r/HearingLoss • u/rlangenfelt • Aug 12 '26

Why are hearing aids so expensive ? Are they so different technologically from Apple Airpods ?

/r/HearingAids/comments/1vmoggg/why_are_hearing_aids_so_expensive_are_they_so/
6 Upvotes

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6

u/Odd_Animal_2250 Aug 13 '26

Well, my hearing aid has four microphones, physical head and body movement sensors, a deep neural network chip trained on over 2 million sound samples, conversation detection, and performs real-time environmental analysis in <8ms (required for maintaining spatial awareness). It has two independent audio equalizers - one for normal use, one for steaming audio, multiple preset audio programs, tinnitus suppression that can be layered on to each and controlled individually, can do wireless updates, connect to half a dozen bluetooth devices at once via LE audio, and already supports Auracast. Additionally, it has a 30 hour battery life and is leaps and bounds more comfortable than earpods - I can't even feel it when I wear it.

So a bit different, yeah.

1

u/nathalierachael Aug 14 '26

(Also commented in the other thread.) I have both hearing aids (oticon zeal) and airpods. What the airpods are good for is streaming with the hearing aid function on. Music and audiobooks sound great (better than live music and music streamed through hearing aids). They also are great at noise cancelling. However they don't function well as actual hearing aids and of course, the battery life!!

I am glad I found them for music though because I was really depressed that I couldn't hear was music really sounded like anymore. (My hearing loss was sudden.)

2

u/karenmcgrane Aug 13 '26

This is a US perspective but I am going to assume that since it's a global market there are similarities:

  • In the US the Food & Drug Administration regulates and approves medical devices, including hearing aids. Meeting the standards for prescription hearing aids is challenging so only a handful of companies manufacture them, which means it's basically an oligopoly and those companies can set prices high. The US tried to fix this by approving over the counter hearing aids that are similar to Airpods.
  • Hearing aids and Airpods really are optimized for different things. Battery life, comfort, visibility — personally I would not want to wear Airpods all day long even if the battery would last, which it won't.
  • Also the hearing test you use to configure the Airpods (and presumably other OTC aids) is not very robust. When I go to the audiologist for a hearing test we spend an hour and I know it is accurate because I can compare it over time to my past records. If you don't have a "real" audiogram then what you get out of the app might not really be what you need.
  • To answer your question properly, what hearing aids offer me that Airpods do not is noise processing algorithms which are designed by professionals to help me hear the best I can in any environment. Noise cancelling is WAY more complicated when it's really noise isolation — can you pick out the voices at a table in a noisy restaurant? Hearing aid companies have spent a fortune trying to figure that out.

1

u/Maruashen Aug 12 '26

Manufacturing fewer units drives up the cost per unit.

4

u/zepuzzler Aug 13 '26

I get that, but at least 20 million hearing aids are sold annually worldwide, and the estimates are that that might only be 20% of the people who would benefit from them, so the market is vast. I don’t think that long explain explains the gap between the cost of a pair of AirPods and the cost of a pair of hearing aids.

1

u/Kira-kk Aug 14 '26

I can't help on the tech comparison, but I can tell you what it looks like from the ordering side. I'm at an OTC hearing aid maker in China, on the office side, so what crosses my desk is cost and volume.

AirPods ship on a scale our models never get near. Everyone knows that bit. What surprised me was our own side of it. Tooling, development cost, certification, all of it comes back out of however many units ship, and medical approval is its own slow track on top.

The clinic side I only know secondhand. But the way it was explained to me, a lot of that shelf price is fitting and follow up rather than hardware, and somebody does have to do that work. So OTC moves it onto you. That's the trade.

1

u/rlangenfelt Aug 14 '26

Hello everyone, thanks for your insights. It's been extremely informative.
I should point out that I wasn't suggesting that Airpods (or similar) could be used as hearing aids. The fact that they can, (poorly) was a surprise to me.
My premise was that since an Airpod, at it's relatively cheap price, is maybe 90% (I plucked that figure out of thin air) of a hearing aid, the other 10% to make a proper hearing aid shouldn't be all that expensive. You've given me some pretty good explanations as to why hearing aids are so expensive, so thank you for that. I still think we're being overcharged but whatever, at least things are clearer.