This week, I saw an old friend, and he caught me up on what he’d been up to over the summer. He and his girlfriend had visited family in Arizona. His niece dragged him to a screening of Lilo and Stitch. He was working hard at a new startup. He said all of this in Spanish, a language I have never learned, but I followed every word.

I understood him because I was wearing the new Apple earbuds. The $US250 ($378) AirPods Pro 3 use artificial intelligence to do real-time translations, their most significant new feature. The earphones, which have slightly better noise cancellation, are otherwise not that different from the last iteration.