Wonderful, this market has been out of whack for a while. They've been sold like a medical device instead of a piece of technology, 5-10x markup. Having fittings and prescriptions done in-store induces learned helplessness and is an excuse for cartel pricing, just like with eyeglasses.
Lower price is good but I'm looking forward to the variety of hearing aids and the improvements to them that are bound to happen.
Apple has been interested in getting into the health space. This is a perfect new product for them. The only problem I see is that the market might be too small to make a difference in their profits.
AirPods Pro essentially function as hearing aids already, with their "transparency mode" which routes sound from the microphone to the speakers. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if they'd eventually make a "hearing aid mode" which lets you calibrate the volume and frequency response to more appropriately fit a person's individual hearing issues.
I very highly doubt it: They cannot very well have people's hearing aids fail to work if some sort of doom destroys the phone.
It is probably simply that it isn't so absolutely difficult for Apple to start making these. The company is already experienced in making small electronics, earbuds, and things like this.
They know how to make feedback-based sound equalization via their latest generations of airpods. This bit is very important for adapting the devices to the hearing loss profiles of patients.
This is what made them extremely expensive for a good part of their history. Adaptability and auto-adaptability.
Also, they're very small electronics for what they do.
I love hating on Apple as much as the next guy, but I doubt that would happen. They'd probably have some fancy features that could only be controlled from Apple devices, but surely none of the core functionality.
Not everyone needs to be specially fitted but every hearing aid is priced as such. I know I'd like to try the lower end of the spectrum before I decide I need a specialized hearing aid.
I have a stellar pair of four-driver custom molds from Alclair. Including mild-taking, costs were around $700 all-in. Your $2500 figure seems very high, unless your “good” means “absolute top of the market”.
Fitting is $100-$200. Then you can expend 200-1500 in your in-ear monitors depending on what you want, and the ones that are in the $300 range are already pretty good sounding.
Of course, the same as with headphones, you can spend $5K, 6K or even 10K in some top of the line planar magnetic whatever Audeze, Stax or Hifiman, but really, you don't need them.
Think also about the economy of scale. Hearing aids are more common than hi-fi high end in-ear monitors. If any big player in the electronics field enters this game, prices (and features) could be way better than they are now.
