Whilst I dislike Beats, I admire them a lot. They entered a market where every company was focusing on sound quality first, aesthetics second and they came in with a new take: headphones should look good (I actually dislike the style but a lot of young people seem to love it), and should have a lot of bass to make certain types of music - music listened to by young people - sound good (again, I dislike this but many people love their sound).
hellbanTHIS comments that he lost a lot of respect for Apple when they bought Beats. Initially, I did too, but having learnt more about the company, I think it's a perfect fit. A lot of people say that you shouldn't buy a Mac because you can buy a Windows machine with the same spec. Often, they're right. But they're also missing the point completely - you don't buy a Mac for the memory, the CPU, the SSD - you buy it for the experience, the "it just works", and for how nice the hardware is. Beats is the exact same thing. People aren't buying the headphones for the sound quality, they're buying it for everything else.
Again, I'm no fan of Beats. But somewhere like Hacker News, we ought to admire their ingenuity in taking over a market where the existing players had completely ignored (and frankly, seemed oblivious to the presence of) a large untapped audience.
hellbanTHIS comments that he lost a lot of respect for Apple when they bought Beats. Initially, I did too, but having learnt more about the company, I think it's a perfect fit. A lot of people say that you shouldn't buy a Mac because you can buy a Windows machine with the same spec. Often, they're right. But they're also missing the point completely - you don't buy a Mac for the memory, the CPU, the SSD - you buy it for the experience, the "it just works", and for how nice the hardware is. Beats is the exact same thing. People aren't buying the headphones for the sound quality, they're buying it for everything else.
Again, I'm no fan of Beats. But somewhere like Hacker News, we ought to admire their ingenuity in taking over a market where the existing players had completely ignored (and frankly, seemed oblivious to the presence of) a large untapped audience.