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Comment by gareim | Hacker News Reader

Apple redefined the mp3 player market, the ultraportable laptop market, the smartphone market, the tablet market, and now they're buying a company that reinvented the higher-end headphone market. Is it smart of a brand that has traditionally created their own iconic images to buy another cultural icon for $3 billion? I don't think so.

Maybe this gets used a lot, but would Steve Jobs have done this? Or would he have created his own headphones and music streaming service?

I'm willing to bet anything this is going to be seen as where Apple's golden age began to wane.

EDIT: I said "higher-end" because it's perceived to be, even though audiophiles would never agree. The consumer market believes that Beats and Bose are king though. That's another reason that I'm against this purchase; Apple isn't even buying anything technically higher end (Sennheiser, Beyerdynamic, HiFiMan, what have you).

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The Beats deal comes down to two things:

1) The "premium mobile audio" market is going to be the next huge market where Apple and Samsung face-off. It's no coincidence that Samsung announced their new line of premium headphones just a week before the Apple-Beats rumors began: http://www.samsung.com/uk/news/local/samsung-launches-level-...

2)Despite the tech communities denial, Apple and Beats are very much in sync. Beats is first and foremost a fashionable hardware company for the mass markets, which APPLE IS TOO. People in the tech community, and Hacker News more specifically, are having a hard time grasping this deal because they still see Apple's roots as a niche tech company of superior quality, whereas they've long moved to a mass market company. For a long time Apple was seen in a similar light as Beats; they charged a premium for commoditized product (personal computers with operating systems) and were heavily driven by marketing. Wether Hacker News wants to accept it or not, they're both predominantly mass market fashionable hardware companies that charge a premium for their ostensibly superior products. Beats has created a justifiably large brand, whether techies want to accept that fact or not. As the dominant hardware company, Apple is just acquiring a fast up and coming trendy hardware and accessories company, just as happens in every other industry. This deal makes sense.

I agree but I think there’s a third reason. This Jimmy Iovine guy is no joke, he’s like the Johnny Ive of music and Hollywood, and the ability to work out deals with media companies is priceless.

http://www.dailydot.com/technology/apple-beats-jimmy-iovine-...

> 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.

That doesn't mean they're not part of the higher-end headphone market.

High-end is a sonic category, not a price category. There are extremely expensive audio systems that are targeted towards concerts, etc..

That's an interesting definition. I think of it as a synonym of "upscale," which refers explicitly to high price but does generally have a connotation of high quality as well.

I agree - I think of "high-end" as indicative of price.

Probably better to call them luxury headphones. That doesn't carry the same connotation of quality that "high-end" does.

One thing I've learned over the last 10 years in the tech world vs. the last 25 years in it, is that the mainstream (via its marketing catalyst) will override traditionally-held beliefs about the uses of technology and the words used to describe it.

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.

Factually true, but as they created and own pretty much the entire market for $300 headphones, one has to concede they have the title of high end headphones... high end doesnt necessarily mean highest quality.

Not really true - Sony and Sennheiser (as well as AKG and other less known companies) had the market covered already.

I think the idea is that Beats expanded the market for $200-400 headphones. Yes, Sony sold headphones in that range, but they didn't sell them to every high school student who wanted to look cool.

This just further underlines the point that Beats are not actually high-end headphones, but fashion items. As such, they're incredibly vulnerable to changing tastes. In the areas around me, Beats have already plummeted from prominence or popularity among young people and cool people.

I've seen that happen, as well. People who can't really afford it pay a couple of hundred for a cool red B on their headphones, then they wisen up and realize that a cool S is a better choice.

No, at that price they sold to professionals and audiophiles who wanted the sound to actually sound properly, not muddy bass overflowing the mids and highs.

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)

Audiophile pretentiousness aside, the article barely even mentions the actual hardware. Probably bought them for the music service & industry connections

True, but at one stage, Sony almost cornered the market for a specific pair of DJing headphones...until everyone realised they actually weren't too good, but still 'wanted to look cool'.

Yup, they're the Air Jordan's of headphones. It's a fashion choice, not an audio quality choice.

I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that most youth weren't begging their parents for $300 headphones before Beats came along.

It hadn't occurred to me until I've been reading through these postings, but it's true: high-end, expensive headphones have traditionally be tragically ugly, almost as though it was a badge of honor to suffer the ugly headphones, because one knew they were getting superior sound quality.

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.

Except Beats created a new market - a group of people who couldn't actually afford $300 headphones but bought them anyway. Just as you see people who buy iPhones and iPods but can't really afford them.

Reminds me of some long-early post when hackers gf begged him to buy her a new iPhone5. Instead the hacker somehow skinned and make her old iPhone4 to look like iPhone5 and she didn't even noticed.

Consumers, right? :)

Audiophiles (broadly speaking, even if - like myself – they really don’t want to be called that) and people working with audio bought those, hardly anyone else. Those aren’t the people who buy Beats. That’s a totally different (and much smaller) market.

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?

I guess it's a win-win for everyone: Beats got these people to spend $300 on headphones, then these people realize that they want to get real quality for their money and they go get something better :-).

It doesn't matter if you're paying for sound quality, fashion, or the brand name. They cost $150-$300. That's higher-end.

it's not worth that price

hello beats audio employees

Even within Beats own line there are the decidedly "lower" and "higher" end models.

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.

Surely this could be said about many other high-end fashion type brands. Expensive Nike trainers aren't worth what they sell for, most designer handbags are worth a fraction of what they sell for. These items also don't have any real technical merit to justify the price.

Fashion runs as a top-down economy. Most of the high-end designers are the ones driving innovation, and other designers/large corps soon imitate these styles a few years later for lower prices.

I agree 100% You get people listening to Beats headphones that pump so much bass that they destroy the mid and high end. It's stupid to pay that much money for a decidedly low-end product. Just because it's loud doesn't mean it's good. And beyond that, the actual physical quality of Beats headphones is absolute rubbish. I unfortunately bought into the hype my first year of college and picked up a pair and returned them a week later as they were falling apart and sounded like dirt. Bowers and Wilkins are far superior in basically every way.

High end is all about perception as indicated by price. Technical quality means almost nil.

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.

> High end is all about perception as indicated by price. Technical quality means almost nil.

Sure, perfect match for Apple.

The fundamental mistake that audio geeks make with Beats is to think that the best headphone delivers a flat response.

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.

I totally agree. The question I ask is whether Beats is the kind of headphone that Steve Jobs would personally design and use. The "steve" test seems to guide everything else they build, so why not extend to headphones.

The way I see it, the answer seems to be "no." The headphones are bulky, the logo gaudy - just not Steve. The advertising - think of the superbowl ads that rankled Seattle fans - just not really Apple's style or ethos.

I can't underestimate Apple - they are a wildly successful company, and may well see something great that I can't. Guess we'll just have to see.

OTOH, the iPod Hi-Fi.

Even if beats isn't his aesthetic, I find it difficult to imagine Steve being able to stomach a lower quality product underneath.

Jobs would have wanted products perhaps like Bose - expensive, overpriced but ultimately good quality underneath. Beats is lower middle quality underneath all the plastic and Jobs wouldn't be able to sleep at night if he thought anything lower middle quality ever shipped out of his factories.

The audio fidelity of Bose speakers and headphones aren't any better than that of Beats. They're rightly derided in the audio community as sub-par equipment sold for far too much.

>The "steve" test seems to guide everything else they build

Where did you get this from?

> would Steve Jobs have done this? Or would he have created his own headphones and music streaming service?

I don't know, would he have? You asked the question in such a way as to imply the answer that no, he wouldn't, but you can't actually know that for sure. Also, we shouldn't be holding Apple to the standard of 'Steve Jobs was perfect so if he wouldn't have done this then it's bad'; Jobs made his share of mistakes anyway.

The confusing part is that Apple is spending $3bn on a company that makes mediocre, overpriced headphones with lousy sound quality. It makes no sense to me that they would buy a company like this when they have the money to create their own headphone line with better technology, equivalent or better design, and overall better result, likely at a lower price.

I guess we'll have to see where things go from here.

We don't know what he would have said, but what he did say before he passed away was that he explicitly didn't want people at Apple to ask what Steve would have done, he wanted them to do what they felt was right.

The deal would make no sense whatsoever if not for the music streaming service. It's interesting that they get the headphone business along with it - my hope is that they will gradually beef up the quality of the headphones in the process.

They also get the legendary founder of Interscope records (who ran it for 25 years) and Dr. Fucking Dre as part of the deal to serve as Apple management. That's got to worth something.

Yes, but what's the over/under on how long either of them stay? Seems a bit like Michael Ovitz at Disney: he lasted a year.

What if they were given an opportunity and the complete responsibility to build a record label under Apple?

Total end-to-end control of music from creation to consumer listening.

Of course we can keep playing the what-if game, but I think there's a bit more to this deal than meets the eye.

One possibility: Apple intends to bring its quality and engineering expertise to bear on the Beats product line. They might be thinking that they can take the #1 seller and preserve that position indefinitely by decreasing the price and improving the quality. Apple's supply chain can probably result in better build quality (or a reduction in price for the current builds), and its engineering can probably bring better audio quality.

If "Beats Suck" turns into "Beats are Really Good, and Less Expensive", then they will lock up a good deal of the higher end headphone market.

There may also be some interesting exploration of what's possible with a headphone-based wearable. Plenty of room in that particular fashion accessory...much more so than in a watch.

They could design a new headphone connector that makes all other headphones incompatible.

And then patent the idea:

Claim 1: Headphone connector means comprising a plurality of means that are incompatible with all other brands of means

> There may also be some interesting exploration of what's possible with a headphone-based wearable. Plenty of room in that particular fashion accessory...much more so than in a watch.

While I applaud your imagination, this seems to go against Apple's vision of elegance and miniaturization (i.e., the perfect technology is invisible).

> There may also be some interesting exploration of what's possible with a headphone-based wearable. Plenty of room in that particular fashion accessory...much more so than in a watch.

Let's look at this from a different angle... What if Apple already has a super cool headphone based wearable tech.

Maybe Apple RND came up with something like "Google Glass minus the visor" a while back. That something could well look like a chunky set of headphones, right?

Now let's take a look at the current wearables market... The high profile items are things like Glass, Pebble, Samsung Gear. And they're almost all painfully uncool (outside of Sillicon Valley, anyway).

If Apple were going to launch its chunky iHeadphones, it would know that it'd be up against the "dork factor." So it would make sense to spend some cash to negate that. If so, purchasing the coolest headphone manufacturer you can find, and tying their brand to your upcoming tech, makes a lot of sense.

>I'm willing to bet anything this is going to be seen as where Apple's golden age began to wane.

I would argue that they've already been left behind on the music front. iPods are dead, no one wants to buy tracks on iTunes for $1.29, iTunes Radio was too little, too late. A lot of Apple fans are proudly using Spotify or other services on their iPhones. Heck, even the musicians associated with Apple are getting uncool.

So, at least a Beats acquisition is something.

As of about a year ago, Apple was selling about 21 million songs a day. That's a lot of no ones.

http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/1538108/itunes-cr...

That said, Apple hasn't had much impact on other types of music delivery--although it's probably worth noting that the business models associated with those other types of music delivery are a lot less clear than selling individual songs is.

OTOH: http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/3/5271528/music-sales-decline...

> would Steve Jobs have done this?

I think so. Apple built the iPod and purchased SoundJam because they realized the world had changed. Buying CDs in stores and feeding them into your CD player was inevitably going to be replaced by digital media players/sales. iPod/iTunes filled this demand for many years but now the world has changed again. People don't spend $200 on iPods anymore but they will spend $200 on Beats headphones. They don't like feeding digital media files into their digital media players -- streaming is much easier. They also don't care much about owning music anymore or understand why a song costs 99 cents when they can goto YouTube and listen to it for free.

"…this is going to be seen as where Apple's golden age began to wane."

I heard that kind of talk when Steve died.

I think a lot of people would still argue that. I've seen a lot of talk in the press about how Cook is still under pressure for not releasing any revolutionary new products after Jobs' immediate pipeline.

Yes, it's definitely easy to cry doom, haha. But what have we seen since Jobs? Iterations of successful product lines. Faster, thinner, better battery life in general. But where's THE AppleTV that the media has been rumoring about for years? Or the wearables that grab headlines every day?

I'm sure there were plenty of products (AppleTV, smartwatch) in the pipeline before Jobs passed away. The question is, outside of those long-rumored about products, what next? This purchase of Beats just seems like a bad omen of acquisition rather than invention.

Maybe I'm wrong and the Apple-Beats combination will create a new product that changes how we look at headphones. Maybe I'm right and Apple is losing their vision. Only time tells and either way, it'll be interesting to look back on these crazy decades.

Then again, what did we see before the iPhone launch? Not much more than incremental improvements to Macs and iPods.

We'll see next week what they'll have to announce.

I completely agree with this. Jobs would've already made a subscription service and tried different headphones to sell by now. This is more of an aquihire and it's unimpressive.

If you watch MKBHD's videos on youtube, he shows why beats headphones sound good and why there's plenty of others that sound better for a cheaper cost.

Basically it's not really a move Jobs would've done but that's what happens when your co-founders aren't running the company anymore. It's like the NFL draft.

I'd say Google is going up and Apple is going down.

>> "Jobs would've already made a subscription service"

They already made one - iTunes Radio. It sucks. Also Jobs was strongly against music streaming as he didn't think people wanted to rent music.

>> "Basically it's not really a move Jobs would've done"

You knew him well did you?

I'm not willing to bet anything on that, one week before WWDC in a year where Tim Cook has already gone on record saying that Apple is going to launch "new product categories".

> reinvented the higher-end headphone market.

Rebranded mid-range electronics with pop star endorsements and hype.

Do people really consider Beats to be high end?

s/high end/costly/

Obviously "high-end" refers to how much people pay for them, not the objective sound quality of the headphones.

But I guess using the obvious interpretation wouldn't let you seem smart by shitting on something popular.

Yes, Beats is considered to be "high end." Beats are seen as a symbol as status for kids. Owning a pair makes you "cool." It's similar to how many kids want an iPhone or a pair of Jordans.

>Beats are seen as a symbol as status for kids

This might have been true five years ago, but it's not very accurate any more. Beats have come and gone as a fashion piece.

A Lexus is a re-branded Toyota; it's still high-end.

Lexus cars have more differences from the similar Toyota model than just a new badge. Beats are pretty much just a badge.

As an owner of a new Lexus -- absolutely. Can't wait until my lease is up.

Oh come now, that's a bit ridiculous. Interiors are upgraded, accessories are upgraded, often the suspension is upped as well. Outside of that, many of the Lexus models have completely redone power trains (F line). The IS line is on a completely separate platform from whatever the equivalent vanilla toyota would be.

I would have gone with something like Ford and Lincoln, where they really are almost completely rebadged.

As a Toyota fan, who recently looked at both a Ford Escape and a Lincoln Navigator...

You mention "interiors are upgraded, accessories are upgraded" - a 2010 Escape looks and feels cheap. Plastic everywhere, everything creaks and squeaks when you lean on it a little. The Lincoln has (actual) wood paneling, things like retractable running boards and even a nearly ten year old Navigator feels nicer, so I'm not sure how you can say it's not like the Toyota-Lexus difference.

>Do people really consider Beats to be high end?

People who buy them do and that's what matters.

Unfortunate wording. Not high end, which presumes high quality. I'd describe them as luxury or premium brand headphones, not high end.

I said "higher-end" because it's perceived to be, even though audiophiles would never agree.

Do audiophiles really agree on anything?

You're going to have a really hard time finding any audiophile anywhere with anything positive to say about beats

The consumer market believes that Beats and Bose are king though

To be fair, from what I've read Bose has the best noise cancelling system, albeit at a high price.

I'm not incredibly persnickety about audio quality and don't think I can tell the difference among various "good" headphones. But I have a pair of Bose headphones and like them.

I recently got Bose QuietComfort 20i for my trip from Europe to Australia. It was expensive, but so worth it. That constant humming noise on the plane usually makes me incapable of doing anything. With these earphones—you flip the switch and the magic happens. Especially on the flight from Singapore to Perth which was very smooth (no turbulence) it felt like just sitting in a room and listening to music. Watching movies on the plane also became much more enjoyable, with headphones offered by airline you need to turn volume almost to the max. You need an adaptor for airline headphones jack though.

> ... but would Steve Jobs have done this?

I wonder if Steve would have backed out of the deal because of the video that was posted online prior to the announcement.

Something tells me that Steve wouldn't have done the deal to begin with though.

I get a little kick out of things like this because I just know Steve Jobs would flip shit if he were still alive. I really don't see how this is a smart move for Apple. I'd love if they prove me wrong, but I don't think they will.

If this was the very stupidest thing Apple has ever done--a massive colossal waste of money that needed to be written off--they would still have $183+ billion cash on hand that they could cry into.

You really, truly think Jobs didn't know where his company was going to go in the next 5 or 10 years? Seriously?

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