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Comment by nickv | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

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