If AirPods were magical, AirPods Pro are supernatural. Apple’s newest pair of AirPods continues to make waves with “augmented hearing” entering people’s vocabulary. However, the broader implications found with Apple’s AirPods strategy are just as impressive. Apple is quickly removing all available oxygen from the wireless headphone market, and competitors find themselves at a severe disadvantage. In just three years, AirPods have evolved from an iPhone accessory into the early stages of a platform well positioned to reshape the current app paradigm for the wearables era.

Another “Quiet” Launch

One of the more fascinating aspects found with AirPods Pro was how the product was unveiled. Instead of receiving stage time at Apple’s big product event at Steve Jobs Theater one month earlier, AirPods Pro received the press release treatment. When contemplating potential sales, AirPods Pro may end up being the best-selling Apple product that has ever been unveiled with just a press release.

The subdued unveiling given to AirPods Pro is consistent with Apple’s prior approach to AirPods. Instead of receiving the red carpet treatment as the Apple Watch did two years earlier, AirPods were unveiled to the world over the course of just five minutes at Apple’s iPhone and Apple Watch event at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. In a sign of just how nonchalant Apple was with the unveiling, AirPods were positioned merely as an iPhone 7 and 7 Plus feature. The product was said to be an additional option that consumers had for handling the transition away from dedicated headphone jacks. (Remember those?)

Earlier this year, AirPods with wireless charging case was unveiled via press release as well.

AirPods Pro

It’s easy to gloss over many of the selling points found with AirPods Pro given the familiarity with AirPods. Items such as seamless pairing and the carrying case that doubles as a charging station play crucial roles in giving AirPods Pro such a high-quality and enjoyable user experience.

However, the features that have gained the most attention, and rightly so, are Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) and Transparency mode. For many people, AirPods Pro will be their first pair of ANC headphones. Those users are in for a treat as Transparency mode addresses the largest negative found with ANC headphones - the user is seemingly removed from his or her surroundings. A press and hold on one AirPod stem switches between ANC and Transparency mode. The functionality is a great example of how Apple’s engineering and design teams, through collaboration, can produce a great user experience.

Sales

In FY2019, Apple sold 35 million pairs of AirPods at an average selling price (ASP) of $162 (both are my estimates). On a revenue basis, the AirPods business is on a $6 billion per year run rate that is doubling year-over-year.

One way to put those sales numbers into context is to compare AirPods to other Apple products at the same point in time after launch. As shown in Exhibit 1, AirPods are trending similarly to iPhone sales when looking at unit sales out of the gate. After three years of sales, Apple has sold 61 million pairs of AirPods on a cumulative basis. During the first three years of sales, Apple sold 60 million iPhones.

Exhibit 1: Unit Sales out of the Gate

Unit Sales Out of the Gate (Above Avalon)

Apple likely crossed an important AirPods sales milestone last quarter. For the first time, Apple sold more than 10 million pairs of AirPods during a three-month stretch. While the preceding observation came from my earnings model (access to my Apple earnings model is a benefit associated with Above Avalon membership at no additional cost), the math checks out with Apple management’s commentary and clues provided on the 4Q19 earnings conference call. It’s likely that AirPods sales will exceed 10 million per quarter for the foreseeable future.

When contemplating AirPods unit sales trends going forward, too many people are stuck in a mobile mindset. Instead of seeing someone buy and use just one pair of AirPods, we may see a new kind of usage pattern develop in which a growing percentage of AirPods owners will use more than one pair of AirPods. This will help boost AirPods unit sales.

On Apple’s 4Q19 earnings conference call, Tim Cook was asked about the potential upgrade trajectory for AirPods. Cook commented that he thought current AirPods owners would be in the market for AirPods Pro to “have a pair for the times that they need noise cancellation.” The clear implication found in Cook’s comment was that Apple expects some AirPods owners to use multiple pairs of AirPods with differing levels of functionality.

After just three years of sales, we are already starting to see the early stages of this trend develop with people upgrading their AirPods but keeping their old pair as a backup.

In an unscientific poll conducted via Twitter poll through my account, 30% of respondents said they use more than one pair of AirPods. Interestingly, 41% of people who said they purchased a pair of AirPods with wireless charging case claim to still be using their older pair of AirPods as well. It helps that AirPods last years before poor battery life takes its toll. My initial pair of AirPods from 2016 are still used daily. It's early, but it looks like people using more than one pair of AirPods is a thing.

Platform Building

The current app paradigm primarily consists of downloading an app to our smartphone, tablet, smartwatch, smart TV, or laptop / desktop. We then interact with the app to “pull” information and context at a time of our choosing. App notifications are not very smart and instead represent mostly useless distractions more than anything else.

The Apple Watch was the first device to genuinely begin questioning the current app paradigm. The Siri watch face on Apple Watch is all about providing the wearer glanceable amounts of information, data, and context in the form of cards chosen by a digital assistant. These cards are personalized to the wearer based on the time of day and schedule. In essence, we are moving away from pulling data from various apps to receiving a curated feed of data that is dynamic - always changing and tailored to our needs.

Apple is turning AirPods into the second platform built for what comes after the App Store. Instead of being about pushed snippets of information and data via a digital voice assistant, something that will likely remain ideal for mobile screens, AirPods will be all about augmenting our environment by pushing intelligent sound.

AirPods Pro wearers are able to experience the early days of this dynamic with Transparency mode. Switching between Transparency mode and ANC is equivalent to augmenting our environment. We are receiving two different experiences despite being in the same location.

This dynamic could be extended so that a simple tap of an AirPod or a quick voice command can take us to a different location via sound. Utilizing HomePods as sound receivers, an AirPods wearer would be able to “move” from the kitchen to family room. A quick tap of one AirPods, or Siri voice command could bring the wearer from the family room to kitchen to answer a family member’s question or simply to be “in” the room.

App developers would be able to take part in this revolution by building experiences that further augment people’s hearing. “Apps” would amount to tools capable of adding context to our hearing. Fitness can be rethought by adjusting the AirPods wearer’s hearing during workouts and exercise based on his or her activity. As an example, AirPods music playbook can be adjusted based on the users’ heart rate obtained by an Apple Watch. Such adjustment would amount to the AirPods wearer being “removed” from his or her environment when close to reaching a maximum heart rate during a run or track workout. Of course, such health tracking and monitoring may one day be brought directly to AirPods in subsequent editions.

Another example involves utilizing AirPods to deliver different sound experiences to different people despite being in the same location and looking at the same thing. As an example, a single presentation shown in a school or office setting can end up delivering a dozen different experiences to those in attendance.

Platform Power

AirPods will derive its platform power from three sources:

Technology advantage
Design focus
Massive adoption

Apple is pulling away from the competition when it comes to building mini computers worn on the body. AirPods are computers for the ears. Years of learning how to manufacture 2.1 billion iPhones and iPads is now helping Apple to build nearly 70 million wearable devices per year.

This technology prowess and manufacturing acumen goes to waste if people don’t actually want to be seen wearing the devices. Apple’s success at redefining luxury, combined with the company’s design-led culture, gives the company a large advantage in the area of understanding what people will want to wear on the body.

The final source of platform power will come from massive adoption. There are currently 45 million people wearing AirPods. At the current rate, more than 100 million people will be wearing AirPods at some point in 2021. As to how Apple is able to see such strong AirPods adoption, Apple is busy removing all available oxygen from the wireless headphone market.

The company is utilizing a masterful combination of price and features to establish multiple beachheads in the market.

AirPods Pro do not replace AirPods in the product line. Apple is instead embracing a strategy of expanding the product line according to functionality. AirPods Pro represent the expansion of the AirPods line into a higher-end segment that places value with ANC. The end result is that Apple now has three different AirPods model, each targeting a different price segment of the wireless headphone market. It is certainly reasonable to expect Apple to continue pushing this strategy in the coming years so that we see a pair of AirPods go for as low as $99 and as high as $500.

We see similar product strategies with the iPad and Mac lines. With these, Apple sells a range of flagship products with varying degrees of functionality, and of course, price.

There are some unique attributes seen in Apple’s campaign to remove oxygen from the wireless headphone market. Unlike what they did with the iPhone or iPad playbook, Apple didn’t launch AirPods at one price and then begin to lower pricing once all of the profit had been sucked from that initial market segment. Instead, Apple has been doing the opposite. Apple unveiled AirPods at a very aggressive $159 price, which sent shockwaves across the industry as the competition was priced closer to $300. Three years later, competitors are still struggling to match AirPods' $159 entry-level price.

Something Big

This AirPods evolution into a platform does not come as a surprise. Here was the opening paragraph from my initial Above Avalon article on AirPods shortly after being unveiled in September 2016:

“AirPods will turn out to be one of the more strategically important hardware products Apple has released this decade. However, you would never know it judging from the way Apple unveiled the device last week. I suspect that was intentional. While the press remains focused on the short-term debate surrounding the iPhone's lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack, few have realized that Apple just unveiled its second wearables platform.”

Three years later and that paragraph still rings true. AirPods have turned into a cultural phenomenon while dedicated headphone jacks on smartphones have become relics. Meanwhile, Apple’s wearables train continues to gain momentum as the company grabs real estate on our wrists and in our ears by bringing a new level of personal computing to the masses.

Listen to the corresponding Above Avalon podcast episode for this article here.

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