Apple’s AirPods are great; they’re also a powerful symbol of our unsustainable economy

A tweet last month by Midas Kwant about Apple’s AirPods did a napkin analysis of the earphones’ profitability: if instead of being launched by Apple in 2016, they had been constituted as an independent company, and based on Apple’s projected sales of one hundred million units for 2020, that company would conservatively have been valued at $175 billion, making it the thirty-second largest in the United States. In just four years, and with only one product.

Apple’s ability to generate value by reinventing already existing products is well known: AirPods, whose contribution to Apple’s accounts has already been analyzed, are not that different to other Bluetooth earphones, but today no one remembers these earlier models, and virtually all of today’s are designed to look like AirPods. When the company launched them, AirPods critics dismissed them as overpriced, uncomfortable and even problematic in company, but over time, they have become iconic, ubiquitous, even if many people use cheap Chinese copies. The second version, released last October, incorporates sound cancellation and several other features, and seems to be selling very well too.

Sure, Apple has 20/20 product vision and have designed earphones that mysteriously stay in the ear and offer very reasonable sound and…