Meme of the Week: AirPods

AirPod Flexing or AirPods themselves have become a huge meme over the past few months, the internet losing their mind over Apple’s new accessory. Though the devices were released back in 2016 when the iPhone 7 was introduced, it didn’t become a meme sensation until November 21st of 2018 when Twitter user @CandaceTheAngel retweeted a photo of another meme, Miley Cyrus’s Blue Eyes, a photo of Miley Cyrus that is slightly disturbing from a photoshoot, with AirPods edited into her ears saying “me: h-,  person with AirPods:” with the photo of Miley underneath. The original post was made by @GraceCantEven but only gained popularity when @CandanceTheAngel reposted it. Within two months, it gained over 41,000 retweets and more than 179,000 likes. November 27th, @VonDeNiro tweeted a photo of someone wearing AirPods with the caption “it smells like broke in here”, referring to the price of AirPods, set at almost $200. The tweet got more than 29,000 retweets and 89,000 likes in less than a year. December 25th, Instagram user @masipopal posted a painting of a man being knighted by the Queen captioned “AirPod users welcoming new members who received them for Christmas”. In just three days it received more than 37,000 likes. This is what sparked the popularity of the AirPods meme.

The earliest known use of AirPod Flexing was in September 25th of 2018 on Twitter, when @camosweg made a tweet saying “me walking on campus:  person with AirPods: yeah i’m RICH”, which only helped the takeoff of the meme springing to action, taking the internet by storm. Various media outlets such as Buzzfeed, Distractify, 9to5Mac, and others covered the growing popularity of AirPod Flexing which only attracted more attention.

It’s become popular to say someone “speaks broke” if they don’t have AirPods or “he don’t speak broke” if they do have them. Memes like this are spread from Twitter, where screenshots of Tweets are shard to Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and other social media sites. AirPods are made fun of because of the way they look, without the wires connecting them to your phone. It’s also because of their price, sitting at $159 for the headphones and the charging case. Many people like the style of AirPods and see it as a fashion statement, others think it’s showing off that you have enough money to spend over 100 dollars on a pair of headphones. Some people believe AirPods are a scam for what they are, and so many people are buying them because they are popular and they are brainwashed by Apple, convincing themselves they need the latest thousand dollar iPhone and two hundred dollar headphones as a pair.

The popularity of AirPods and the meme revolving around them have the internet in a frenzy, constantly posting and reposting memes about them and poking fun at the thousands of people that own the devices, AirPod owners also playfully arguing back that everyone else “speaks broke”. This meme has definitely taken over all of the internet, and it isn’t going anywhere any time soon.