Different earphones for different people and different ears. Some people don’t want or like the feel of a noise canceling ear bud. They require a seal in your ear canal.
IMHO, the primary selling point for Apple / Beats headphones are the little ecosystem integration things that go beyond vanilla BT headphones. And unfortunately, Apple has not opened that stuff up to 3rd parties. So if you want the additional hands free functionality, automatic device handoff, automatic pairing, etc, you need H1 or H2 chip headphones from Apple / Beats.
I physically can’t wear in-ear headphones or headphones that require a seal. Noise cancellation only really works if you have a solid seal either in-ear or over ear. I also hate the isolated feel of noise cancellation, I leave it turned off when I wear any over ear headsets (AirPods max, Sony XM4). I absolutely adore my AirPods 3 and I will upgrade to the 4s assuming they remain accessible to me.
Yes, and that was actually what I wanted from them. They're open enough where I can hear through them at work without having to turn on a transparency mode. They're just my work dirty buds so I don't really care how they sound, just that they work (and they actually work better on Android than native iOS in my experience) and they take calls. Plus they're not built like cheap crap.
I have a set of gen 2s and one is dead so I borrowed a set of gen 1s collecting dust from a relative. No noise cancel, can’t change volume…I don’t know how they sold at all
Gen 1 sold well because there were not a lot of small, fully wireless, earbuds when those launched. Moreover, unlike other BT headphones at the time, they were low latency and paired reliably.
All in all, the market was different back then and the OG AirPods addressed a combination of user experience issues that the rest of the market wasn’t really addressing.
"Successful" after Apple took away the 3.5mm jack for no reason and said "fuck you you have to buy them now," maybe. Runners were using TWS earbuds for a decade+ before Apple soft-locked users into needing to buy their proprietary product.