Using homemade items, three young people in India managed to unlock the hearing aid functions of the Apple AirPods Pro 2which were restricted in your region due to local regulations.
The story begins when Rithwik Jayasimharesident of Bangalorebought a pair of these headphones in hopes of helping his grandmother, who suffers from hearing problems. However, when trying to activate the hearing aid features, he realized that they were locked in Indiaa country that is not among the more than 100 in which the function is accessible.
These headphones received a software update that allows them to act as assistive headphones. This novelty was an economical and accessible solution compared to traditional hearing aids, whose price in India It ranges from $600 to $9,500 (approximately Rs. 50,000 to Rs. 800,000). In contrast, the AirPods Pro 2, costing around $300 (Rs 24,900), represented a viable alternative for those with limited resources.
To activate the assistive listening features on the AirPods Pro 2a device running iOS or iPadOS 18.1 or higher was required, and the headphones had firmware 7B19 or later installed. However, geographical limitation prevented Jayasimha and others in India use these functions.
Despite changing the IP address and language settings on a 10th generation iPad to simulate an eligible location, the device continued to recognize that it was in India.
Determined to overcome the restriction, Jayasimha and her friends, Arnav Bansal y Rithvik Vibhumembers of the technological collective Lagrange Pointdeveloped a homemade method based on a Faraday cage and a microwave.
The Faraday cage is a structure that blocks electromagnetic signals, and in this case, it was constructed using a cardboard box lined with aluminum foil. They placed it on a microwave, which, when turned on at maximum power, served as a blocker of Wi-Fi and mobile phone signals on the 2.4 GHz frequency.
The process was not easy. After several failed attempts and configuration adjustments, the team discovered that the iPad was using not only the IP address, but also the SSID y MAC addresses of nearby routers to determine their location. This meant that even if the iPad had no cellular coverage or active GPS, it could infer that it was in India using information from nearby Wi-Fi networks.
To solve this challenge, the group placed a plaque ESP32 next to the iPad inside the Faraday cage. The plate was programmed to alternate between a hundred SSID of networks Californiasimulating that the device was in EE. UU..
A code in a MacBook It ordered the iPad to restart and activate its Wi-Fi antenna five minutes after starting the process. During early testing, the system continued to fail, forcing the group to adjust the cage and perform multiple reboots.
After about three hours of adjustments and tests, finally, the Mac Console reported that the iPad was identified as being in the EE. UU.. Excited by their success, they took the iPad out of the insulated case, plugged in the AirPods Pro 2, and watched as the headphone function settings appeared on the screen. The unlocking process had worked.
To ensure the reliability of the method, the group repeated the experiment several times and subsequently built a more stable Faraday cage. With the perfected method, Lagrange Point offered an unlocking service at its headquarters Bangalore so that others could benefit from this feature without incurring the high costs of a traditional hearing aid.
