The First Bluetooth Headphones: A Quick History

"First Bluetooth headphones" actually covers three distinct milestones, several years apart — a mono phone headset, stereo headphones for music, and eventually true wireless earbuds with no connecting cable at all.

📞 1999: the first Bluetooth product was a phone headset, not headphones for music

Bluetooth technology itself was developed starting in 1994 by engineers at Ericsson in Sweden. The first Bluetooth consumer product reached the market in 1999 — a hands-free mono phone headset (a single earpiece for calls, not music), which won a "Best of Show Technology Award" at COMDEX that year. Early Bluetooth audio quality wasn't good enough for music listening, so these first-generation devices were built purely for phone calls.

🎵 2004: Bluetooth headphones built for music arrived

It took until 2004 for genuine stereo Bluetooth headphones — built for listening to music in both ears rather than just handling phone calls — to reach the market, once Bluetooth audio profiles and quality had improved enough to be worth using for anything beyond calls.

🔊 2010s: Bluetooth headphones go mainstream

Bluetooth headphones became a mass-market category through the 2010s, with brands like Beats playing a major role in making wireless listening a default choice rather than a niche one — even though audiophile-grade sound quality over Bluetooth was still catching up during this period.

🎧 2015: the first truly wireless (no connecting cable) headphones

Even after Bluetooth headphones became mainstream, most designs still had a cable connecting the left and right earpiece — full true wireless (TWS) design, with no cable anywhere, is a separate, later milestone. Onkyo's W800BT, released in 2015, is generally credited as the first truly wireless headphones — meaning both the on/off switch and controls were fully self-contained in each earpiece, with nothing connecting them physically.

🍎 2016: AirPods make true wireless mainstream

Apple's AirPods weren't first to the true wireless format, but their late-2016 launch (announced September 2016, released that December) is what turned true wireless earbuds from a niche product into the mainstream default — most current true wireless earbuds still follow the general format AirPods popularized: two independent earpieces plus a compact charging case.

If you're specifically asking about true wireless (cable-free) earbuds rather than Bluetooth headphones in general, Onkyo's 2015 W800BT — not AirPods — is the more accurate "first" answer, even though AirPods get most of the popular credit.