Last week, Apple’s Airpods, the highly anticipated wireless earphones unveiled at the iPhone 7 event in September, finally became available in the company’s online store. Originally scheduled to be launched in October, technical issues had forced Apple to postpone the release to a point where a 2016 release started to look unlikely. Despite making it in time for the holidays, the Airpods will probably not make an appearance under many Christmas trees: after hitting the Apple Store last week, the estimated shipping time quickly went from days to several weeks, indicating very limited supply.
Missing out on the holiday shopping season is huge loss for Apple, even more so considering that headphones appear to be in-demand this year as the following chart illustrates. According to a survey conducted by the Consumer Technology Association, headphones are the most-wanted technology gift this year. 40 percent of the respondents said they were planning to purchase headphones as a gift this year, which puts them way ahead of smartphones as the second most popular tech gift of 2016.
