Apple quietly stops selling Bose, Sonos and some Logitech gear
theverge.com
theverge.com
The rest of the article mentions that new headphones are on the way according to rumour, that only Logitech’s headphones and portable speakers were pulled rather than the entire line of Logitech accessories, and that up until now, Apple has been comfortable selling both its first party headphones and third party ones, “and let the best product win” and then publicly asks “what changed?”
The implications are strong, no need for “vague menace” here. Apple will sell more of their product if the only headphones you can buy from them are their own headphones, assuming they have a captive audience, of course.
The obvious undertone is that their headphones might not be as good as third party ones — more expensive, fewer features, but who knows until they’re actually announced, of course.
In the big picture, this could also indicate a pivot away from Apple selling third-party devices that don’t directly act as accessories for their own products first and best.
Nobody is captive to the Apple store. There is literally thousands of other places anybody could buy peripherals from. And if you’ve spent much time looking at what they stock, you might notice that Apple tends to stock more peripherals in the categories that it’s not very good at making in house, so the exact opposite inference could also be made.
And the exact opposite inference is: “a pivot toward Apple selling more third-party devices that don’t directly act as accessories for their own products first and best” — which doesn’t make sense. Maybe the confusion is over first and best? I meant that Apple is entrenching its ecosystem play by making automatic headphone connection a feature exclusive to Apple-built headphones, and that they could do the same in other markets. For instance, why sell an FLIR add-on infrared camera when you could make it an iPhone Pro feature in 2-3 years? My suggestion is that the Apple Store is quickly becoming a place that serves Apple more than its customers, and Apple seems to be okay with that, for now at least. It’s the retail store equivalent to not being able to buy digital books from anywhere but the Apple Books store. Just as you have to use Safari to buy books from your iPhone, you’ll have to visit third-parties for more accessories that don’t directly attach to or increase the value of your Apple device. Because the addons Apple most wants to sell you are the ones they make themselves, and thus have the most profit margin for...
This is even more outright ridiculous than your last claim. Nobody is help captive at the Apple store. If you're browsing apple.com for a product, your captivity ends buy opening the website of any other online retailer. Yet, you somehow manage to go further into some insane rabbit hole by suggesting that because a few 3rd products were dropped by the online Apple store, that this is a signal that Apple is start dropping support for 3rd party peripherals? When people say that HN just automatically hates anything Apple does, this is exactly what they're talking about. There's no rationale to a comment like this, it literally just comes off as deranged.
Apple often does make "the best" accessories for it's own devices, but it doesn't always, and the 3rd party ones work just as well. My Sony headphones work just as well with my iPhone as my Beats ones do. Apple doesn't even make the best mouse for Macbooks or iPads. Logitech does. There is not a single ounce of reality in anything you just said.
(a) Considering their track record of wanting to monopolize and control markets, I wouldn't put it past them.
(b) Many stores do put out announcements if they remove products for ideological reasons.
How can Apple be,
1. An operating system and business software company
2. A cell phone company
3. An exclusive marketplace for apps
4. A movie studio and streaming service
5. A music studio and streaming service
6. A hardware company whose products predominantly work with and favor other Apple branded hardware
7. ...
How can Google, Amazon, and Apple all do this? Pretty soon they're going to be providing us insurance, doing our dentistry work, and selling us caskets and cremation services.
These monopolies are sucking the air out of so many industries. And they honestly do a lackluster job at the random spaces they enter - they just happen to have the money and weight to push out the smaller players and not have to worry about actually competing.
I don't want America to have three Samsungs. It's not healthy. I don't want the arts to be dominated by advertising, grocery, and luxury computing/accessory brand companies.
If you want to get that first party integration/advantage these companies are happy to partner with you, but you have to have a product that can’t be replicated with 5 devs, a PM, and a Domino’s gift card. And don’t expect to charge a premium, if you try to ask for any more than a sliver above cost the numbers work out in favor of building it in-house.
What isn't?
I mean, Apple is building a Hollywood studio. That's insane.
I get the feeling nothing is safe. If Apple wants to do it, they'll do it. Same for Amazon.
Companies that have developed the ability to do things well enter new industries and raise the bar.
Also it weakens them in their core industries if they take their eye off the ball, giving more opportunities in their core industry.
It's also a characteristic of software, with its near zero marginal costs allowing a small number of people to obviate and dominate entire fields.
Seems like this is the same calculation everyone needs to make when planning or evaluating startup ideas. I'm always curious to hear about the current unsolved technology areas are (other than poorly-defined concepts "data science" and "A.I", that is).
I have no idea if Sonos’ products are trivial or not. If they’re just off-the-shelf-ish audio equipment and good software then maybe.
Bose definitely not because their R&D work is legendary. Hence why Apple bought them.
The movie studio thing isn’t as doom as you’re thinking. It’s just Apple writing checks and getting put their name on stuff. This isn’t Apple disrupting Hollywood or anything, they just need exclusive content for Apple TV+.
Is it? I've always found Bose sound quality to be objectively bad compared to other brands at similar prices.
They're not absolutely bad, just bad in terms of sound-quality-for-dollar. By a lot. Compared to e.g. Edifier or Klipsch (for speakers) or Beyerdynamic (for headphones) which fall around the same price ballpark as many popular Bose products but IMO sound way better.
Music was understandable given there are no Streaming Music alternative other than Spotify. ( But Apple Music still sucks after so many years, and barely caught on to Spotify ). But Making Apple Originals? Pouring Billions into it?
And Apple Card? Yes I think Banking and Finance will be there soon. If they have some sort of Apple Cash will minimal cash balance that doesn't require as much regulation as a bank, they will start with a potential 1 Billion customers. And then you have insurance, investment options....
Apple TV+ is indeed a curious one. Personally I think it's as simple as being a placeholder to allow Apple to make strategic choices in future, if they ever choose to compete aggressively with Netflix, Amazon etc.
I think the real weird one is finance. While Apple Pay is obvious, Apple Card is not. Banking is desperate for technological upheaval but many fintech start-ups are already doing a good job of this—at least in some countries like the UK.
Apple Music curation. Has anyone been impressed by this? I found maybe 2-3 songs I didn’t already know about, over the course of at least a year. I was never impressed, even SiriusXM has more variety and relevancy. I think they blew the chance to really do something great.
AppleTV+ makes me feel fatigued. Yes to being a “curious one.”
Apple Card seems to me like Apple’s version of a co-branded airline card. As much as I like to dunk on Apple these days (I used to be a huge fan), Apple Card is something they executed really well on. I’d like to give props to the Apple Pay/Card team. I think they’re doing a great job here and have a solid foundation for wherever they take this. That said I have a hard time imagining using Apple for all my transactions and balances, especially with the callous way they seem to behave lately. But you never know.
No, I haven’t been impressed by Apple Music curation. But I haven’t been impressed with Spotify recommendations either. I dare say that the best approach will require equal parts algorithm and curation.
As for Apple Card, that probably makes more sense in the USA where having many credit cards under different guises is commonplace. In Australia, store cards are relatively uncommon; I would suspect that a majority of people only have cards issued by their bank of choice.
For English Speaking Countries Apple Music seems to be doing OK for that curation and Discovery. Especially in US. Elsewhere the same formula hasn't worked at all. [2]
Consider Apple has 1 Billion iPhone users, compared to 2.5B Android ( Excluding China ), with App Spending power 4 times the average of Android users. And Apple Music, after 5 years, with it being default on iOS ecosystem, still does not have half the paying users as Spotify is saying something.
That is not to say Spotify is perfect ( Far from it ).
Note: But it didn't matter much because Music Streaming Services is a Net Zero Profit Margin Business.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/beats-curated-music-service-headin...
[2] https://atadistance.net/2018/02/04/homepod-and-the-apple-mus...
It makes the Apple One bundles seem larger than they actually are.
The classic excuse which people hide behind is "but they don't have a monopoly". Sure, they don't have a monopoly in precise terms. But the power they have to push products in new verticals is just unfair to the competition as they can't compete on equal terms.
Jabra's parent company in total earns less than 10% of what Apple earns selling just Airpods. It would be really sad if we lose iconic companies like Bose to these "want to own everything" tech giants.
Sidenote: This downvoting pattern on critical comments on any threads related to Apple has been absurd for quite some time. Somehow we have entered into a territory where say a company like FB always is upto no good for most here but the opposite is true for Apple.
Looking at the top Apple threads for the last month, it hardly looks like HN is some positivity echo chamber:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...
Bose used to be a gorilla in IP and was happy to sue Beats as soon as Apple announced they were buying it. Highly probable any settlement may have included carrying their products for some period of time.
Maybe they saw the writing on the wall and chose that path to fight on.
> Highly probable any settlement may have included carrying their products for some period of time.
Apple would have sold Bose products just for the retail cut they can get. They are considered premium and for a lot of categories Apple didn't have competitors till now, so it was better to just sell products like Bose for the retail cut.
Maybe a better example would have been Apple Music?
It's kind of like suggesting that Lenovo's T14s (I picked it at random) laptop is better and cheaper than a Macbook, so why would anyone a Macbook: People still have to wade through the X1 series, the P series, the rest of the T series, the X series, the Yoga series, the E series, the L series, the 11e series, just to find that one Macbook-killer. Or they can just go to apple.com and buy a laptop and be done with it. Except in this case, it's bluetooth earbuds.
Jabra, Spotify are not competing with Apple on just merit. Apple has the advantage of pushing Airpods, Apple Music on their Macbook/iPhone customers because they have the cash and branding space on a red carpet for them.
We all want to blame a boogeyman for all of our problems. There are plenty of alternatives available to Apple Music, the iphone, and the airpods. How many brands make wireless earbuds? how many phones? and Spotify, Amazon Music, Google, etc, all offer competing music streaming services.
Apple certainly leverages many advantages is has, so does every other company. That doesn't make it monopolistic.
The only thing I can say is calm down. Electronics hardware manufacturing company makes electronics isn't anti-trust, it isn't even news.
I decided to get a bose pair even though I had reservations. They were ok - the sound quality was not as good as either of the previous wired pairs, but I figured that was the price you pay for the convenience of bluetooth wireless. They worked well until like my first pair I left them on a plane.
OK no more bose - I bought a pair of Sennheisers. For the first month these were fantastic and half the cost of bose. I liked them so much when my wife wanted headphones I bought her an identical pair. Then one day they just decided they would no longer pair with my bluetooth devices. No idea why, no way of fixing them and when I looked online lots of other people have had the same problem and end up sending them back to Sennheiser and getting a replacement pair. I can't be bothered to do this so I go back to bose.
My latest pair of bose QC headphones are by far the worst. The audio quality is worse than any previous pair of bose headphones I've owned, and the microphone is so poorly placed that I've given up using them for calls - whenever I did this in the past I ended up spending half the call explaining to the other person that I didn't need to speak up - I was already talking unreasonably loudly it was just that the microphone didn't work properly.
Headphones seem to be going through the "tornado" phase right now where demand is soaring and quality is plummetting. The way for Bose to distinguish itself would be to go back to making good noise-cancelling headphones (which it used to do very well) but I think it is most likely they will follow the race to the bottom and get crushed by larger competitors.
As a long-time fan of Bose headphones at the moment I won't be sad to see them disappear.
It makes it seem like the wedding was clad in huge secrecy, when in actuality they just didn't put out a press release announcing it and didn't invite the media.
Makes for good headlines though.
If you want an example of Apple not doing something quietly, consider how they stopped carrying Fortnite on the App Store, or the policy they tried to implement wrt the Unreal Engine.
If there had been some public spat with Bose in the run-up to this, and/or they announced a policy decision related to selling their hardware, it would not be quietly.
That's a tautology, or at least a trivial claim. It can be reduced to, "if it were a public spat, it would be a public spat." Hope I'm not being uncharitable here.
Apple didn't advertise they were dropping FortNite. It was not on the front of the App Store (outside of conspicuously recommending competitors). Apple only released legal and policy statements. These are only warranted when there are policy infractions Apple wants to enforce (eg violating App Store Guidelines). Dropping Bose or Sonos was not due to policy infractions, anymore than Walmart dropping Amazon products is. There is a fundamental difference between "We dropped this product for economic reasons, but it may return" and "We have banned this product because it violates the policies and terms we have set out, and it is no longer welcome."
Apple _has_ to respond to policy infractions. Otherwise they're effectively abandoning the policy. [0]
[0] Note: I'm not defending the App Store policies here, but rather saying that the App Store policies discussion doesn't pertain to this discussion.
While it may be true that my claim is tautological (especially if we understand a tautology as a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form), that doesn’t make it false or irrelevant, which seems to be the implication.
When you say ‘That's a tautology, or at least a trivial claim. It can be reduced to, "if it were a public spat, it would be a public spat,’” I agree. It’s pretty self-evident. What I’m doing is highlighting that it was a public spat in the case of Fortnite, and wasn't in the case of Bose.
I think the bit you’re missing is that once we’ve established that there is a difference between something being a public spat and something not being a public spat, we can use a phrase (like quietly stops) to add that information into a statement. Thus there’s a point to saying quietly, and the word is appropriate. That’s the point I’m making.
It understands my voice and sounds great, what am I missing?
"I'm afraid I can't do that on HomePod..."
"...you'll need to do that on your iPhone..."
Familiar phrases if you go any deeper than "what's the weather?".
For sure, nobody's buying HomePods for Siri. That said, with as assist of Homebridge[1] for device support it's abilities are not substantively different than Alexa's for my family's use cases.
Well there are better standalone speakers and there are better "smart" speakers. As it stands it doesn't really justify the premium over Sonos, Echo or Google Home. Heck at least let me use bluetooth.
Also, I trust Apple’s “don’t listen for Hey Siri” feature more than the either Google’s or Amazon’s
Oh my, no. Say what you will about Siri, they sound wonderful. For example, they shame my Sonos Play:1s.
I am about to get a Sonos soundbar instead, which I will AirPlay to from whatever app/application I please.
Though at this point in the refresh cycle I'd be hard-pressed to buy a HomePod, since they're getting long in the tooth.
It's called Audio Hijack [1], but I don't think it reliably supports stereo pairs.
how often were you doing this? from what app?
WiFi is nice because I don't ever get connection issues or drops around the house. I have a few bluetooth speakers and they were bad at this. Just walking into the kitchen or bathroom caused the connection to drop.
Agree with grandparent comment, the HEOS speaker sound is fuller/richer, less reliance on Bose-style psychoacoustics.
Further, the Denon AVR with HEOS surrounds is the only receiver I know of supporting integrated amplifier for wired front speakers (separates) and WiFi wireless surrounds. I run Definitive ProMonitors and ProCenter for front, and Denon HEOS for surrounds.
(Note: Many receivers support wireless for other zones, I’m talking about mixing amped and wired for front with wireless for surrounds, and also ruling out “kits” where you can’t mix and match your own choice of speakers.)
In the same way, Apple Music and other first-party ecosystem things sound great on HomePods. The sound is unrivalled at its price point. It really is amazing how good of a device they made. For third party music sources such as Spotify, the experience is quite different. The HomePod subreddit is full of issues with playing Spotify on the HomePod, even over Airplay[0]. It was detrimental to the point that Spotify filed a formal complaint to the EU last year[1], and support was finally added this year at WWDC[2] for non-Apple audio sources.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/HomePod/search?q=spotify&restrict_s...
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2019/03/13/spotify-files-complaint-with-...
That's an interesting analogy. Have you considered other products to fit this as well or is it something specific about Homepod?
Looks like Bose has multiple patents for noise cancelling technology. Did a major one expire?
Have expired for a long while. It just took some time for serious competition, like the Sony MDR-1000X and its descendants, to come out.
Those patents are really old actually. Noise cancelling was unknown to the general public prior to the first quietcomfort headphones from Bose but it had been in use for decades before in Bose aviation headsets.
Most major brands are better than beats by a long shot.
However, most brands are beginning to cheap out IMO. I had a pair of sennheiser headphones back in like ~2005, they lasted like 11 years before the cups started to fall apart. I replaced them with a new pair of sennheiser which lasted ~12 months before they began to fall apart... Not only that, the old sennheiser was SUPER comfy, the new ones hurt my ears after a while... Replaced the new sennheiser with another model, fall apart in ~12 months...
Now I'm just using some Asus gaming headphones, quality is not Bose level but its good enough, and the cups have lasted longer than the last 2 pair of sennheiser I've had.
I don't really have a horse in this race because I don't care what accessories Apple sells or doesn't, don't buy retail, and rarely buy electronics or durable goods new. I still have a 3 year old pair of QC35 (I) that has had ~10 ear pads, the top band, and battery replaced by me.
Apple is going further and further into it's own navel.
I think, and this may be a strange thought, that apple might do better to sell competitors stuff to keep itself strong and healthy.
Edit: Turns out Bloomberg already has a story on it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-05/apple-sto...
Much cheaper, much simpler, nothing to break ...