Appleâs spent a lot of time investigating alternative ways of interacting with its devices, but one of my favorite is one of the newest: head gestures with AirPods.
If youâre not familiar with this feature, introduced in iOS 18, it allows to you use a head nod (up and down) or a shake (side to side) as substitutions for OK and Cancel. For example, you can answer or decline a phone call, reply to or dismiss a notification or message. It works with both the AirPods Pro 2 and the AirPods 4 line.
I love this feature. Is it a little silly at times? Sure. But there are plenty of occasions where I canât easily get to my phone or Apple Watchâsay Iâm carrying things in both hands, or wearing glovesâand I donât necessarily want to talk to Siri. Nodding and shaking my head is second nature, and I like the audio feedback the AirPods provide to encourage the gesture. Could it be a little better? Sure; at times I feel that I have to move my head somewhat too vigorously, which probably looks a bit comical. (More so than talking to Siri? Probably not.) But I also have faith that the machine learning algorithm Apple is no doubt using to detect these movements will be refined with time.
What I wish, though, is that there were more options for gestures. For example, Iâd love the ability to change volume or move back and forth through music tracks using a head gestureâsay tilting my head to the right to increase, tilt my head to the left to decrease. I appreciate that the AirPods Pro 2 have the ability to slide your fingers up and down to adjust volume, but I find those controls finicky at times, especially while wearing gloves in the cold of winter. The same goes for using the Digital Crown on my Apple Watchâif itâs even on the right screen for it. More often than not, I just try to hit my phoneâs volume button while itâs inside my pocket, which isnât much better.
As an Apple Watch Series 7 user, I havenât gotten to really try out the gestures there, but I have briefly used the hand gestures Apple added in visionOS 2 and found those to be winners. As Apple continues to develop these platforms and add more sensors to its devices, I expect these kind of alternative interactions to only increase, and I, for one, am here for it.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the sci-fi spy thriller The Armageddon Protocol, is out now.]
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