At New York Fashion Week in September 2025, the singer and actress Dove Cameron walked the runway with a pair of white Apple EarPods woven into her hair bun. Vogue called it the moment of the show. The accessory cost about 15 UK pounds. Six months later Circana, a research firm, reported that revenue from wired headphones had risen by roughly 20 per cent in the first six weeks of 2026, after five consecutive years of decline.
The shift is not enormous in absolute terms. Bluetooth still accounts for around four in every five units sold worldwide, and the global earphones business is on track to clear 65 billion US dollars in 2026. But the direction matters. The average wired pair sold in 2025 cost about 13 US dollars; the average wireless one cost 99 US dollars. Growth turned up across price points, not just at the cheap end, which makes pure trading-down a partial explanation at best. Dr Omar Fares of the Ted Rogers School of Retail Management in Toronto attributed the shift, writing in The Conversation, to a yearning for an “idealised version of the past”. Dua Lipa, asked about it by Vogue, gave a more prosaic reason: she did not want to charge them.
What the buyer is rejecting is informative. Bluetooth was meant to free the listener from the tangled cord. It did, and then introduced a smaller menagerie of humiliations: pairing failures at the worst possible moment, the colleague whose audio kept piggy-backing on yours mid-call, batteries that, on industry estimates, force replacement of the typical pair every 18 to 24 months. Apple removed the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 in September 2016, on the grounds that the cord was archaic. Almost a decade on, a TikTok creator called Aaliyah Allwood posted a clip asking, “Is anyone else just so over the AirPods?” The replies ran to thousands. There is also the matter of the bin. iFixit, a repair-advocacy site, scored Apple’s AirPods Pro 3 zero out of 10 for repairability in October 2025, the same grade every previous AirPods model has received. The wired alternative, by contrast, has no battery to die.
A wider unwinding
Headphones are not alone. In March 2026 the Recording Industry Association of America reported that vinyl had cleared one billion US dollars in United States revenue in 2025, the format’s 19th consecutive year of growth and the first billion-dollar haul since 1983. Vinyl shifted 46.8 million units against 29.5 million for CDs, at an average price (per Discogs) of 37.22 US dollars, up 24 per cent on 2020. Streaming kept growing too, by 6.8 per cent on premium subscriptions, but vinyl, the format streaming was meant to render obsolete, grew faster. According to Luminate, half of American vinyl buyers do not own a record player. Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, a record many of its purchasers will never play, accounted for 1.6 million of those vinyl sales by itself.
The pattern repeats. HMD, which licenses the Nokia brand, saw flip-phone sales double between 2022 and 2023, and reissued the Nokia 3210 in May 2024 to mark the original’s 25th anniversary. Adam Ferguson, HMD’s head of product marketing, told CNN in September 2025 that the #BringBackFlipPhones hashtag had been used by some 61 million people. The same year HMD launched a Barbie-branded flip phone with Mattel that pointedly omitted social media. Punkt, a Swiss outfit founded in 2008 by a former BlackBerry user named Petter Neby, sells minimalist handsets at a premium. Digital point-and-shoot camera volumes were up 93 per cent in 2025, again according to Circana, driven by sub-200 US dollars models that take noticeably worse photographs than the smartphone in the buyer’s pocket. Even the BlackBerry itself, or an updated version of it at least, might be about to make a comeback.
Each of these reversals has a different rationale on the surface (fashion, sound quality, digital fatigue, status) and a similar one underneath. Each successive generation of the dominant product solved an old problem and quietly introduced several new ones. Wireless headphones removed the cord and added pairing, charging and a 24-month replacement cycle. Streaming removed the shelf and substituted the algorithm. The smartphone removed boredom and added an entire literature about its consequences. The customer was given more, and is now, at the margins, paying to have less.
That is awkward for a business culture in which addition is the default mode of progress. Roadmaps swell with features; investor decks recite ecosystems of integrated services; the chief executive who removes a feature does not usually get a launch event. Subtraction has nonetheless travelled rather well where it has been tried with conviction. Aldi and Lidl took share off Tesco and Sainsbury’s by stocking around 2,000 product lines apiece against the British majors’ 30,000 or more, and now account for nearly a fifth of the British grocery market between them. Jack Bogle launched the first index fund at Vanguard in 1976 by removing the actively managed portfolio; Vanguard now runs around 10 trillion US dollars of assets. Trader Joe’s, an American grocer, carries roughly 4,000 SKUs and posts among the highest sales-per-square-foot in the country. Ryanair built Europe’s largest airline by passenger numbers on a doctrinal commitment to taking things out (free meals, allocated seats, baggage, customer goodwill).
The wired-headphone revival is not, on its own, a Vanguard-scale event. True wireless will keep dominating unit sales, and Apple, which earns a useful slice of services revenue from devices that need to pair with a phone, has no intention of putting the headphone jack back. Some of the comeback is fashion, which by definition will pass; some is Generation Z performing analogue rebellion, itself a kind of brand. None of which alters the harder commercial point. The default-to-more instinct, embedded in product roadmaps and earnings calls alike, is worth interrogating from time to time. The cord, it turns out, was not really the problem. A great deal of what replaced it was.
Photo: Dreamstime.
