Sonos picks a good time to plug into headphones

livemint.com:

There’s never a great time to step up competition with Apple. But for Sonos, the timing is a necessity. The maker of premium-wireless speakers is finally breaking into the headphone market.

Sonos lifted the wraps Tuesday on its Ace headphones, slated to go on sale June 5. It is the most significant move to date into a new market segment by the company that helped pioneer the Wi-Fi speaker market. Market research firm Circana estimates that headphone sales in the U.S.

totaled nearly $2.2 billion in 2023—48% larger than the market for Wi-Fi audio speakers. The move also brings Sonos a new list of major competitors. The $450 Ace will compete in the premium end of the over-ear headphone market, where brands such as Sony and Bose have long reigned supreme.

But its most formidable foe might be Apple, which sells premium, over-ear headphones under the Beats Electronics brand along with its AirPods Max. The latter product looked like a stretch in late 2020 when Apple launched the massive headset with an even more massive price tag of $550. But that price and eye-catching design also seem to have transformed the AirPods Max into a social-media-fueled status symbol among fashionistas.

Vogue described the headset as “the chunky, oversized flex of the moment" in an article this past year. Circana analyst Ben Arnold said the AirPods Max has become a major player in the premium, over-ear headphone market that saw U.S. sales jump 45% in 2023.

Sonos has a lot of practice successfully competing against Apple and other tech titans. Cheap-smart speakers from Amazon.com and Google sapped some of the company’s growth in 2016. But privacy concerns and those products’ mediocre audio quality helped Sonos quickly regain its footing.