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AirPods Made up 71 Percent of True Wireless Headphone Revenue in 2019 By Jesse Hollington Apple's AirPods are continuing to take the wireless headphone industry by storm, and last year's introduction of the second-generation AirPods with 'Hey Siri' support, followed by the noise-cancelling AirPods Pro has only made Apple an even more dominant force in the market. In fact, a report in late November that arrived a few weeks after Apple's release of the AirPods Pro revealed that Apple couldn't make the new AirPods fast enough to keep up with demand, but it predicted that despite this the company would still ship more than 60 million AirPods by the end of the year — a number which includes both the AirPods and AirPods Pro models, but not Apple's Beats- branded Powerbeats Pro. While this prediction sounded a bit optimistic, it shouldn't have been all that surprising, considering that the AirPods have never stopped selling like hotcakes. Since they were first released in 2016, they've been flying o' the shelves, and accounted for 25 percent of all wireless headphone sales within weeks of their launch, which was even more surprising considering how hard it was for anybody to get their hands on a pair back then. This demand never really died down, either, and the original AirPods were still dominating the market two years later, long after the novelty had worn o' and rumours were swirling of a second-generation version on the horizon. Now a new report from Strategy Analytics reveals that Apple's AirPods met the target originally predicted by Bloomberg's sources last year, not only selling 60 million units in 2019, but also capturing a market share of more than 50 percent of all "Totally Wireless" (TWS) Bluetooth headphones. Sales of AirPods also completely dwarfed every other competitor, with Xiaomi and Samsung roughly tying for a very distant second place, with less than 10 percent each. What's more interesting is that according to the report from Strategy Analytics, sales in the TWS category actually grew by 200 percent in 2019, meaning that Apple is capturing a large chunk of an even bigger market, and suggesting that the vast majority of sales of AirPods weren't from existing users upgrading, but rather those completely new to truly wireless earbuds. Apple's AirPods are the dominant Bluetooth headset in terms of sales volumes and revenues in the TWS segment. Even as other vendors enter the TWS segment, Apple will remain the dominant vendor in the category through the middle of the next decade. - Strategy Analytics Images courtesy of www.idropnews.com