.
I think that whether or not they built the thing does not matter.
The way Apple and others misuse their market position to get away with anything is ridiculous. At a certain size or influence you shouldn't be both a platform for other companies and products and a participant in that platform while giving yourself all sorts of advantages.
Airpods are decent but they have most of their market share due to the massive integration gap from competitors. So shit it's impossible for anyone to compete.
Do the relevant provider-agnostic Bluetooth audio standards (in USB they’d be class devices, not sure on Bluetooth terminology) have equivalent features that Apple is refusing to just implement? I think it’s reasonable to ask Apple to support interoperability standards once the industry settles on them, but it seems weird to incentivize them to create bespoke standards that they control in an effort to reduce their market power.
I’m fine with apple looking to exit the market and/or harm their product rather than comply.
A missing fringe feature won't drive fans of the eco system away.
It's not clear to me to what extent you disagreed with what I wrote. But, on this point I should point out that every time Apple holds back a feature citing the DMA there is much complaint in Europe.
So regardless of what you think it seems a lot of people do care. You appear to have a better understanding of the law: Apple can bring in a feature if all can use it or they can withhold the feature.
Or is it powered entirely by local models?
> Live Translation is integrated into Messages, FaceTime, and Phone to help users communicate across languages, translating text and audio on the fly.1 Live Translation is enabled by Apple-built models that run entirely on device, so users’ personal conversations stay personal.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-elevates-the-ip...
Voicemail greetings typically inform the caller the message will be recorded, and there'a often a beep which is an indicator of recording as well. If you don't consent to recording, you can hang up without leaving a message.
For anything remotely powerful enough, iOS will have to send voice to some server for processing and that’s a privacy shit show.
EU has defined Apple (but not Google(!)) as a "digital gatekeeper" and thus Apple has to comply to pretty much any part of their system being replaced with a 3rd party alternative.
So if they bring this system in, something which is listening to people real time and using online AI models to translate things, EU might force them to let _any_ 3rd party AI replace it.
And when someone installs TotallyHonest Co. AI to replace it and there's a massive data leak where they just stored every conversation as-is in an open S3 bucket, who gets the PR flak on HN? Apple, EU or TotallyHonest? The headlines will have "Apple" in them to drive clicks and TotallyHonest is maybe mentioned in the 3rd paragraph, which nobody will read or remember.
The only winning move is not to play.
Because unbeknownst to many, e.g., just because someone is in your home does not mean they do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy even in spaces that are common, i.e., not the bathroom, e.g., a house cleaner or maybe a contractor or even a guest talking while you are not in the room.
This generally only applies to the voice recording, not the video itself.
I have been a bit surprised that some enterprising attorneys with a hunger for getting rich have not jumped on this matter already. Because you, the owner may have consented to being recorded by an always-on listening device, but your family members or your guests will likely not have done so. Or, even if some slick corporate attorney got you to agree to take on responsibility for notifying everyone as is necessary in each jurisdiction, that makes you even, legally speaking, knowingly engaging in felonious activity.
Could you explain what you mean? The following article lists Alphabet as a gatekeeper.
https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en
> So if they bring this system in, something which is listening to people real time and using online AI models to translate things, EU might force them to let _any_ 3rd party AI replace it.
If you allow the third party to do that, yes.
> And when someone installs TotallyHonest Co. AI to replace it and there's a massive data leak where they just stored every conversation as-is in an open S3 bucket, who gets the PR flak on HN?
I see this argument often, as often as I hear about leaks. Do you have an instance where Apple was blamed for a leak from a third party? I never heard anybody blaming Apple for Tea app leaks for a recent example, and it is still available on App Store.
Also, an alternative translation app does not have to be provided by a totally random third party vendor. Companies that to me are just as trustworthy as Apple surely will provide alternatives too - Google, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft or Anthropic.
So I really don't see what's your point here. Don't install the alternatives if you don't trust them.
Even though quite literally every single piece of major western technology is assembled in Foxconn factories.
It's purely because dissing Apple brings clicks and people arguing on comment sections and social media posts.
--
And about 3rd party translation AI systems. Of course _I_ won't install suspicious ones, but how do you make sure Auntie Liz won't? If you provide an option to do so, grifters will get less tech literate folks to install any kind of crapware.
Apple chose Foxconn. It won't get to choose the third parties implementing alternative translation apps. That's the point.
I see that I wasn't specific, but I thought it's obvious given the context.
> And about 3rd party translation AI systems. Of course _I_ won't install suspicious ones, but how do you make sure Auntie Liz won't?
I think you are switching topics from allowing other vendors to use Apple-only APIs to "sideloading".
Educate her. (yes, that's not Apple's responsibility, and they don't even try. We need people to understand what applications can do when installed on a smartphone or a computer. It's a national education issue IMO). If she can't take care of herself anymore - parental controls.
I see the point in having some entity verify legitimacy of applications, but it does not need to be only Apple/Google, like with TLS.
You are also allowed to record and film in any public space.
If there were real issues with GDPR or the AI Act Apple would have nothing to lose and everything to gain by mentioning at least the generalities of _why_. But they did no such thing so we can only assume it is not any of those things which are the real issues.
Really? You can't imagine any reasons Apple wouldn't want to have a public PR battle about its disagreements with its primary regulator in the market? Have you ever worked with the government?
But for this translation feature they have not even mentioned any regulatory issues, so we should from conclude, from previous and current behaviour, that Apple is delaying for something else. Probably engineering or political reasons.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2025/09/12/apple-delays-iphone-air...
You have no source for this claim.
You've not given the person being recorded any way to exercise their legal rights around collecting, inspecting and deleting their data.
GDPR is aimed at companies building user databases, not allowing them to completely ignore security, accuracy, user complaints, and sell anything to anybody while lying about it. It doesn't limit individual people's personal use of data.
The rest is correct: the restrictions are aimed at organisations, not individuals.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj/eng#art_4.tit_...
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/domestic-cctv-usi...
"If your CCTV system captures images of people outside the boundary of your private domestic property – for example, from neighbours’ homes or gardens, shared spaces, or from public areas – then the GDPR and the DPA will apply to you. You will need to ensure your use of CCTV complies with these laws. If you do not comply with your data protection obligations you may be subject to appropriate regulatory action by the ICO, as well as potential legal action by affected individuals."
You, as an individual, have data protection obligations, if your ring doorbell captures audio/video about someone outside your property boundaries. The apple translation service seems analogous.
This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity and thus with no connection to a professional or commercial activity.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj/eng#rct_18
GDPR is aimed at protecting _individual's_ personal information, irrespective of what or who is collecting or processing it.
You could always put environmental audio through Whisper, attain audio trance crypt at 51010 per cent Word error rate, put that transcript through machine translation, and finally TTS. Or you can put audio directly through multimodal LLM for marginal improvements, I guess, but ASR error rate as well as automatic cleanup performance don't seem to have improved significantly after OpenAI Whisper was released.
Was this post the output of such a pipeline, by chance?
But honestly, I do not believe GDPR is the reason here. Apple is also very privacy focused.
GDPR does grant it rights to EU citizens everywhere in the world but also other nation citizens in EU. I personally like GDPR a lot but I understand that people are complaining about this part
Meta glasses also: https://www.meta.com/help/ai-glasses/955732293123641
but how would these airpods really be able to know you're in the EU? this should be easily hackable
As part of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) evaluation [0], Apple was found to operate a market for headphones connected to its devices, while competing in the same market with own products and giving itself a competitive advantage by creating OS-features exclusive to them.
The EU found this is not a level playing field for competition and ordered that they have to make such OS features available for other accessory manufacturers as well.
I guess they are currently either trying to make a case for the EU on how it is technically impossible to provide the feature to others, prove that this is somehow not an OS-feature (and should be excluded) or delay any action to maximize the benefit of this competitive advantage in other markets.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are also beats headphones in the pipeline for which they want to use this feature as competitive USP...
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
As an example, when they were compelled to allow competing browser engines, they didn't open source Safari; they added a multiprocessing/JIT API to iOS (tailored and restricted by policy to browsers). Competitors (web browsers) got access to the OS features (multiprocessing/JIT) that they needed to compete with Apple's product (Safari), but they didn't get access to the product itself and still need to build their own.
In this case, competitors (device makers) might request access to the OS feature (background execution) that they need to compete with Apple's product (live translation on AirPods).
It should also be noted that such functionality only has to be provided if explicitly requested by a developer who is working on a competing product, so they don't have to develop it preemptively.
I'm not saying that this is completely fair or whatever, just that I don't think it's quite as extreme as people are making it out to be?
So if I'm Samsung, wouldn't I explicitly request every possible bit of functionality I could force Apple to provide, even if the "competing product" might very slow to market?
I think this situation also shows a strong divide between two visions of Apple end-game (and I think both exist within the company): exposing those APIs makes the Apple ecosystem better as a whole, with its satellite accessories/app developers; while keeping them private gives them an edge as a hardware selling company. Personally, I prefer when Apple embraces its gatekeeper status.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/translation/transl... [1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech [2]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/speec...
As a Mac user since 2007 and iPhone user since 2009, this behavior of Apple disgusts me. (Yes, I know - vote with your wallet. I switched from Apple Watch Ultra to Garmin Fenix and do have a Pixel with GrapheneOS.)
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