This was a retort people used against AirPods. They look like funny Q-tips sticking out of the user's ears. But really they don't look much different from earbuds, which people wear all the time, so shouldn't AirPods be fine? The response was that the wires on the earbuds make them socially acceptable.
It never made any sense. But people who saw AirPods as doomed to fail insisted that they looked dorky and embarrassing because… they didn’t have wires.
It doesn’t make sense in hindsight, like the “iPhone will fail because it doesn’t have a physical keyboard” doesn’t make sense. But that’s the pattern here. Vision may fail, but if so, it will not be just because it’s different than current paradigms.