Apple has a long habit of showing up late to the party and somehow leaving with everyone’s attention. It wasn’t first to MP3 players, smartwatches, or wireless earbuds, and it did fine with all three. Open earbuds might be the next party it’s running late for. Nothing, Bose, Huawei, Anker, and a pile of Chinese brands like Sanag and Baseus have been selling ear hooks and ear clips for a while now, and Shokz just more than doubled its shipments year over year. Designer Anurag Sarda has a theory on what Apple’s entrance could look like, and he calls it AirPods Open.
Sarda, an industrial designer based in Helsinki, takes the AirPods 4 bud and gives it a glossy white hook that loops over the ear. Apple’s signature stem survives, relocated to the end of the hook where it dangles behind your earlobe like a tiny tail. The bud sits angled just above the ear canal, so your music gets in without shutting the world out. Funnily enough, Apple already calls its tipless AirPods “open-ear,” and the new AirPods 5 even claim the industry’s best ANC in that design. Sarda’s concept takes the word literally, and frankly, that’s the version I’d want on my ears.
Designer: Anurag Sarda
Apple’s Most Famous Stem Gets a New Spot Behind Your Ear
The bud comes straight from AirPods 4, right down to the black mesh grille and the little pill-shaped vent beside it. From there, a soft hook arcs over the top of your ear and drops down behind it, ending in a section that looks exactly like a classic AirPods stem. A visible seam separates that stem from the hook, so it reads as its own module rather than a tacked-on detail. Pinch one between two fingers and it forms a near-perfect question mark, which feels on the nose for a product asking why Apple hasn’t made it yet. It already looks ready for an Apple Store display table.
Hook earbuds usually hide a battery pod behind the ear to counterbalance the driver up front, and Sarda’s relocated stem sits in exactly that spot. Nothing even markets its Ear (open) around a “three-point balance system” for the same reason. The difference is that Apple’s pod would already be famous. Everyone from your aunt to your barista can spot an AirPods stem across a room, and since those stems already pack microphones and battery cells, the engineering logic carries over neatly. The case follows suit, nesting both hooks in mirrored loops around the buds with the stems meeting at the hinge like two commas holding hands.
The Open-Ear Crowd Apple Would Be Walking Into
Nothing Ear (open) is the closest cousin, a $149 hook design with 0.29-ounce (8.1-gram) buds and a nickel-titanium wire inside the hook that lets it flex and spring back. Sarda knows that brand’s playbook well, having already designed the Nothing Gamepad (1), a controller concept built around glyph LEDs. Bose went the clip route instead, and its Ultra Open Earbuds (2nd Gen) arrived this fall at $299. Huawei covers both camps with the hook-style FreeArc and the clip-style FreeClip 2, which sells for £179 (roughly $240) in the UK and isn’t officially sold in the US. Clips read more like jewelry while hooks feel more locked in, and Sarda clearly picked a side.
Apple already owns half of this idea through Beats, whose $249.99 Powerbeats Pro 2 use a nickel-titanium hook tested for more than 1,500 hours with nearly 1,000 athletes. The catch is that Powerbeats seal your ear canal with silicone tips, which makes them gym gear more than all-day wear. Meanwhile the AirPods 5, announced in September, keep the tipless fit and add ANC, so Apple already knows how to make an open bud sound good and block out the bus. Sarda’s concept essentially staples those two products together. Take the Powerbeats hook, drop the tips, bolt on an AirPods bud, and you’ve got something Apple’s supply chain could probably prototype by lunch.
Ternus’s Apple Is Suddenly Ready to Try New Things
John Ternus took over as Apple CEO on September 1, and the company has been on a launch tear ever since. In his first two months, Apple unveiled its first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo, plus a touchscreen MacBook Pro and its first smart home hub, the $299 HomeView. It also co-designed the Apple Home Collection with LG and Schneider Electric, a lineup of cameras, locks, thermostats, and a video doorbell. Apple building smart locks with LG would have sounded like fan fiction two years ago. Ternus is a mechanical engineer who spent 25 years in Apple hardware, and the company suddenly seems far more willing to try new shapes.
That appetite is exactly what makes AirPods Open feel plausible instead of wishful. Open earbuds are where the growth is, and Omdia expects the category to reach 90.5 million units a year by 2030. Apple has the hook from Beats, the bud from AirPods 5, and a CEO who apparently enjoys a new product category. Sarda’s renders even come with campaign-ready taglines like “Always on, never in,” which honestly reads better than half of Apple’s real ones. If Apple does show up late to this party again, I’d bet good money it walks in wearing something very close to this.
