Can someone with first hand experience explain how are hearing aids different from in-eat headphones with passthrough? What's the technical difference?
I’m not an expert by I have worked with a hearing aid producer, though not directly with the signal processing. Roughly the thing is that hearing loss doesn’t just mean that you have for instance 30% reduced volume on your hearing. So just naively amplifying all sound won’t help you that much. What you need is to measure the hearing loss at different frequencies and then amplify those frequencies in the input signal. Now thats a very crude simplification and a lot more complex signal processing goes into the actual products based on things like making the signal source more clear for people with high frequency loss, since many people suffering from hearing loss will have issues in crowded spaces or conversations with multiple people because it’s not at easy for them to “tune out” notices unrelated to the person they are listening to.
Then of cause there a a bunch of things you can do to try to isolate typical “useful sounds” compare to environmental sounds.
Hope that helps a little to explain the difference. This is also why you can’t really have a hearing impairment aid without doing the assessment which it sounds like Apple can now do with just the AirPods and an iPhone, because it’s never just “tuning up the volume”
personally, knowing about how apple product development works, I have very little expectations for apple branded hearing aids being any good.
hearing aids are medical devices, not headphones with passthrough.
The tolerances of safety and robustness alone are worlds apart.
Think about it this way: if a pair of apple earpods break, you just buy another one.
If my hearing aids break, there is a very high possibility of death and dismemberment leading to termination of my life.
Also, I would never buy apple branded hearing aids except under the circumstances where Apple and the FDA come to agreement, contractually obligated by the US courts system, that if Apple decides to terminate that product line, that all information, patents, design schematics, and code are passed to a 2ndary company (it could be one of the current hearing aid manufacturers) for continued support.
There can absolutely be no instance where apple can decide to "lay off the department" and "turn off the update servers" and leave the product unusable, for the lifetime of the patient.
That's the real difference between hearing aids and headphones.
as with all medical equipment, your experience may not represent the experience of all who need hearing aids.
I use hearing aids, and without them, my workplace turns into a death zone.
Think about people working in public transportation with hearing disabilities.
Imagine if you are working in an Amazon warehouse where your hearing aid fails and you can't hear a mechanized forklift coming through, or you can't hear announcements pertaining to safety.
Even at regular office, I can't hear fire alarms without hearing aids so literally, if the hearing aids fail, and there are no flash alerts or smoke alerts, I'll just keep working through a fire alarm. Thankfully flash alerts are regulated and mandatory.
I maintain that if your workplace is this dangerous, your hearing aids aren't the problem. That mechanized forklift should have warning lights and safety cutoffs. It's extremely common for industrial workers to be wearing huge amounts of hearing protection; relying on audio for survival in the workplace is almost guaranteed to be an OSHA violation in one way or another.
