How The Airpods 3 Were Made - And How Apple Plans To Make Them Even Better

We sat down with Gary Geaves, Apple's VP of Acoustics, to talk all things AirPods 3

While there's every chance that you're not familiar with Gary Geaves, millions of people across the world know his work. As VP of Acoustics at Apple, he leads the team that is largely responsible for all of Apple's audio products - and, for that matter, the audio components in products such as iPhones and iPads.

It's always a pleasure to speak to the fabulously enthusiastic Geaves, and What Hi-Fi? jumped at the opportunity to take a deep dive into the development of the AirPods 3 with him and Eric Treski from the Product Marketing Team. It quickly became clear that much of the work in designing the new AirPods 3 revolved around trying to solve problems inherent in the brief to come up with a true-wireless in-ear headphone that crams into its tiny form next-gen tech such as Spatial Audio, and ups the sound quality ante without resorting to a burrowing or noise-isolating design. Geaves and his team went to great lengths to overcome the obstacles presented, as we shall see.

So, who is Gary Geaves?

The man leading the team behind such a tiny, envelope-pushing device as the AirPods has a background in the British hi-fi industry, most notably at Bowers & Wilkins, but before that Geaves studied computational acoustics. He joined Apple about ten years ago to, as he puts it, get more focus on audio.

We last met Geaves on a tour of his team's labs in Cupertino right around the launch of the first (now discontinued) HomePod in 2018. We got a clear sense of the obsessive nature of Apple's Acoustics Team during that visit. It's of course no surprise that Apple has loads of money to throw around, but the people we met and the facilities we saw suggested a serious appetite for acoustic problem-solving. That's a very good thing considering the problems presented by the AirPods 3.

The challenges of non-burrowing earphones