Apple created a new market for themselves by shelving the headphone jack and essentially forcing there to be a bluetooth headphone market.

It basically came down to a simple question of whether Airpods does well, or the iPhone tanks at that point. All prior headphone jack removal attempts within the android market had failed miserably, as users just jumped to a different maker.

However, since the iOS versus android market is pretty rigid in terms of user totals even back then, an iPhone failure was extremely unlikely. Which left the only question as being just how successful the move would be.