“Rapid growth in demand seen over the past two years for wearable devices including smartwatches and wireless headsets will carry into 2019, serving as a significant growth driver for shipments of both flexible and rigid-flex PCBs in the year, according to industry sources,” Jay Liu and Willis Ke report for DigiTimes. “Bolstered by strong year-end buying sentiment in 2018, Apple saw its revenues from Apple Watch and AirPods during promotion campaigns shoot up 50% on year from 2017, demonstrating great sales potentials for wearable devices in 2019, the sources said.”
“Apple is set to release AirPods 2 sometime in the first half of 2019, and the new wireless earbuds with discrete designs to carry health monitoring functions are expected to receive enthusiastic market responses. Other brand vendors have all planned to launch wireless headsets in the year, with market competition seen to heat up soon,” Liu and Ke report. “At the moment, Taiwan’s two leading flexible PCB suppliers Zhen Ding Tech and Flexium Interconnect mainly deliver shipments for Apple Watch and AirPods, but they will also move to land orders from other brand vendors or for other applications.
Liu and Ke report, “Meanwhile, Compeq Manufacturing and Unitech Printed Circuit Board also supply rigid-flex boards for AirPods, and they also expect other brand vendors of earbuds to bring new revenue sources in 2019.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As per AirPods with health monitoring functions, body temperature is but one thing that pops immediately to mind.
I’d be most excited about an announcement that they’ve increased battery life by 600%.
Health monitoring… WOW.
Meanwhile in Cupertino, Airpod price increases 70%.
You know, I wear my AirPods about half of every day, sometimes in use, sometimes just sitting in my ears.
The rare time when I run low on juice, I pop one in the case while I keep using the other. After about five minutes, the one in the case is full (or nearly so), so I put it back in my ear, and then charge the other.
I wouldn’t want them to be larger just to increase battery life (even at all). This is one product where keeping them small really IS worth a smaller battery.
More battery life would be nice, I guess, but only if the don’t have to trade away anything else, since the current battery life is great.
Not much information in the article, but I would jump on a new AirPods model.
Love my current pair. Wireless charging would be nice.
Battery power is good but can always do with more.