The new old thing
APPLE has a new hit device, so popular that it has sold out across most of America and Britain. If you order it online it takes six weeks to arrive. “Best Apple product in a long time,” sings one online review. Useful and (of course) slickly designed, it enjoys the highest consumer satisfaction of any Apple product in history, according to a study by two firms, Creative Strategies and Experian.
Such enthusiasm must be bittersweet for Apple’s bosses. The gadget in question is AirPods, a set of wireless headphones that look a lot like Apple’s traditional ear buds, just without a wire. Priced at $159, AirPods could become a business worth billions of dollars, like the Apple Watch, a wearable device that Apple started selling in 2015. But headphones are hardly the transformative, vastly profitable innovation that many have been waiting for.
That wait started only a few years after its biggest blockbuster launched. On June…
