Beats cost $18 to make.. cheap plastic.. nothing premium about them.. they even put a few pieces of metal in it so they feel sturdy.. People love(d?) them. Sold for $200/pair. Company sold for $3b.
The bill of materials isn't the sole determinate of success.
First, if you look at a shelf of products (say an airport gadget shop), beats is not the worst value on the shelf. Most beats products are OK. Half the gear (in general) in those shops is crap.
Second, Beats did a good job on "product". They understood what price ranges to target. The understood what each form factor was for, and how to explain this to consumers. Beats' actual competition was earbuds, not alternative "studio headphones." They knew which sound qualities (bass, basically) customers would want, for the music they actually listen to while walking around a mall.
They aren't always the best price performance across categories, but they aren't crap either.
Anyway, the reason I think they deserve credit is not that. They understood the implication of "wearables." They are the ones that managed to build that company, with a foot in fashion and another one in electronics. Part authority on what's cool, part predictor of what's cool.
If you do the bill of materials test on versace it won't go well.
Compare beats as the fashion-tech-wearables brand to all the smartwatch attempts at similar. Beats stands out.
I also once bought soy sauce that wasn't kikkoman, half price and it tasted good. Go figure. This doesn't make Samsung or Kikkoman "junk." It makes them a brand name.
Maybe I should put this differently....
If Beats announced today they are putting major effort into smart watches, I would expect to soon see lots of people wearing them. I'd beats to make smart watches that people want because they're relevant piece of culture and utility.
If boss or plantronics announced the same... I wouldn't.
Xerox invented the modern PC, Apple spent the next 30 years applying celebrity endorsements and marketing nonsense to make money. That's the story. I think this is very wrong.
If you are selecting a component to put in a device, this is a mostly objective question. Price. Objective quality, longevity. For a person to get value out of a thing, you must cross into more "subjective" territory. If you refuse to rely on anything that is subjective, nothing about humans makes sense. Why do people want to look cool anyway? Why are people listening to music?
Unfortunately, this topic, audio quality, is extremely subjective, yes, like someone mentioned in another comment to my original post. But objectively the audio response of Beats are very bass heavy and, in my opinion, the high end response is lacking, but other people really enjoy their beats headphones so thats up to them. Although, the divers in Beats, for the price, are objectively a poor purchase. You can get stronger and clearer drivers in other headphones at a fraction of the cost. I'm not really sure where the last bit of your posts ties in with what I've been saying but I totally agree people will be people, especially when the topic is complex and they can just buy what Harden/KD/etc. wears and be happy.
[0] - https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/27/10840614/beats-by-dre-hea...
> They aren't always the best price performance across categories, but they aren't crap either.
If Beats owners admitted this then they wouldn't have become a meme. Unfortunately most I talk to will claim that they're the best headphones on the market, and will refuse to accept that they could have gotten better audio quality from "less cool" brands for $100 or less.
"They are not the best performance per dollar you can get."
OK. This is true. It's also true about every electronics brand that exists. It's almost the definition of a brand, with a few exceptions where "best value for money" is the brand. There is always some under appreciated brand with great value that no one knows about.
Consumers (especially with portable & wearable gear) care about aesthetics, brands and other things that they might value even if you don't. This is a fashion item as well as electronics, after all.
Same question, why beats specifically? Why not Apple, Samsung, Boss?
To some degree, that question sounds like "whataboutism".
However, all big brands receive their share of Internet criticism, especially if they release a high-priced form-over-function product. Recent Apple laptops come to mind. Is Apple being singled out? They own Beats, right?
One of the other differences is that the other brands you mentioned are much more highly diversified. Even Bose sells more than just "wearables" (and within those, they sell an electronics-heavy version with noise cancellation).
> This is a fashion item as well as electronics, after all.
That alone gives you an adequate explanation. If it were pure fashion, it would probably get the same criticism, except that it wouldn't get any attention in those (or this) forum in the first place.
You may disagree with the validity of the criticism, but surely you at least recognize its existence if not prevalence among the technically-inclined.
People shit on Bose all the time. And justifiably.
Apple is in exactly the same cohort, but RDF is strong.
Samsung is great hardware, shitty interface (touchviz is pure garbage). But people don't defend it like they defend Apple, Bose or Beats.
There is a huge difference between the low cost ones and let's say 200-300$ sneakers.
My ETQ low 3 are insanely comfortable, are made of good material that age nicely, and are basically built like a tank (vibram soles, stitched + glued elements for maximum durability, etc).
For Balenciaga you pay the same level of craftmanship + trendy design and brand recognition.
I don't think you can really compare this to Beats though.
They are pretty awful at their price point, but audio quality is something most people don't really pay attention to. It has big basses is enough for most people. The same way that Samsung's oversaturated screens look amazing to many consumers.
And for Beats, I would say of why you pay is for the brand..
Many expensive headphones use plastic because of weight. Even the Sony MDR-Z1R have plastic. One of the only headphones I know that don't was the Sony MDR-R10, but from my understanding of the history of those, Sony was actually losing money on every pair sold ($2,500/pair).
I'm not saying Beats are great, but they get picked on for reasons. It seems almost like a meme and they aren't a terrible product. They work well for what they are meant. People like the way they look. They are supported by one of the most iconic companies in the world and sold in every Apple Store (and many others) with a large variety of different models and colors. Bring them into any Apple Store when something goes wrong and even out of warranty you can sometimes get help from a Apple or a Genius and/or a replacement.
The reasons are that anytime they're [rightfully] critisized in any way, a horde of obvious Beats purchasers comes and defends why it was reasonable for them to spend $350 on a pair of headphones with similar sound quality to a $50 pair from a different brand. They'll never admit they bought them for the name or the fashion appeal, they'll always claim that they "sound amazing," and pull up some irreverent review from Vice or similar saying that Beats are passable. If people just admitted that they don't give a shit about sound quality and want to look cool to their friends then I don't think it would have become such a meme.
And maybe they do sound great to that wearer. You don't know. What sounds good enough for them might not be great sound to you. That's perfectly fine. Maybe they did buy them for how they look. Why make that your business? Why do you even care that that's why someone bought the headphones? I go back to my earlier position: it's not your money being spent. It's theirs. Taking people to task for subjective things like this seems like a very strange thing to lord over people for IMO.
When I bought my first luxury car, I had friends recommending an Audi. Seemed like marginally better value for the money, a little better MPG, some marginally nicer interior features, etc. But in the end I went with the BMW because every time I look at the A4, all I see is a Jetta for twice the price. The fact that Audi is owned by VW and the cars are based off the same platform is a turn-off for me. It has nothing to do with the features or the performance or the "feel" of the car... it's just a brand image in my mind. A Lexus is an expensive Toyota. An Audi is an expensive VW. But a BMW is a BMW, they don't make anything else. My 3-Series isn't anything but a 3-Series.
I know that sounds ridiculous, but when it comes to premium products, it's not always easy to quantify why you like one over the other. A lot of the time it comes down to irrational things like adjacent brands or the way it makes you "feel". Everyone can discount that as much as they want and say JVC has better sound for half the price of Beats, but it doesn't change the fact that the people buying Beats don't care about the sound, they care about the intangible benefits that the brand gives them.
Almost everybody agrees they're harder to drive, and that the drivetrain is much cheaper (because the driven wheels do not rotate, so the mechanics are incredibly simpler)
And you can say, that makes it less likely to break. Technically true, but this is not something that breaks often, nor can you reasonably expect it to break (essentially only under enough mechanical stress to be bending/breaking the axle (a thick all-metal pipe), and at that point I guarantee this won't be the worst problem you have). It's just not the weak point of any car, so it won't ever make the difference between a car that keeps driving and one that does not.
Which makes this weird, because you're paying a lot more for an objectively worse product, which causes more mistakes in driving and is therefore more dangerous, for some bragging rights. I'm probably a geek because this just seems incredibly stupid to me.
Sweet deal for the manufacturers though: charge a lot more for a much cheaper product that's also simpler to design.
If aesthetics, wireless performance, portability or integration aren’t import to you and the only thing you care about is raw sound quality, that’s fine. Beats probably won’t fit your requirements. But the vast majority of people want something that balances a lot of different qualities well and Beats does that today (maybe not so well in the past).
As for the price, what good active noise canceling headphone on the market isn’t at least $350?
FYI: I have the Sony WH1000XM2. I paid $400 for them. I tested all ANC headphones on the entire market before settling on the Sonys. Beats were not the worst by any means. They gripped my big head too tight and hurt so I couldn’t consider them. Other than that, the A1 chip was amazing for connectivity and the sound curve was great for hip hop. They were also much more pleasing aesthetically and more portable than the competition. Ultimately comfort was the #1 thing I was looking for and they didn’t check that box.
The sound though, just can't keep up with any of the competition. For some people this isn't an issue - so they love the headphones, as they should. For someone like me who listens to a lot of hip hop and electronic music, it's a complete dealbreaker.
The wireless ANC headphone market is in a weird place right now. All of the headphones do some things really well, but have major tradeoffs to make one way or another. It all comes down to which tradeoff you want to make and what part of the experience is most important to you depending on your use-case.
Like I said, I've tried nearly every option in the market. Maybe I should write a blog post around this since I've invested so much time into it already.
The same person who wrote this article about Sonos, also did a tear down of Beats headphones:
https://blog.bolt.io/how-it-s-made-series-yup-our-beats-were...
I was wrong. It's actually closer to $20.
In other words, the design details from the teardown signal that Amazon is willing to eat losses on hardware, whereas Sonos can't afford to. Sonos doesn't have the alternative revenue streams that Amazon (and Google) have, making it hard to compete head on. I do think there is a niche for Sonos though, offering more music-focused options and sticking to the truly premium/high-end market, which Amazon seems less interested in. Google seems interested in that market segment with the Max, but I think they are still testing the waters so Sonos can still compete.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-paying-just-under-500-mil...