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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

I’ll never understand that people get angry about this stuff but not about luxury bags or iPhones.

You’re not paying for the bill of material. You’re paying for the research, the engineering, the design and the brand.

I'm angry at neither Sennheiser nor Apple. First Sennheiser does its research and uses engineering to differentiate a product, and that's fine for me.

In Apple's case, more money generally gives more hardware. LIDARs, GPS modules in GSM iPads, more cores or more co-processors, etc.

I'm very aware that I generally don't pay for the bill of materials, and it doesn't bother me, because I get a far superior experience for a longer time.

My newest toy is 3rd generation AirPods my wife got me for my birthday. Do they sound better than my highest end headphones, no. Are they "monitor-flat", again no. But, they are practical, sound enjoyable and useful. Also they do a great job at projecting voice (podcasts, calls, audiobooks) at my ears with utmost clarity even in noisy environments without being loud, fatiguing and uncomfortable, and you know what? This is great.

Also, it renders Atmos audio beautifully. I enjoy listening to them, and this is what matters for me on the go.

And, they're paired to an iPhone X, and it's going out of support this year. I'll again get the latest and the greatest in shortest time possible and forget about phones for ~8 years.

Yeah, my boss has latest and greatest iphones and airpods pro, and everytime he uses them compared to dirt cheap Jabra headset company gave us, I know. How? He sounds like crap, voice dropping, volume jumping up and down, sometimes audio disconnections, while literally everybody else on the call is fine. Pairing issues half of the time.

But he refuses to use what company gives to him. He ain't complaining, because he hears rest of us perfectly fine.

Btw all that hardware you listed, its in other phones too, for much less. My phone from last year has ie Lidar, that's not something fancy these days, and its pretty accurate for common stuff. I won't build shelves just by using it but otherwise measures OK.

I use AirPods Pro for hours every single weekday in meetings and have never had a single complaint about quality. Never any pairing issues, and I frequently move between my work MBP, personal iPhone, and personal MBP. They switch flawlessly.

I do notice that the cheapo company supplied headsets sound scratchy when others use them over personal AirPods.

Funny how we have exact opposite experiences.

> Funny how we have exact opposite experiences.

Just a crazy thought, but perhaps the parent was trying to connect to a device not created by Apple?

Any tips for Atmos? I've tried turning on "spatial audio" for albums that support it on apple music, but it just sounds more distant and echo-ey. It sounds so bad that I can't imagine anyone liking it, so I must be doing something wrong

Atmos is a scam to sell more speakers. The spacial audio is the same lame fake surround sound trick that never sounded good. Either listen to Atmos mixed music, famously hated by artists and producers alike, or just listen in stereo and enjoy the music.

Oh yeah I'm fully aware, I just want to give it an honest shot, but everytime I did it sounds the same as or worse than stereo, even watching/listening DolbyTM AtmosTM Certified ContentTM on DolbyTM AtmosTM Certified DevicesTM

Honestly, no.

I gave a couple of shots with some albums, with the AirPods, only. The way Apple puts it (scan your ears with FaceID camera to optimize things) makes a convincing performance of positioning music, but it's not better than a honest stereo album with a good pair of speakers.

Upmixing stereo to spatial is not very good, too. Just look for Dolby Atmos albums on Apple Music.

Huh, I didn't know about the ear scanning thing. I'll give it a try, thank you!

> You’re not paying for the bill of material.

They’ve added more material (and cost) with the foam, and to make the product worse.

A cheaper iPhone isn’t usually a crippled high end model.

I’ve got news for you about how flash memory and processors are manufactured, binned, and fed out to distinct product lines.

The general strategy is to make everything with the same die, and then bin the output based on manufacturing quality, defects, etc.

Quite often, the manufacturing is too good, and therefore perfectly capable hardware is feature-limited in order to fill the lower end product lines.

And plenty of people buying those processors feel it's their right to 'overclock' to get the performance of a more expensive product - In the early 2000s people would even bridge connections on the chips with pencil to reverse multiplier locking.

Slot 1 300A Celeron pencil trick was the best. I lived with that for a while, and then I got a dual socket 370 533 Celerons on the BP6. That was an absolutely insanely overpowered machine for years.

their options are to: * do novel research into making a sku that produces exactly $199 worth of sound quality, no more no less (more expensive) * sell everything cheaper, which is equivalent to making both skus sound identical (less profit) * not make a low end sku (pricing out potential customers) * create a low end sku for lower binned drivers (least bad option)

Take apart the phone and look at individual parts and you will find that this is absolutely the case. Every large scale electronics manufacturer uses this strategy.

And specifically in Apple's case they do spend more money doing stuff like soldering ram to the motherboard so customers can't upgrade them.

As much as I dislike Apple policies on general, the RAM is not soldered, it's integrated in the SoC, and it makes a HUGE difference in terms of SPEED.

The soldered disk on the other hand... fuck that

They started soldering the RAM to the logic board on the mid-2012 MBP.

Initially this was discussing the iPhone.

It’s one of those happy times when everyone is right.

> And specifically in Apple's case they do spend more money doing stuff like soldering ram to the motherboard so customers can't upgrade them.

Doesn't soldering RAM to the motherboard cost less?

100%. Soldering RAM makes the engineering quite a lot easier, prevents a RAM module vendor from making profit, and gets rid of an entire assembly step because now you no longer need to install the RAM module.

The downside is a lack of flexibility, because you are now committed to a very specific RAM chip and you need to spend effort if you ever need to change that - rather than just plugging in one of a dozen modules.

You missed the point entirely. “The research, the engineering, the design and the brand” is almost exactly the same for both models. The problem is that Sennheiser charges you $150 more for pretty much the same headset.

So if Louis Vuitton made a version of their bags that’s the same but a different logo, at only a 50% margin instead of 98% or whatever their current margins are, you’d be angry at them too?

But because they only sell the version with the super high margin and not the “crippled” cheaper kind, it’s somehow just fine?

Same with iPhones, those margins are huge, they could totally sell you a crippled cheaper version of the same hardware and still make money. They just choose to only sell things at the highest margins, because their UX and brand are so strong. How is “pricing everything super high” fine and “also sell a few cheaper options with lower end-user value” terrible greed? That’s totally upside down to me.

If LV did that, it would damage their brand. People justify paying for premium brands by convincing themselves they get something exclusive. If LV showed you can get the same product, just with a different brand, then it's no longer exclusive. Those who previously believed in the brand would be angry.

> So if Louis Vuitton made a version of their bags that’s the same but a different logo, at only a 50% margin instead of 98% or whatever their current margins are, you’d be angry at them too?

Useless comparison, bag here is only fashion statement, not something you use for technology.

And it's weird assumption they made any of them "first", they most likely designed both in parallel (design time != start of production time) and just put worse sounding version in cheaper one to not cannibalize the market.

It's known as "market segmentation" and it's been around forever. Look at CPUs, car engines, smart phones - same hardware with different feature bits enabled allows you to sell the same widget cheaper to a different demographic without destroying the value proposition of the more expensive variant.

Yeah, this sounds like textbook price discrimination via market segmentation to me. Producers do this to capture more of the consumer surplus value (willingness of some consumers to pay more than others). The alternative is to offer a single model for a price somewhere in between. Without the segmentation the richer / more willing to spend consumers save some money, but some of the poorer / less willing to pay consumers get priced out of the market. With effective price discrimination, the supplier gets higher profits, but there's also some cross-subsidy from bigger spenders to the more thrifty ones, so there's also some progressive redistribution.

Well, if there was a proper competition the "cheaper but better performing model" would capture some of the competition market, but headphones are bit too subjective market for that.

> proper competition

Are you suggesting the headphone market is rigged?

I explained what I suggested in my previous sentence, read it to the end

You can look at it from a different angle, that you pay $150 less for pretty much the same headset, as the more expensive one paid the research.

I can argue that why do I have to pay 1000$ for a software, when the hobby tier is free, it is pretty much the same application.

And the difference between the different products sold by software people is frequently just a few bits here and there. The "Pro" version might allow bigger files or higher resolutions or whatever, the "Lite" only does 20 projects at a time, whatever. The cost for these differentiated products is exactly identical, the underlying product is precisely the same, yet they have the audacity to charge (often a significant) price differential. And you even already did all the work for the Pro Ultra version! How dare you artificially cripple it to sell it at a lower price! Disgusting and reprehensible. Software developers should be ashamed of themselves.

> I’ll never understand that people get angry about this stuff but not about luxury bags or iPhones.

What makes you think same people do not get angry about those ?

> You’re not paying for the bill of material. You’re paying for the research, the engineering, the design and the brand.

The annoyance is having to navigate what you pay for. I don't want to pay for the design and the brand, I want to pay for engineering and research

You also pay for quality control. Cheaper brands often have decent audio quality on average but high variation in between individual pairs of headphones. They also tend to fall apart after 1-2 years of use in my experience.

I don't mind paying for the research, engineering and maybe design but I won't pay for "brand". Same as I don't buy luxury bags or iPhones or clothes.

Are headphones still getting better?

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