Apple AirPods have generated roughly $10 billion in sales, making them a Fortune 500-level business on their own. Sam Parr and Shaan Puri explore software built on top of the hardware: push-to-talk between close contacts, voice messages, and voice commands that skip the phone entirely.
Yeah, just multiply by, let's say, 100.
It's a billion plus in sales, right? Yeah. The other one I like is, uh, so everyone has AirPods on now, right? And I think AirPods did one thing like Apple does really well is nobody wanted to walk around with a Bluetooth headset, right? I think we all agree you didn't look cool. You look like tacky.
It was a known douchebag thing.
Yeah, it was like, it was like having the cell phone on your belt.
Yeah, like great analogy. Perfect. And so I was like, great, people have AirPods now. And so what else can you build with this? Again, Apple's unlocking capabilities and hardware. So what software can you build? And so there's two ideas. One's mine, one's somebody else's, but I'll take it as my credit. Yeah, exactly.
Whoever says it, it's theirs.
Yeah, exactly.
By the way, Apple or AirPods, what did, how much? 10 million units, uh, in the last X amount of time. So what's that? 10 bil— is that 10 billion in sales?
Yeah. Just multiply by, let's say 100.
It's a 100 billion plus in sales, right? Yeah.
Yeah, it would be a Fortune 500 company.
Yeah, I agree. It's fantastic. And so one of the things I was thinking about was, great, if I have these on all day, can I just have this on kind of connected to like my wife or like somebody, right? So whether you do it for work or for personal, you always have it on. There's no audio flowing. But then if I'm like, hey Sean, what's up? It knows, do you have your AirPods on? If it doesn't, it tells me, hey, he's not there, but you can record a message, you'll get it later, right? But if you're there, you'll just hear my audio. And you still aren't on yet. You kind of opt in again to be like, yo, what's up, man? Like, it's like, how do you take the phone call away from like that? And you're like, I'm not going to give this capability to everybody. There's a couple of close people in my life, like my wife, that I'm going to be like, great. I just want to have this on and this capability that's there.
And so it's like, uh, in The Office, they do this in the TV show.
Oh yeah. Jim and Pam have their thing just constantly. Yeah. But this is good because it's not, uh, It's not on when you don't want it on. So let's say I have my AirPods in, you have yours in, and I'm, I'm walking around, I'm at lunch. I have this idea for the podcast. I basically just say, yo, Sam, what we should do is we should do this. And then you basically receive, but you're not sending back, um, unless you say whatever the keyword, like the, you know, like how Alexa works, right?
Like it's like Sean or whatever it is.
And that's way more lightweight than me picking up my phone and starting to type or phone call, like, who wants to do that, right?
So phone calls feel weird 100% right now.
Yeah.
