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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

There is a general pattern with Internet commentary where things that are decried as useless or not as good just become the most popular thing. I wonder what it is.

I recall this happening in my time here on HN and Reddit.

- The iPad

- AirPods

- Bitcoin

- Facebook

It’s almost at the point where I think it provides signal that something will be valuable.

My personal hypothesis is that it captures the idea “I think this should not be considered valuable but lots of people around me do think it is” which sort of happens only if that last condition exists.

So any time I read something like this, it means there’s some sort of invisible popularity for some product I don’t know about. Interesting idea.

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> It’s almost at the point where I think it provides signal that something will be valuable.

This is called survivor bias.

In reality when things are labeled as bad by the majority, they are probably bad and/or are going to fail.

but because they fail, you move on and forget about them.

Anyway, nobody ever said Facebook was useless when it started.

I had two invitations from friends in USA when it was still invite only and people actually offered me money for them...

the other examples are hardly revolutionary.

many people have said face masks are useless since covid started, but we wear them anyway, because covid actually kills people.

that's something I would describe as "considered useless, but became the most popular thing, out of precaution"

nobody is going to die without iPads, bitcoins and frankly why airpods are in the list is a mistery to me...

Ah no, it's something more special. Like, everyone panned Juicero, but all the mainstream guys loved the iPad. TechCrunch loved it and they didn't even get a trial device. /r/technology made fun of it ("more like maxipad haha"/"4 iphones glued together haha"). I think the key element is watching techies act in a way that's clearly from some deeper place.

If Airpods were a separate company, they'd have more revenue than any company on half of the Forbes 500. I think your comment has a bit of this. On HN, everyone treats Airpods like some sort of fad toy. In real life, my friends love the device.

> On HN, everyone treats Airpods like some sort of fad toy

isn't it possible that this is just you generalizing a bit too much?

I've simply said they're just earphones and aren't going to change humanity as we know it

every brand offer some kind of earbuds, my phone came with a couple of them, never used them, having to charge another device that can fail at any moment is not my idea of comfort.

> In real life, my friends love the device.

Oh, well, if your friends love it, everyone else must be wrong then...

(it seems to me that your conclusion are based on very few observations and not representative of anything. for example you said in every city airpods are everywhere. I live in Italy, they are definitely not everywhere, they ate pretty rare. they are also very expensive for the general population , my friends with an iPhone buy Xiaomi earbuds, they are good enough and cost 1/10th)

> for example you said in every city airpods are everywhere

I didn’t say that because I concretely do not believe it. They’re an expensive device and still remarkably popular. 5x the revenue of Ferrari and Lamborghini combined.

yeah, toilet paper's market is larger than Ferrari market too.

No sh*t Sherlock!

It's all about volumes, Ferrari is the Mona Lisa, airpods are me drawing on a napkin when I was 5.

There are many more drawings on napkins, but they doubtfully have more value than La Gioconda.

Tablet sales have been slowly dropping for 6 years now, while laptop sales have been increasing, at least according to this site:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272595/global-shipments-...

So the jury is still out on iPads.

AirPods are a niche Apple product, not sure what point you are making with them.

Bitcoin is even more of an obscure niche, a speculator's bubble.

Facebook is the only unambiguous winner from that list, and quite a bit of that is due to obvious monopolistic practices after they initially grew big (buying WA, Instagram, but also embedding themselves in the base internet access path in Africa and other places).

>AirPods are a niche Apple product, not sure what point you are making with them.

This is such an HN comment, it bothers on the cliche.

Apple has generated more Airpods revenue this year than Nvidia has period. Apple has generated 2x Airpods revenue than ALL of AMD or Square or Spotify. Just Airpods. It's 5% of their revenue (and these are $129 devices competing with $1000+ devices in their portfolio for the revenue pie).

How is a product that generated $12B in revenue in one year niche? I'd take that niche. Literally every person on the street has them in their ears. Imagine a startup with $12B in revenue and >120% YoY growth and margins in the 50%.

I'd argue Airpods might be the second most successful Apple product ever after the iPhone.

Interesting, I admit I was completely wrong on the AirPods at least. Personally, I had never heard about them after the original announcement discussions, and rarely see anyone with them on the streets. This is probably because I live in a poorer country (Romania, one of the poorest in the EU) and I am not very connected to the Apple ecosystem in general.

This was a massive blind-spot for me, I honestly had no idea that AirPods had become a huge phenomenon like this...

You see! It’s like that. There’s a kind of weird sneering wrongness to the comment. “Just a niche”. As soon as you read that, you know something is up.

It’s clearly not fact based. So it must come from some deeper place. A feeling of being threatened or of envy or something like that. It’s far too strident in its incorrectness to be more than just garden variety wrongness.

As I mentioned in a sibling comment, it's coming more from a bubble and some hubris on my part for thinking my bubble is connected enough.

In my city, people don't visibly use AirPods a lot, none of my iPhone-using friends have one, and I haven't seen news/articles about AirPods at all since the original announcement hubub. I foolishly assumed that I am getting a representative sample of the world from this point of view, and I ended up commenting based on this foolish assumption.

All right. Sucks that I jumped to a conclusion on that with you. It's possible you're the common case and that all the people who treat Airpods like not a real thing are actually in places where they're not commonly used.

> AirPods are a niche Apple product

Have you walked around a city at any point in the last 2 years? AirPods are not niche.

And iPads are a huge success, about the only actual decent tablet out there. You see them _all over_, the jury is not out unless we move the goalposts so that it’s not successful until it replaces laptops.

I think AirPods by themselves would be a fortune 100 company.

The money is there, VC people are eager, the concept has been around for years, and like you said, there is a cult base that is absolutely indoctrinated. The world is ready for one (1) implementation of blockchain that actually does something meaningful and better than what already exists. Yet here we are. People are spending their lives trying to convince others that blockchain is a good technology, but nobody actually doing anything with it. It's not like there's a grand conspiracy blocking any companies from being successful, blockchain/crypto is just for con artists and the gullible.

It’s because we have established living and survival conditions based on decisions we have made through life. These then form biases.

E.g.

* iPad vs Android ecosystem

* Bitcoin/crypto vs fiat

A lot of these takes are from disruptive technology.. It’s called disruptive for a reason and that reason gives it lots of arguments to why it could fail against established thinking.

So if something had a lot of haters in technology.. it could be a disruptive technology which has a good risk to reward ratio if it becomes adopted.

> So any time I read something like this, it means there’s some sort of invisible popularity for some product I don’t know about. Interesting idea.

The problem with your theory is that it implies you should have also been investing into Twitter Fleets and WeWork. Hackernews tends to be cynical about most things in my experience. It's tricky to use it as a signal about anything.

It's apparent to me that cryptocurrencies have plenty of value tied up in them at this point. But the object of the post was to solicit a better understanding of whether they've solved the problems I'm interested in.

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