I thoroughly enjoyed this article. I might not have agreed with everything (I don’t think the industrial design of the airpod is *quite* sexy enough yet, but it’s better than most) but I appreciate that somebody gets the notion that Apple is not making tech toys for silicon valley people. Since the first Mac, the Jobsian strategy has always been UX-leads-tech, not the other way around.

Interestingly, too, Apple is one of the only companies that seems to solve engineering problems by essentially re-engineering their customers instead of re-engineering their tech. The headphone jack kerfuffle is a perfect example of that. Get rid of the jack, and while you may lose some market, you’re essentially forcing the rest of your very substantial device market to accept bidirectional digital connections (both wired and wireless) as the new normal for headphone connections. Once you have that, you no longer need to solve the “how do I make this backwards-compatible” or “how do I send lots of data via a TRRS analog jack” problems. It opens up many more options for Apple to sell “smart devices” in a market nobody else is even considering currently because of the high technical costs. They’ve done this before — and always framed it as dropping an obsolete device, but in reality they’re basically always re-conditioning users to use something more beneficial to the Apple Ecosystem (no optical drive? Well, just use the app store! etc). It’s both terrifying and wonderful, depending on your perspective.

The airpods aren’t the end product in and of themselves; they’re just the pathfinder that they can eventually build upon. Untethered Apple Watch? Possible now, since you can play music and do complex siri things now without a cord. In-ear health monitors? Yep, sure. Who needs to buy a new fitbit when you’re already wearing your headphones while you work out? There are entirely new product lines that can happen now, because the userbase is being groomed to accept them. While tech pundits are losing their mind about their expensive headphones and the user-hostility of removing a standard jack, Apple is quietly mapping out their strategy for the next 20 years.