Counterpoint: Apple's AirPods are expected to sell 82M pairs this year, but their worldwide market share of true wireless earphones will drop from ~50% to 35%
- AirPods maker is projected to sell 82 million pairs this year — Wider market growing even faster, driven by cheaper models
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's earphones franchise has been a story of absolute growth inside a shrinking relative position. NPD had AirPods at 85% of US totally-wireless dollar sales in 2017, and by Q4 2018 Counterpoint still put them at 60% of a 12.5M-unit global hearables quarter (the same dataset that flagged low- and mid-tier brands gaining). Shipments then doubled to 60M in 2019 on AirPods Pro demand, per Bloomberg's sourcing.
Today's Counterpoint forecast extends that arc: 82M pairs is another volume record, but share slides from roughly 50% to 35% because the category itself is expanding faster at the cheap end than Apple plays. The later record bears this out — Apple trimmed planned 2021 output by 25-30% (to 75M-85M units) before ultimately shipping an estimated ~120M pairs that year (Bloomberg's look at the 'quiet success' of AirPods) — big numbers, in a market no longer defined by one vendor.
First-order effects
- Apple keeps setting shipment records — 60M in 2019, a projected 82M now — while its worldwide unit share falls from ~50% to 35%, meaning low- and mid-tier brands are capturing most of the category's new buyers.
- The growth engine shifts further toward premium tiers like the AirPods Pro line, which drove the 2019 doubling and lets Apple defend revenue per unit even as unit share erodes.
Second-order effects
- Rivals competing at price points Apple doesn't touch turn the true wireless market into a volume game below and a margin game above, pressuring mid-tier brands caught between cheap commodity models and Apple's ecosystem lock-in.
- Suppliers and assemblers tied to AirPods volumes face whipsaw planning — the 2021 production trim to 75M-85M after a 110M forecast shows how sensitive forecasts are when share is contested.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, true wireless earphones settle into a two-tier structure: a commoditized low end owned by scale brands and a premium end where Apple competes on ecosystem integration rather than share — mirroring how the smartphone market stratified.
- Apple's wearables economics increasingly depend on attach rate to its installed base rather than category dominance, making services and device-lock-in the durable moat as hardware share normalizes.
The trend: True wireless earphones are maturing from an Apple-dominated niche into a two-tier global market where Apple trades unit share for premium, ecosystem-bound volume.