The Stratospheric Growth of the AirPods
Wired UK has published a look at the explosive growth of Apple’s AirPods. Despite little promotion from Apple, the AirPods have overtaken AMD, Shopify, Snap, Spotify, and Twitter in revenue. In 2018, they earned an estimated $3.3 billion. In 2019, AirPods revenue shot up by 121% for an estimated total of $7.3 billion. “It was almost like wildfire how quickly it spread,” said Apple Vice President of Product Marketing Greg Joswiak.
Apart from some recent issues with unavoidable firmware updates (see “AirPods Pro Firmware Problems,” 4 May 2020), the only notable concern about the AirPods revolves around their essentially disposable nature—their lithium-ion batteries are sealed in. Apple offers a recycling program, but realistically there are going to be a lot of AirPods in landfills. We can hope that Apple’s engineers will put in the necessary effort to create AirPods with replaceable batteries, but despite Apple’s claims about environmentalism, that seems unlikely to happen.
Both of my sons have them and love them.
These and the watch are both winners. What will be the next add on to the iPhone Apple will launch?
I can definitely agree with that. I’ve really enjoyed my AirPods. So much so that when I stupidly left mine in a tray at Dulles security, I ordered my next pair from the aircraft I immediately after boarded. To me AirPods have to them this Apple magic that reminds me of the old days when Apple gear just worked and almost magically made things tremendously simple and user friendly. I bought my wife a pair of Pros and I was really impressed with how well they fit and with the ANC. When we can start working again for real, I’ll be on planes a lot more again and I suppose it won’t take me long to then get a pair of Pros for myself.
Glasses or headsets. They’ll help sell hardware and apps.
I took a look at the Apple website, and are a lot of jobs open in Cupertino for advanced camera engineering, such as these two:
Although I haven’t read anything about Apple or Google autonomous automotive systems for awhile, I think they might not have given up on it. The advanced camera stuff would be applicable here as well. But this would be way further down the road.