Throw out any assumptions you have about integers and hang on to your sense of all that is right in this universe, because the new math is here and 2 now comes before 1.
Writing for the Forbes contributor network and home of the “Hands on a Soft Body” contest where the person last standing can walk away with one of the sweet 2018 manatees that are rolling off the Florida production lines as we speak, Ewan Spence says “Apple’s Courageous Decision Fails To Connect With New iPhone Customers.”
The future is wireless, and only Apple was courageous enough to see it and act on it. If that’s the case, why are Tim Cook and his team selling rather a lot of the past to its customers?
Nostalgia for a time before scientists activated the Large Hadron Collider and moved us into the darkest timeline?
Make no mistake, the AirPods are a successful product and are expected to see more additions to the line this year. According to analysis of Best Buy’s sales ranking, it’s the best selling Apple product this month, and has been for some time. The curious point is what lies in second place in the peripherals sales charts.
The lightning to 3.5mm headphone adaptor.
Wait. Wait. Wha-
Wait. What?
AirPods, which cost 16 times as much, are selling better than the headphone jack adapter and your conclusion is that customers have rejected wireless?
Sure, every iPhone without a headphone jack currently comes with the headphone jack adapter in the box, but the Macalope’s household has purchased three such phones and of the original three adapters [pretends to look around but already knows the answer] all of them have either been destroyed or simply gone missing. More importantly, these also come in the iPhone box for people who also end up buying AirPods. So, those people could have kept using the tangled wad of headphones they already had but decided not to.
It should also be noted that this transition to wireless was never going to occur immediately upon Apple shipping AirPods. It’s as if you looked at shipments of floppy disks in 1999 and concluded “Welp, a lot of people are still buying floppy disks. Looks like Apple was wrong, it’s floppy disks forever.”
…iPhone owners have decided that what they want is their own headphones, connected to their iPhone, and if that means carrying a dongle with a universal socket at one end (until it gets lost and another has to be purchased), then so be it.
No! If we’re going by the rules of this game you defined—that the relative sales ranking of Apple peripherals at Best Buy is an accurate indicator—what they decided they want is AirPods! Ugh, there are so many ways this is as wrong as classifying a hot dog as a sandwich. First, this information says nothing about people who use other Bluetooth headphones with their iPhones. Second, the adapter may be the second most popular Apple product at Best Buy, but we know nothing about the relative volumes of each, only that AirPods are number 14 overall and the adapter is number 22. We have no idea what percentage of iPhone users are using wireless versus wired headphones, the one number we really need to have this discussion.
Finally, of course, all of this is just what’s going on in the 8th Ring of Hell on the periphery of your local mall that is Best Buy, which is not really a representative sample. But, by all means, let’s draw grandiose conclusions from their results.
Look, if you want to play these ridiculous games, fine (well, not really), but the Macalope must insist that you use our Earth math. That doesn’t seem like it’s asking a lot.
You’d think.