Ads for AirPods

AirPods are great. They’re small, intuitive to set up, lightweight, and the new ones are noise-canceling, which is especially helpful on long plane rides. It’s funny how many people were naysayers of the product when it first launched, and now it’s an enormous revenue driver for Apple. I love my AirPods.

I don’t love ads. Yes, occasionally there will be a great commercial on TV, but typically they’re just… bad. The same is true for audio ads. Typically, I find they are worse than normal ads because it’s someone rambling about whatever product.

This all got me thinking about what the world would look like if Apple decided that AirPods should have their advertisements on an operating system level. The most logical approach for this would be to make the core product cheap and then subsidize the cost with ad placements.

On one hand, this is a horrifying idea. I don’t want to be in the middle of a phone call and then have to listen to a Ford F150 ad. Sounds like a nightmare. However, if you can’t afford AirPods this becomes an interesting alternative (if Apple adopted a freemium model).

Time will tell if something like this gets built.

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