Why haven’t other true wireless earbuds taken off like Apple’s AirPods?

While there are an abundance of true wireless earbuds in the market, there is little doubt that Apple’s AirPods come first. Apple captured almost half of the market in 2020 – even heavyweights like Samsung and Xiaomi only had a fraction of that share despite their much stronger position in the smartphone world.

But why are AirPods so popular despite their Apple-related features, premium pricing, and a slew of competitors with potentially better value? It’s tempting to just call out “marketing”, but the truth is more complex. Apple was able to hold its own in part with top-to-bottom control that gave it an edge over its competitors, not to mention good timing and uninspiring competition.

Unlike its competitors and their respective products, Apple controls everything through the AirPods

Critics like to beat up Apple for creating a walled garden that is difficult to walk in without losing useful features or even entire gadgets. You can use AirPods with an Android phone or a Windows PC, for example, but they lose the tight integration that comes with iPhones, Apple Watches, and Macs. Compare this to platform-independent earbuds like Jabra’s Elite 85t, which offer similar functionality across platforms and even give you a choice of voice assistants. In theory, there is little reason to choose Apple if you have the slightest inclination to jump ship.

However, it is precisely this lock-in that makes AirPods so attractive: Apple controls both the hardware and the software for its products. It can integrate functions that competitors either do not offer or require additional time to provide. Apple was arguably the first company to make it really easy to pair and manage wireless earbuds, for example. You can flip open your case and use your AirPods with your iPhone in seconds instead of minutes. Alternatives like Google’s Pixel Buds brought some of these features to Android, but only after years of waiting for a more universal approach to easy pairing.

Continue reading: The best AirPods alternatives

Apple used this tight control to stay ahead of the curve even as the competition caught up with the basics. Spatial audio and automatic source switching were added to the AirPods Pro long before it was on the radar of competitors, as it could easily integrate this support into its operating systems without having to wait for others. You can achieve spatial audio and automatic source switching with non-Apple earbuds like the Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro. However, this is a recent development released a few months after the AirPods were launched. That’s forever in the consumer tech world, and both of these features are part of Samsung’s own walled garden as you need a Galaxy phone with One UI 3.1 to access those extras.

The bottom line: Apple may not always have the best sound quality, battery life, or compatibility, but it has a far greater benefit of continually setting and raising expectations. AirPods are generally effortless to use and are based on the latest software-controlled features. Apple makes it hard for other companies to keep up when they need to support a much wider range of devices and operating systems.

Timing isn’t everything, but it’s important

Apple is rarely the first to enter a device category. The iPod was a long way from the first MP3 player on store shelves, and the iPhone came years after smartphones hit pockets. However, it has the knack of getting in just early enough that it can disrupt a market while learning from its competitors’ mistakes – and AirPods are a textbook example of Apple’s optimal timing.

Bluetooth earbuds were certainly available long before Apple launched the first AirPods in December 2016, but the audience for them was just getting started. According to NPD data, US wireless headphone sales in July 2016 overtook their wired counterparts. In addition, the earbuds available on the market had many limitations: short battery life, behind-the-neck cables and complicated pairing processes. It still took a concerted effort to go wireless, and it was rare to really get rid of cables unless you bought early adopter products like the Bragi Dash.

See also: The best AirPods alternatives under $ 100

Enter AirPods. These were easy-to-use, truly wireless earbuds that solved the battery life dilemma with a sleek case that could charge for a day. Apple had fixed some of the biggest problems for wireless earbuds just when people were asking for them. This gave Apple a huge head start and kept this momentum through improvements to the base model as well as later additions like the AirPods Pro.

Yes, Apple’s marketing influence played a huge role in the success of AirPods. Its sheer size guaranteed that many people would know AirPods existed, and in some cases, introduced people to wireless earbuds. It helps that Apple gave the AirPods a boost by removing the headphone jack on the iPhone 7. Still, none of these decisions would have helped if Apple had been late or got in early without significant benefits. That marketing muscle only made sure AirPods got the best start possible, and didn’t guarantee their success.

The competition is not strong enough

There’s no way to gloss over this – much of the competition for Apple’s AirPods just isn’t that big.

You will surely find high quality options like the Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro or the Sony WF-1000XM3. However, the market is saturated with a legion of Look-at-Me earbuds that explicitly mimic Apple’s AirPods design. The true radio buds from Huawei, OnePlus, and Xiaomi (among others) have some cosmetic differences, but they are clearly based on Apple’s coattails. And if you can afford the real thing, chances are you won’t buy the tee.

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Regardless of the uniqueness, all of these competitors are facing a bigger problem: They do not fundamentally improve the basic concept of Buds-plus-Case, which is widespread with AirPods. They might sound better or last longer on battery power, but there aren’t any revolutionary technology upgrades that AirPods buyers would think twice about. Even the Galaxy Buds Pro, as nifty as it is, is overshadowed by Apple.

And that’s just not good enough when AirPods have such a great sales edge. While these competitors offer AirPods-like functionality to Android users, someone seriously considering a pair of AirPods may not consider the alternatives unless they’re either cost-conscious or insisted on feature parity for Android . Why take a chance on a rival when Apple is a known force? Put simply, it could take a fundamental change in true wireless earphone technology to remove Apple from its throne … and that may not take long.