“Word, now confirmed by the Financial Times, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, that Apple is in talks with Beats Audio about an acquisition to the tune of $3.2 billion is surprising only because of the price,” Anthony Wing Kosner writes for Forbes. “The dollar value of Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine’s cool aside, there are many things that make sense about the idea. Apple has never been considered a street brand or the maker of particularly good headphones.”
MacDailyNews Take: The latter goes double for Beats.
“And iTunes Radio is far from a Spotify or Pandora killer, so the new Beats Music streaming service could bolster it and declining iTunes sales,” Kosner writes. “But for a company that was valued at $1 billion at the time of the Carlyle Groups investment of $500 million last September, the hyper-inflation of its valuation can only mean that others were in the bidding.”
“Apple has never spent a billion buying another company, something that rivals Google and particularly Facebook can’t say. Facebook, in particular, stacks up as a likely suitor,” Kosner writes. “And, like Apple, Facebook has a cool problem. Instagram and WhatsApp were both attractive because of their teen appeal. Beats would bring not only youth but some amount of urban street cred as well… But Beats is really much better aligned with Apple than any other tech company I can think of. Both have succeeded at launching product line after product line that are a cut above its major competitors in both quality and price.”
MacDailyNews Take: Beats. A triumph of marketing over sound quality. Kosner has obviously swallowed Beats’ marketing hook, line, and sinker. A pox on you, Anthony, for ever daring to mention “Apple” and “quality” in the same sentence as “Beats” whose audio hardware is, to be generous, overhyped mediocrity at best.
You want to kill an audiophile? Just slap a pair of Beats’ headphones on him and press play.
Kosner writes, “My guess is that Beats may have played Facebook or others to drive the price up, but secretly (or not so secretly) have always wanted to be acquired by Apple.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The fact that some poor, tin-eared and/or gullible souls think Beats’ audio products are “quality” is proof positive that some people will believe just about friggin’ anything.
Related article:
Apple in talks to buy Beats Electronics for $3.2 billion – May 8, 2014
Beats makes inferior, gimmicky, overpriced hardware. Their “Beats EQ” software on the HTC One is also a huge joke. I can’t imagine that Apple would pay $3 billion just for the streaming service.
First The Beatles, now Beats…
Beats your joking rubbish headphones made from cheap plstic and terrible sound. best suited to teens who love then, but Beats are pooor quality headphones they break as i have been told by friends who have owned them and people who sell them here in the UK.
Apple would probably better buy Bower and Wilkins or Bose who are specific Audio companies who make better quality kit
The headphones don’t look cool just plain stupid if apple wants the streaming service go the whole hog and spend some of their excess cash and buy spot iffy or pandora or bugger it buy both!
Wish Bose was for sake at 3.2 billion dollars and that apple was buying it. Beats electronics is over priced at any price, really hoping this news is false
Cook. you have got to be kidding. We all realize Jobs handed you a cash-printing machine, but why are you blowing it all on spaceship office buildings, $68 million signing bonuses, and garbage low-end audio marketers?
HTC made a $300 million investment in Beats just a few years ago, and the venture flopped. HTC backpedalled out of it. Why is Apple wasting its resources to repeat the same mistake?
This sounds like a ridiculous rumor. Apple acquires companies for the expertise they provide to incorporate into their other products. I can’t think of anything Beats would provide to Apple that they need.
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/05/08/apple-beats-lefsetz
No matter how “good” they may or may not sound, this product has always had the sense (for me) of a fleecing of kids who wanna look cool and parents who just cannot say no to their brats. Kinda like buying your 4 yr old an iPhone 5s.
This is all about acquiring Jimmy Iovine, not Dre or the headphones. They needed to fix iTunes Radio. And their iTunes/Music business needs an industry bigwig to run it. No one is buying songs anymore. Its all about the streaming. And the Dre/Ioivine team have built something Apple needs. Getting the headphones and the apparent cache of the brand might be considered a nice bonus.
If true, it has got to be because Tim Cook wants to buy the love of the gangsta crowd. He already wasted a lot of good money buying the love of gays, lesbians, politically correct Nazis and enviro-whackos.
Really, MDN? They may not be the absolute best headphones, I’m not sure I haven’t reviewed thousands or even hundreds of models. But I have had several different brands of headphones in the $200-$400 price range and of all of them, my dre beats (newer model that is rechargeable) are my absolute favorite, and the quality is outstanding. This is something I could foresee apple doing great things with, not to mention they call rip it back out of all the competitors who are licensing it!
You poor deaf bastard. You should invest in hearing aids instead.
Apples products are far superior to “beats” apples earbuds sound just a good,, if they were going up the rest they should have bought the real innovators of headsets BOSE!!! That would impress more with a well built and marketed product ,, not a black urban headset that’s over priced and sound poor,,, come on Apple, if your gonna buy a headset maker shoot higher and with more proven sound !!
Bose innovators of headphones….please….no audiophile would touch any Bose product….style over substance. And anyway powering any pair of headphones from the shite that is mp3 is just a pointless exercise. The death of what people perceive as hi fi is directly linked to the garbage ipod….I would happily stamp on everyone of them.
If this is true, it marks the beginning of the decline of Apple.
It will be time to jump ship.
Beats electronics at over $3 Billion you must be fucking crazy, cheap crappy overhyped shite pretending to be a quality audio product, and its hardly a monopoly….headphones like Senheiser, Beyer or Stax would absolutely destroy any Beats products hands down….I cannot see self respecting analyst valuing this company at anywhere near this value. Are you sure this isnt April 1st.
Beats? Really Apple?… This is troubling. You just lost a big fan since ’84.