The AirPod Phenomena
The strange cultural moment around Apple’s wireless headphones
Keaton Keller, a tech and entertainment vlogger who goes by “TechSmartt” on YouTube, traveled from Burbank to San Francisco in February to attend the Bay Area’s first AirPods Meetup after 36,000 of his 3 million subscribers requested that he show up through a survey on his channel.
The SF event, one of many organized across the country, promised to be a “networking opportunity” exclusively for AirPods owners and garnered more than 1,700 RSVPs on Facebook. But when Keller arrived in Union Square on that foggy Saturday afternoon, he was met with a random trickle of weekend shoppers, only a few of which—incidentally, it seemed—were wearing AirPods.
The internet has turned AirPods into a Rorschach test for the Millennial notion of success and coolness, a totem through which to discuss class tension and anxieties.
“Maybe the TechSmartt fans are just trying to make a meme out of me,” Keller said in a video posted to his channel from that day, seeming genuinely crestfallen, before purchasing AirPods at the Apple Store across the street (his 37th pair). “I need to go find things to do,” he muttered to the camera as he entered Louis Vuitton to purchase wireless designer headphones that retail for $995.
Keller’s comical quest is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the antics and fanaticism surrounding the relationship between AirPods and wealth. The internet has turned AirPods into a Rorschach test for the Millennial notion of success and coolness, a totem through which to discuss class tension and anxieties.
In the Bay Area, a place already divided between those who are obsessed with—and able to afford—cutting-edge technology and those who aren’t, Apple’s wireless headphones have become an obvious physical symbol of the chasm between the two. What is less obvious, though, is who gets the last laugh in the debate between fans of AirPods and their naysayers. It’s difficult to determine if AirPods are hip or dorky; if owners are visionaries who champion lifestyles that we should aspire to; or if it’s silly to pay $159 for pieces of plastic they will eventually lose, and even more delusional to brag about it.
AirPods went from relative obscurity to the second-highest-selling Apple product ever within two years of launching.
In the case of owning AirPods versus not, who are the winners, and who are the losers?
AirPods were released in 2016, but it wasn’t until December 2018 that they started to take on a life of their own. That holiday season, the Twittersphere churned out joke after joke expressing the elitism that one feels when popping in AirPods, from a meme featuring Weimaraners in turtlenecks beneath the caption “I know these dogs have AirPods,” to a viral photo of an AirPods case tucked in between a pillow and a 100-dollar bill.
Since then, these sleek, teardrop-shaped devices have become the Rolex for Millennials, who, 10 generations of iPhones later, have long since swapped out analog time for Siri. AirPods went from relative obscurity to the second-highest-selling Apple product ever within two years of launching.
Then, what began as tongue-in-cheek camaraderie between AirPod owners on the internet turned into real-life attempts at elitist exclusivity when a group called the “Pod Squad” began organizing event meetups in major cities across the country earlier this year. New York City, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Houston, Dallas, Portland, Seattle — legions of the squad were seemingly everywhere.
The Pod Squad dub themselves “the most exclusive AirPod group around today” and use marketing tactics to stoke enthusiasm for their networking events, which vow to “bring together the classiest people in society” by requiring attendees to sport a pair of AirPods to earn admittance. Their content is the meme equivalent of a dad joke — equal parts funny and cringey, a sense of humor that can be met with only a wince and an eye roll.
Nonetheless, earlier this month, I answered my journalistic call of duty and attended what was to be the Pod Squad’s Bay Area AirPod Owners Meetup in Union Square.
When I showed up, similar to Keller’s experience in February, a lot of things were going on in the park — a couple of teenagers rolling joints, German tourists making out, a guy bench-pressing an iguana — but an AirPods meet-up was not one of them. It’s every journalist’s dream to infiltrate a cabal of rich people and report back from the front lines. But this just wasn’t my time.
It was safe to say after the event that the Pod Squad is most likely just a marketing scheme, but the existence of the scheme alone is telling. The group is leveraging the rhetoric of the divide between the haves and the have-nots that has organically sprung up around AirPods to do Apple’s bidding.
The crazier thing is that real people (read: non-journalists) are buying into it, including people with major influence. Another popular YouTuber, 20-year-old King Liang, better known online as PlainRock124, drove his Tesla down from San Francisco to Los Angeles to attend another event hosted by Pod Squad earlier this year. Sporting a homemade T-shirt featuring a giant pair of AirPods and the word “poor” with an X through it, Liang filmed himself dodging strange looks from other shoppers at the Grove as he struggled to find other AirPod loyalists. He later ran into a group of fans who recognized him from YouTube. One by one, he had them flash their AirPods cases and say into the camera, “I’m not broke!”
AirPod owners gain swiftness and agility by going wireless, no longer stalled in their morning commutes by cords catching on doorknobs or by fraying filaments. AirPods 2.0 just hit the market last month, promising a slew of features like interacting with Siri directly through the devices, separating the power of AI from users’ bodies only a thin piece of plastic. But people have been disappointed by the “upgrades.”
In fact, Apple forums hum with criticisms of the product. People rail against them for looking like mind-control devices and complain about how easy it is to drop one on a commuter track or down a toilet. Some owners are so concerned about losing their pricey gems that they admitted to being too worried to actually wear them.
For a generation that is inundated with political discussion around wealth inequality and, by some estimations, is facing the bleakest financial future since the Great Depression, relishing in the ownership of something that is expensive and immediately recognizable is perhaps a way to cope with these grim economic realities.
More interesting still were viral posts that directly pushed back against the braggadocio of AirPod owners.
For a generation that is inundated with political discussion around wealth inequality and, by some estimations, is facing the bleakest financial future since the Great Depression, relishing in the ownership of something that is expensive and immediately recognizable is perhaps a way to cope with these grim economic realities.
Young people are forced to take on 300-percent more student-loan debt than their parents. One in five young adults ages 18 to 34 is living in poverty. Shelling out money for a pair of swanky headphones might make us feel like we’re doing okay money-wise, that we belong in the coterie of entrepreneurial success stories, that we are winners—or at least will be someday soon. One need only scan Twitter to read the tea leaves.
In response to the (obnoxious) 19-year-old couple whose post on social media asked, “Bought our first house at age 19…What Y’all buying?” @vicxkat replied “Airpods.” The tweet was liked 57,060 times.
