AirPods Pro 2

• iOS 18.2 is expected to launch fully next week, December 9
• The Hearing Test feature is coming to the UK, and other countries
• Hearing Aid Mode only appears to be coming to the UAE this time

Apple has released the final release candidate for iOS 18.2, which means the much-awaited iPhone update is about to launch for everybody rather than just beta testers. The good news is that the useful Hearing Test feature, which helps you detect any suspected hearing loss, is coming to more countries – including the UK. However, the bad news is that this doesn’t include the actual hearing aid mode in most of these countries – just the test.

According to Apple’s release notes, the new hearing aid mode is indeed coming – but only to users in the UAE. While the update brings “support for the Hearing Test feature on AirPods Pro 2 in Cyprus, Czechia, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Romania, Spain, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom” it’s only bringing the hearing aid mode to the United Arab Emirates.

We tried the AirPods Pro 2’s hearing aid mode, which is available to users in the US thanks to FDA approval, and it’s a very impressive update. Hopefully it will come to more countries following respective regulatory approvals, but there’s no clear schedule for that, so we have to stick with “hopefully” for now.

What to expect from iOS 18.2

I’ve been using the various iOS 18.2 betas for a while, and the headline features are all around Apple Intelligence. Or at least, they are if you have the iPhone 16 or iPhone 16 Pro models, or the iPhone 15 Pro models. Other iPhones haven’t been invited to the Apple Intelligence party.

What that means in practice is a mix of useful and, to me, useless features – these include the gimmicky AI image generator Image Playground, custom emoji generation, and the occasionally handy Clean Up option in the Photos app.

There’s also ChatGPT support, summarisation of Mail and Messages notifications, Visual Intelligence to carry out an image search based on what your camera’s pointing at, and the two-stage shutter mode for the iPhone 16’s new camera button. The Music and TV apps get natural language search, and there are improvements to Find My too.

The release candidate is available now, and unless any earth-shattering bugs are discovered in it we’d expect to see the full release next week, most likely on Monday. It’ll be launched alongside new updates for iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, visionOS and the HomePod software too.

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Contributor

Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, is on sale now and her next book, about pop music, is out in 2025. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind.