> reinvented the higher-end headphone marke
There's zero high-endness about Beats headphones. They're all right (at least if they were priced around 30% of their current price), but really, they don't sound particularly good.
There's zero high-endness about Beats headphones. They're all right (at least if they were priced around 30% of their current price), but really, they don't sound particularly good.
Apple definitely bought the brand, not the headphone tech. Otherwise with such a cash stash they would have bought any of Beyerdynamic, Grado, Sennheiser, or the newer entries to headphones like Marshall (the Major is so-so but the Monitor is awesome)
While I'm still such a fan of sound quality that I will continue purchasing terrible-looking headphones, I can't deny that Beats are sexy as hell.
Consumers, right? :)
Getting people who don’t care about how their music sounds that much and who don’t work with audio to seriously consider buying $300 headphones, that’s the achievement.
Those people used to either use the headphones that came with their devices, or they bought some cheap headphones (way under $100, probably even way under $50). Beats managed to attract those people to their products and managed to sell them to them for substantially more than they were previously ready to spend on headphones.
That’s what’s meant when people talk about Beats creating a new market. Buying expensive headphones just wasn’t a mainstream thing before Beats.
Honestly, I don’t even have much of a problem with that. People spend more money on better headphones. Sure, they spend too much for merely average headphones, but those are already better than anything they had before and once they buy into them I think it becomes way easier to convince them to try other headphones. Who cares if they spend too much?
But even on technical quality Beats bring something new to the table. They have a built in amp for christ's sake. They lowered the bar for amped audio to something the masses would use. It is a typical story of reducing friction/barrier to entry and reaping rewards.
Every conversation I see about beats speaks of them as garbage and pure marketing etc etc. But this is entirely missing the point of what made beats a success. You can choose to bury your head in the sand or you can open your eyes and actually learn something from the beats phenomenon.
Sure, perfect match for Apple.
Beats headphones are not designed to deliver music accurately, they are designed to make it sound cooler.
Beats is like the Instagram of music. Yeah, you'll get an objectively higher quality from Photoshop, but Instagram is easier to use and makes things look cool.
Apparently there are quality issues with Beats, but that is exactly the sort of problem that Apple is well-equipped to solve.
The interesting thing, to me, about this is that Beats (the headphone, not the streaming music service) has the high price and is currently high-school chic, but similar things have been said about Apple. In Apple's case they're aided by the product's function being on par with the design.. The Beats stuff seems to consistently fall short of the quality of sound offered by Sennheiser and Sony's stuff.
Hence the public talking about "wifi" instead of "wireless ethernet connected to the internet."
The public doesn't know and doesn't respect the world as it was before the products became available which they feel express themselves.
I am/was with you in believing that high price doesn't mean "high-end," but that association has now become useless for communicating with the rest of the world.
The same can be said for the word "decimate." I've given up trying to use it properly and/or correct anyone. It's over. Also using "data" as plural. The world doesn't want a plan, it wants a dream.