Apple's Airpods business alone exceeds the revenues of Spotify, Twitter, Snapchat and Shopify combined! And at this pace, it wouldn't be a surprise if it exceeds Uber's revenue by end of 2020!!
A thread on the evolution of Airpods (1/11)

Kevin Rooke in his latest report has pegged the revenue of Airpods revenue at $12 billion which is ~4.5% of Apple's total revenues in 2019, which represents a growth rate of 128% over revenue from 2018, in which revenue reportedly was at $5.25 billion (2)

It was in Dec 2016 that Airpods were launched and it was an instant hit. But the first mention of the related work dates back to 2011 when a patent for wireless earpod like headphones was filed (3)

But serious work on the same started post acquisition of Beats in 2014, which not only gave apple its streaming service "Apple music" but also brought in technical expertise (4)

In 2015, the trademark for "Airpods" was filed by a company called Entertainment in Flight LLC which allegedly was a shell company of Apple intended to get the trademark without creating any buzz (5)

The launch of airpods was coupled with removal of headphone jack from the iphone signaling future for a truly wireless experience with a superior audio quality which most existing products failed to deliver (6)

Faced by initial criticism and ridicule, airpods still came out strongly months after its launch and once the demand picked, it had waiting period of upto 6 weeks which is was even higher than the first iphone (7)

The key aspects which made airpods such a huge success were,
1. It was intuitive and very simple to use
2. Seamless connectivity and easy to set up which was not the experience with the then available bluetooth headsets
(8)

3. "Infinite charging" provided by the charging case enhanced the effective usage time
4. And yes, it did not fall from the ears even while running and workouts(9)

This led to the immense success that the product had, selling ~15Mn units in its first year alone and moved up to 60 Mn units in 2019 and its estimated to hit 100Mn units in 2020/21 (10)

Apple has installed user base of ~900Mn iPhones which leaves a lot of potential for the airpods to grow and with the launch of newer variants and enhanced features, it holds a bright future & is on the path to move from just an accessory to the next big thing for Apple! (11/11)