The original article on Medium that this article on huffington post reprints was based on a pair of counterfeit Beats headphones. The followup on Medium does the teardown on a real pair of Beats. Not much difference but some improved quality:<p><a href="https://medium.com/bolt-blog/how-it-s-made-series-yup-our-beats-were-counterfeit-but-they-cost-about-the-same-to-make-as-the-364cc6808d18" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/bolt-blog/how-it-s-made-series-yup-our-be...</a>
Cool. I'd be curious to see the same treatment of other high-end headphones. And all Bose products, which have always seemed egregiously overpriced to me.<p>Tangentially, it's actually really hard to find good headphone reviews anymore, let alone headphone demo places. Pro music stores (like Guitar Center, Sam Ash, etc) are probably the best bet these days - but they tend not to carry headphones like the high-end Sennheisers that used to be my favorites (HD570 I think?).
Why would anyone make headphones, of all things, heavier to make them feel high-quality? Comfort (wearing them for hours) is one of my highest priorities and every gram shaved off the headphones adds to comfort. The fact that they estimate the material cost of a 199$ product to 17$ is the icing on the cake, haha. Now I will look down on people who wear these even more.
What's interesting to me is that Apple products generally don't have margins anywhere near this large. Apple's products aren't generally built the 'easiest' way possible for fast assembly and such. The optimization/cheapness on these is amazing.
people are buying what they want and obviously those guys buying Beats are not looking for very high quality sound. They are buying for style and recognition. The same stuff that Apple has played on us all these years.<p>Although this article is indeed a high quality analysis, and the author really done a great job. There is no point arguing that a Beats is not a genuine headphone. Whatever product it is, there are always people who are looking for quality and people who are looking for style (In some market they are one).