This is a well written post, but I have to disagree on several points.

Although I believe in the over-arching premise that “Apple is a fashion company”, I believe you have grossly over-estimated the airpod’s “sex appeal”, as well as the general population’s love of the 3.5mm headphone jack. The apologist arguments that you are making do nothing but further the misconception that Apple is still “APPLE”.

While Apple has done a masterful job of marketing in the image you posted, it’s not as sexy on the everyday denizen. Nothing about a pair of 1-inch ear dildos protruding out of your ear screams sex appeal.

You are working under the premise that Apple still has magic, and everything that they create turns to gold, and will be widely adopted by the mainstream audience. If we agree that Apple is in fact a fashion company, and not a tech company, we now need to shift Apple’s main purpose of existence from creating quality advancements in technology to being a fashion trend-setter.

Unfortunately, the fashion business is extremely volatile in what it considers “trendy”, and Apple’s rise to fame (as it relates to fashion) banked on counter-culture and exclusivity, along with beautiful hardware design. Apple has been “trendy” for so long that its sex appeal is stating to wane. There is no more exclusivity in its products, as everyone including grandmothers have an iPhone.

We only need to turn to the Apple watch as a recent case-study of Apple’s waning “sex appeal”. The $10,000 gold Apple Watch is no more, despite Apple’s best efforts to get it on Beyonce and Pharrel’s wrists. Apple Watch sales plunged 50% while cheaper FitBit fitness trackers surged.

You have also grossly under-estimated the market for 3.5mm headphone jacks, pegging people that care about the jack as “neckbeard hipsters who spent thousands of dollars on expensive audiophile gear that rely on 100-year-old technology to transmit audio signals.”

There are millions of people around the world that have a favorite pair of headphones, that don’t want to trade them in for “Apple’s vision” of what it thinks is best for them. This is in addition to the $160 barrier of entry, which is out of the price range for an important demographic: teens, and college students.

If your basic premise is true, that Apple does not care about “audiophile neckbeard hipsters”, then what has it traded those “neckbeard hipsters” in for? The “neckbeard hipsters” have been traded in for a demographic of early adopters that can afford $160 airpods, better known as “neckbeard hipsters”.

If Apple’s end result is to get people accustomed to the future of interacting with voice assistants and AI as you say, why did not include a pair of airpods with every iphone 7? If this moonshot is going to work, you have to put the product in the hands of as many people as you can. The alternate $20–50 wireless earbuds people will begrudgingly purchase because they can’t afford $160 airpods, but want to “fit in with the future” are not going to give them the same user experience. Apple fundamentally went against the Steve Jobs philosophy you so quoted , “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.”

Killing off the 3.5mm jack in favor of the AirPods, “because: Apple” is not starting with the customer experience. This doesn’t touch into the fact that Siri, Apple’s preferred personal assistant, is behind other personal assistants such as Google Now and Amazon Echo. As you said, Apple is a fashion company, not a tech company. In terms of data aggregation and contextual services, Google is still king.

Apple has shown unwillingness to make the necessary acquisitions they need to make when their products are failing (as in passing up the opportunity to acquire waze when Apple Maps was a disaster), nor give up their exclusivity to aggregate more data that can be used towards furthering their machine learning, and contextual data (which they could have easily done by bringing iMessage to Android).

I know that you’re thinking “this guy is completely missing the point, the average person doesn’t care if Google Now can find information 1/10th of a second faster than Siri, they only care about “because: Apple”. And you might be right.

But as a middle aged person who is used to leaning on their good looks to be the center of attention, Apple needs to stop and re-assess what they’re doing with their lives, and how many good years they have left until they end up in the retirement home with MTV, Nokia, Playboy, and all the other “cool kid” brands that aren’t so cool anymore.

As Austin Frank so eloquently put it, “Apple is the New Microsoft”.