151–160 of 165 posts
I cannot figure out any way to reconcile the incredibly poor quality of Beats products with a hopeful future for Apple. Can someone make the argument for why this is a good idea?
Beats certainly has one thing going for it in brand recognition: they are the preferred headphone of the professional athlete.
Does Apple have an answer to Nest? To Tesla? To Comcast?
I understand Beats is a powerful brand, with a youthful and enthusiastic customer base, and they've entered the streaming space with some panache. Apple already knows how to do music. Is this what they're focusing on? It seems like a distraction and not a terribly advantageous one.
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By that logic, Apple should buy Google.
They probably should, if they could afford them and weren't going to be blocked by the competition commission.
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I'm a bit of an audiophile myself, so I wouldn't listen to Beats, but I do think "bad" is a value judgement. I want a neutral reproduction of the music, and I get that with my Grado's. The Beats customer wants lots of thumpy bass. We each get what we want.
This is exactly it - they give a 'fun' listening experience that people enjoy, and mistake for sound quality. They're paying a high price for a brand and experience, rather than for the quality of the components, like many other premium brands. I don't wear them, but I don't hate the people who do (though I'm not huge on Beats' "the way it was meant to sound/the way the musician intended" branding)
ding that's the crux of it. people want something that makes them feel good, which often isn't something you can quantify in a lab. so rather than trying to build a better headphone, beats built the equivalent of a booming car stereo strapped to your head, and that evokes a very specific emotional response for most of their customers.
fwiw: i have a pair of Bose QC15 cans that i got as a gift from work. i think they're crap for reproduction purposes, but the experience they're designing for is noise cancellation.
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This is simply untrue. The best headphones, speakers, and amplifiers, are designed to faithfully reproduce the recorded signal. Have you seen the actual frequency response curves of headphones? They are by no means flat! They can approach flat from 20-20k, but there are always trade offs, at least until you get to certain price points. What is good or bad sound is largely subjective and socially conditioned. The expe…
"Have you seen the actual frequency response curves of headphones? They are by no means flat!" Yes. And, as I said: Most cheap products accidentally fail at this goal. It costs a bit of money to produce a quality transducer that is stable, reliably mass-produced, and lasts a long time. Not as much for headphones as for larger transducers, however. For $100 you can buy any of several models that are extremely accurate…
I'm not saying a $25 pair of headphones is particularly good, but it gets past the "obviously bad" test that Beats headphones fail and allows me to leave them at work without worrying about losing or breaking them.
I cannot figure out any way to reconcile the incredibly poor quality of Beats products with a hopeful future for Apple. Can someone make the argument for why this is a good idea?
Quality of product is unimportant. Vast market of "gullible fools" proves this. Currently there are a lot of different headphones that have very similar specs - I suspect that some company is mass producing drivers and other companies are iust putting these into fashion shells and selling them at large profit. (WESC is an example of a company that I think is doing this). In this market - not very good headphones sold…
Hmm... is there a company out there whose sales disprove this statement?
...
Oh yeah, Apple. Maybe you forgot about them?
That said, I think this is a deception to get Samsung to do something costly and stupid.
I cannot figure out any way to reconcile the incredibly poor quality of Beats products with a hopeful future for Apple. Can someone make the argument for why this is a good idea?
Some are speculating that Apple is more interested in the beats music streaming service. I'm not sure I buy that -- doesn't Apple nearly have its own? Even if they don't, surely they've got the foundation set to build one quite effortlessly.
This makes even less sense than the Square acquisition rumor. 1. Apple has the tech and library to do their own subscription service if they want to. You think they can't do their own licensing deal? They surely don't need to pay $3B to acquire someone else's. 2. Apple wouldn't want to operate a cross-platform service. They'd pay a huge premium to acquire a bunch of Android customers than they'd promptly purge. Plus,…
1. Apple might actually need to acquire a team to do better licensing deals with the music (and TV/movie?) industry. Beats, I didn't realize, has some incredible people involved and has a lot of industry buy-in. That sets it apart from Spotify, etc. even though it has no subscribers.
2. Maybe Apple does want to buy a brand. The Beats brand has a lot of pull with communities where Apple doesn't, especially African-Americans. They may see it as an opportunity to upsell them from Android to Apple products.
3. Maybe Apple does need a cross-platform service to do the deals it needs. Like they did with iTunes on Windows back in the day. They get that, without any awkward "iTunes for Android"
4. Beats' headphones business is totally not Apple's approach.. yet? Right now it's more like Monster Cable, commodity product dressed up with sales & marketing & cachet. But what's to stop Apple from improving the quality of the brand? Apple-designed Beats headphones could be something very special. (But that is the weirdest part of this.. Monster is the antithesis of Apple and Apple's never done sub-brands. Maybe they literally bought them just for the preceding reasons.)
[1] http://www.dailydot.com/technology/apple-beats-jimmy-iovine-...
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Apple's market, however, is not gullible fools. They produce quality products that do not lie about their quality. This authenticity and quality is key to their success. Steve would roll in his grave. He had Magnepans.
I was downvoted for a snarky comment about having to replace Beats if they were provided as the standard quality for iPhones in particular. OK that's fair. But with what I believe to have been Job's fastidious attention to quality, I find it difficult to understand how he would have accepted the sound quality. The branding issue has a certain, even large value, but there's also the loss of reputation for quality that…