Can Apple catch up in the race it started?

As recently as 2019, AirPods were unquestionably the best wireless earbuds in the game. Those telltale white stems were visible everywhere you looked — the streets, the office, the subway, and schools. It's that runaway success which may have led Apple to get, not lazy but complacent in the past couple of years. By not releasing any meaningful hardware updates to its entry-level AirPods, Apple has effectively ceded ground to a tidal wave of great low-cost earbuds from rivals. And now it seems as if the former market leader is stuck playing catch-up.

Although most of the tech world expected to see the heavily rumored third-generation AirPods release at Apple's iPhone 13 launch event, that didn't happen. We saw four new iPhones, a new Apple Watch, and even some new iPads, but Apple left us hanging with the one product that arguably needs a refresh more urgently than any of the others.

After setting the standard for wireless earbuds back in 2016 and dominating the marketplace in the years since, Apple's mysterious, present-day silence about a follow-up is puzzling, to say the least. So as we wait indefinitely for the next pair of Apple's earbuds to drop, let's review how we even got to this point and where Apple could go from here.

From goofy to commonplace

When Apple first unveiled the original AirPods five years ago, even those of us who like Apple products tended to agree that they seemed a little silly. Many of us wondered: Who would want to walk around with these long, white stems protruding out from their ears? Wouldn't it be far too easy to lose these earbuds since they aren't tethered by any wires? But even as early coverage from sites like ours praised the earbuds (despite their humorous appearance), what came next was fairly shocking.

AirPods became a huge hit. One market study from Slice Intelligence found that Apple had jumped from zero percent of wireless headphones market share to more than 25 percent of it in 2017, almost overnight. In what felt like just a few months, those garish white stems went from something you saw in social media memes to something you saw actual people wearing on the street. In fact, in the last few months of 2020, AirPods (along with Apple's other wearable devices) brought in almost $13 billion in revenue, per Nikkei.

To be clear, Apple didn't invent wireless earbuds (Onkyo beat it to the punch by a year), but there's a real argument to be made that Apple did make wireless earbuds trendy and, thus, desirable for other tech companies to imitate. And imitate, they did. By 2020, most of Apple's contemporaries like Microsoft, Samsung, and Google had released their own proprietary wireless earbuds to compete with AirPods.

Apple didn't always rest on its laurels when it came to AirPods. In 2019, more than two years after its first earbuds dropped, Apple provided two big updates: The AirPods 2 and AirPods Pro. The former kept roughly the same design, sound quality, and feature set of the original AirPods but slightly improved the battery and added hands-free Siri voice commands. The latter was a bigger departure, which saw the AirPods redesigned with smaller stems, silicone ear tips, and active noise cancellation. The Pro's $250 price tag was (and still is) a high barrier to entry, but it's tough to deny their excellence.

Unfortunately, we haven't seen any new real AirPods since. The $550 AirPods Max over-ear headphones don't count, sorry. (They're not earbuds and they're way too expensive.) As a result, Apple's complacency has put AirPods in a somewhat awkward spot. AirPods market share dropped from 41 percent at the end of 2019 to 29 percent at the end of 2020, according to research firm Counterpoint. That's still a substantial lead over everyone else, but it does point to what happened in the more than two years since the last AirPods update: Other companies made cheaper and better entry-level wireless earbuds, and consumers took notice.

In 2021 alone, we've seen a plethora of wireless earbuds that make it hard to recommend Apple's $160 AirPods to anyone, especially since they lack active noise cancellation (ANC). For Android users, the $150 Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 are a no-brainer thanks to their stylish looks and quality ANC. As for device-agnostic earbuds, the OnePlus Buds Pro, Amazon Echo Buds, and Nothing Ear (1) all include things like ear tips and ANC for less than Apple charges for its most basic AirPods, and at least $100 less than AirPods Pro.

It's just unusual to see Apple get lapped like this in the earbuds race. The company will often go a year or two without big updates to certain iPads, MacBooks, and iMacs, but those products typically stay good and relevant during those dormant periods. One model of iPad doesn't usually look completely obsolete next to the competition by the time its successor comes out. But by maintaining its status quo, Apple's let everyone else figure out how to make better wireless earbuds and sell them for less.

A long wait is seemingly almost over

Obviously, this isn't an obituary for AirPods. They're still exceedingly popular and eminently recognizable. Apple's molasses-like pace of iterating on AirPods has made them a harder sell than some of the competition in recent years, but we know an upgrade is coming, and likely very soon.

Reports indicate the new AirPods are already in production, which is roughly in line with what Apple analysts like Ming-Chi Kuo have been saying for months now. Gene Munster of Loup Funds said he expected Apple to announce the new AirPods in October right after the iPhone launch event finished. In an email to Mashable, he gave one possible explanation for Apple's delayed announcement.

"The AirPod update is likely ready to be announced, but Apple is holding back to give the iPhone 13 launch time to marinate with potential buyers," Munster said. "I expect the update to come in October, and could just be a press release (not at an event)."

What was once the standard-bearer for wireless earbuds now looks overpriced and obsolete next to its peers.
We also know roughly what to expect from the new AirPods, as rumors have been flying around for more than a year. Apple is supposedly redesigning them to look more like AirPods Pro, with a smaller stem and possibly silicone ear tips. Aside from that, Apple could make the new AirPods natively support the spatial audio feature that was recently added to Apple Music. One thing reports have suggested not to expect is active noise cancellation, which may very well stay exclusive to the more expensive AirPods Pro.

Apple launching new AirPods without ANC would be disappointing, and doubly so if the price stays in that $160 to $200 range the entry-level AirPods have always lived in. They may very well be excellent earbuds, but that price point made more sense in a world where you couldn't find effective noise-cancelling earbuds for $100. Now that you can, I'm afraid Apple is going to run head-first into a situation where what was once the standard-bearer for wireless earbuds now looks overpriced and somewhat obsolete next to its peers.

Maybe a slight price drop for either of the two existing AirPods models would help alleviate that. It's reasonable to assume the AirPods 2 will depreciate in value once a new model is out there, but Apple finding a way to make AirPods Pro more affordable would do wonders, especially if the company doesn't plan on updating those in the near future. It's just a lot to ask for $250 for a pair of wireless earbuds that aren't functionally that much better than some that you can buy for $100 less. But Apple also loves charging slightly too much for everything, so don't count on that happening anytime soon.

AirPods felt futuristic to me the first time I tried them out, but their slow evolution has given the competition too much time to catch up. We'll likely see the new AirPods 3 before the end of this year. But until then, it's tough not to wonder if Apple's fumbled strategy has disqualified AirPods from running in the race it originally kicked off.