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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

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).

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>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.

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