The AirPods are Tim Cook’s most underrated achievement

Apple Silicon chips. The iPhone’s dominance. Apple Vision Pro. During Tim Cook’s 15-year tenure as Apple CEO there were highs — and in the case of the Vision Pro, maybe a low — that helped define Apple as one of the most dominant forces in tech even without Steve Jobs. But one product doesn’t get the recognition it deserves, as evidenced by The Verge’s Apple Top 50 products, where the original AirPods don’t even crack the top 10.

Before AirPods, almost all earbuds were still wired back to your phone or iPod. Apple’s ads leaned into the aesthetic with vibrant neon backdrops to frame dark, dancing silhouettes connected by the iconic, stark white earbud wires. But in 2016 that all changed. Suddenly there was Lil Buck, filmed in black and white, pulling a white case out of his pocket, flipping open the lid, putting earbuds without wires into his ears, and dancing down the streets and across the walls of Mexico City. It was a moment that reshaped an industry and turned Apple into the most important audio company of the past 25 years.

At Apple’s special event in September of 2016, Phil Schiller praised the “courage” it took Apple designers to remove the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. A few minutes later, the other shoe dropped: Jony Ive announced the AirPods. Sure, there was a Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter included with the phone so people could still use their wired headphones and earbuds, but the future was wireless. Removing the headphone jack — which, for the record, I and The Verge hated at the time — was instrumental in moving the audio world forward, whether anyone wanted to or not.

The AirPods weren’t the first true wireless earbuds — the Bragi Dash, Onkyo W800BT, and Earin wireless earbuds were all available in 2015 — but there’s a reason we’re not talking about the ubiquity of the Dash right now. Apple sold an estimated 14–16 million AirPods in 2017, and the number kept growing every year.

Untethering yourself from your iPod or iPhone was a game changer. Headphone wires got caught on everything: watchbands, backpack straps, collars, or worse if you ever commuted to work through a big city. Eventually, once people got over looking stupid, AirPods became a fashion statement in their own right. They suggested the wearer was already living in the future, a place where earbuds could be neatly stored in a case, a charging case, without the need to coil a cable that would inevitably unravel in a bag.

I’ll admit that when I got them in my ears for the first time, I was not an immediate fan. The open-ear, one-size-fits-all design wasn’t the most comfortable for me, it never felt totally secure, and the sound quality was merely fine. But it was the integration and ease of use, thanks to the W1 chip, that made the AirPods so attractive. No need to hassle with Bluetooth connections. Just bring the earbuds near your iPhone and they paired, and not only with your iPhone but your other Apple products, too.

The AirPods Pro 2 were a huge step forward in noise-canceling performance, and since then, they’ve gotten improved call quality with more mics and better algorithms, heart rate tracking, live translation, adaptive audio, and, on the AirPods Pro 2 and Pro 3, the ability to act as over-the-counter hearing aids.

And even though the original versions were not my favorite, today my AirPods are always with me. I use them for work meetings. I use them for walks around the neighborhood with their adaptive noise canceling keeping me aware of my surroundings. And I use them when I’m at home and want to watch something on my iPad. They’ve become ubiquitous in so many lives.

While Tim Cook led this period of audio innovation at the venerable computer company, John Ternus oversaw development of the first AirPods, and continues to do so. With Ternus stepping into the CEO position in September, almost exactly 10 years since the AirPods were announced, I fully expect we’ll continue to see the AirPods line grow in their integration, both in the Apple ecosystem and the lives of those who use them.

And maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll get them in a color other than white.