3 Reasons AirPods Are More Important Than The Apple Watch

Loup Ventures’ Doug Clinton believes AirPods are likely to be a bigger product for Apple Inc. AAPL than the Watch, given its “seamlessness in connecting and disconnecting with our phones and enabling Siri has meaningfully improved the way we work and consume content.”

Clinton listed three reasons why AirPods would become more important than the Apple Watch in the near future.

Voice Interface

With several companies working on designing products for an Artificial Intelligence-first world, where speech will be an important component of the interface, AirPods seems to be the “natural extension” of Siri, which will encourage people to depend more on the voice assistant.

“As voice assistants become capable of having deeper two-way conversations to convey more information to users, AirPods could replace a meaningful amount of interaction with the phone itself,” Clinton stated.

In contrast, the use of Siri on the Apple Watch appears less natural, since one would need to hold the watch up to one’s face. With the screen being so small, interaction with it and the information conveyed wouldn't be any better than an AI voice-based interface.

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Medical Data

The analyst believes the “core feature of Apple Watch is fitness tracking including step tracking and heart rate monitoring,” however, “the ear offers similar, if not better, opportunity to track health data.”

In fact, Apple recently filed a patent for advanced earbuds that would be able to track “heart rate, VO2, galvanic skin, EKG, impedance cardiography, and temperature.”

Clinton believes AirPods would incorporate some of these health features over the next two years, with the only limitation being the battery life.

Touch ID

Clinton also believes the AirPods could be the future of Touch ID. In fact, NEC Corporation has already developed technology that “uses the ear canal to verify identity by bouncing sound waves off the ear canal.”

Clinton believes ear-based biometric identification would become a fundamental requirement for augmented reality (AR) and AI interfaces in the future.

“IDC data shows that Apple sold 8.8 million Watches in CY16. We expect 10 million in CY17. By comparison, we expect Apple to sell around 8-10 million AirPods in CY17, assuming production improves in the next month. We expect over 20 million AirPods in CY18 vs 12 million Apple Watches,” the analyst added.

Image: Dave Doe, Flickr