Apple looks to improve future earbuds with ‘beamforming’
<p>Apple has been granted a patent (number 9,516,442) to improve the audio quality of earbuds used with smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktop computers. The company says that under typical environmental conditions, the microphones in eabudds may do a poor job of capturing a sound of interest (e.g., speech received from a user's mouth) due to the presence of various background sounds. </p>