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Your AirPods can detect when you've fallen asleep and pause your media.
The AirPods likely use an accelerometer, not a heart rate sensor, to detect when you've fallen asleep.
The feature requires a pair of AirPods Pro 2, Pro 3, or AirPods 4, and iOS 26.
If you're like me, the one place you can fall asleep upright is on an airplane, but you need a pair of noise-canceling headphones to do so. Most of the time, I'll fall asleep during a "Real Housewives" scene and wake up two episodes later.
Also: Your Sony headphones just got a useful Bluetooth upgrade with the latest software patch
There's a feature in your iPhone's settings that can enable some AirPods to pause your audio content when they detect that you've fallen asleep. Here's how to turn it on, and how it worked when I tried it.
What is AirPods sleep detection?
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