Counterpoint: global wireless “hearables” market hit 12.5M units in Q4 2018, with AirPods at 60% market share, but low and mid-tier brands gaining
Apple was the market leader with its AirPods as premium models continued to dominate the market. However, mid-tier brands started to gain market share.
Context & Ripple Effects
The hearables category has scaled fast from its US-only beginnings: NPD counted just 900K totally wireless units sold in the US in 2017, when AirPods took 85% of dollar sales. Counterpoint's first global read shows the market at 12.5M units in Q4 2018 with Apple still dominant at 60% share — but with low- and mid-tier brands now gaining, the first crack in an all-premium market.
That crack matters because subsequent data confirmed it widened: Counterpoint later projected AirPods' true-wireless share falling to ~35% even as volumes hit 82M pairs, and full-year 2020 shipments reached 238M units with Apple at 29%, Xiaomi at 13%, and Samsung at 5%. This Q4 2018 report is the earliest datapoint in that erosion arc.
First-order effects
- Apple exits Q4 2018 with three-fifths of a 12.5M-unit global market, but the incremental growth is accruing to low- and mid-tier brands rather than to the premium segment it owns.
Second-order effects
- Rivals attack on price where Apple does not compete: the later entry of Xiaomi and Samsung into volume tiers — visible in the 2020 shipment breakdown — follows directly from the mid-tier gains Counterpoint flagged here.
- Apple's counter-move is upmarket, not downmarket: demand for the pricier AirPods Pro drove shipments to double to 60M in 2019, trading unit share for margin and ecosystem pull (Bloomberg's 2019 shipment read).
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, hearables follow the smartphone playbook: a category Apple pioneered becomes a mass commodity where Apple's share compresses from 60% toward the ~29-35% range seen in 2020-2021 data, while absolute volumes explode and value shifts to ecosystem lock-in rather than unit leadership.
The trend: Wireless hearables are transitioning from a premium-dominated niche into a high-volume commodity market in which Apple deliberately cedes share to low- and mid-tier brands.