Apple's New Market: Wearables

When are earphones not earphones? When they are wearables. That was the conclusion I came to after the first 48 hours of wearing my new Apple Airpods.

Immediately prior to Christmas I had planned on writing a blog post about my luxury purchase of the year - new Bose QC35 bluetooth headphones. In the words of Stella Artois "reassuring expensive" - recommending them to friends multiple times over the last six months. Little did I know they would be edged out by Apple’s new Airpods in the last few weeks of the year. To be clear, the Apple Airpods are not a direct replacement of the Bose headphones - but they are amazing.

The biggest shock with the Airpods was how Apple, from no where, delivered a "magical" new product on which it historically built its reputation.

“When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical” Jony Ive (Apple iPad launch)

Apple took a pre-existing product, wireless earphones, that everyone believed had been optimised, but stripping back complexity that competitors had developed and sprinkled some Apple fairy dust - and hey presto - a new category killer. For those to young to remember, Apple was not the first to produce MP3 players but it created a music player that a generation listened to music on.

I will let others better describe the virtues and functionality of the Airpods but Jony Ive has got his mojo back. And yes, before someone else mentions it, they are not the most elegant earphones in the world. They are more in keeping with fertility jewellery that some long lost Amazonian tribe wears - but who gives a crap when the person wearing them can’t see them. Yeah, if you wear only one Airpod it looks like something from a near future television series such as Westworld.

Moving onto my point of the post — it is easy to consider the Airpods as wireless earphones to address the elimination of the headphone jack in the iPhone 7 but the Airpods are much more than that. They can genuinely be described as wearables because they are completely wearable.

What I mean is, Apple have designed the Airpods to be extremely light in a form factor that means you become almost unaware of them eliminating the *need* for them to be comfortable. This is very personal and others might disagree but somehow they just feel better.

The other stand out feature is the distance you can get from your computer, phone etc before the sounds breaks up - as someone who walks whilst making calls this is a real boon. I can walk around the office or grab a coffee without having to carry my iPhone around. Again, back to the concept of the Airpods being wearable and (almost) independent of the device.

But when I make the statement that Apple are now in the wearables market - it is simply not just about the Apple Airpods - but the evolution of the Apple Watch which has become increasingly more independent of the Apple iPhone; its original companion device. Alongside this, Apple has removed all the pain of syncing the Airpods with all your Apple devices (another Apple trait), allowing your Apple Watch to "auto-magically" pair with your Airpods.

Whilst this might be considered a relatively small thing, if the next Apple Watch becomes completely untethered maybe we can avoid talking to our watches like something from Dick Tracey, but simply using our Airpods to listen to music or podcasts or even to take calls. Maybe even, the combined Apple Watch and Airpods could (on occasions) replace the need to carry your iPhone - creating a new market sector for Apple — that of wearables.