Really? That would be a big shift at Apple, which never (as far as I can remember) hired a high-profile industry insider to a high level company position. If true, I'm very curious to see how that will play out.
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Apple's Purchase of Beats May Not Be Finalized Until Next Week
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Really? That would be a big shift at Apple, which never (as far as I can remember) hired a high-profile industry insider to a high level company position. If true, I'm very curious to see how that will play out.
It is like a person's enjoyment of music is not completely subjective or something.
Your logic is very sound actually. Its no about their products, its the relationships within the music industry. Apple needs access to more music, to sell more hardware.
Though if they really cared about the sound quality and benefits from such a deal, they could have bought BOSE. The only reason people are against this, unlike Apple, Beats products are plastic crap (for the price), while Apple for their price point, offers excellent quality products (not saying value for money).
Personally If I saw the new iphone with a Beats logo, for me that would be devaluing the Apple Brand.
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You mean there are people out there that just want to hear mid bass? Flat muddy sound, Restricted dynamics in the midrange and treble and Harsh treble.
If that is your idea of Music enjoy
But hey, image is everything!
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Apple also used to do iPods......
If this results in Apple finally updating their iPod range, I say WELCOME Iovine.
Yeah if they only cost $5 to make then beats would be worth 10 billion dollars which would mean it makes that much more sense to buy them.
I have come to accept most people don't understand how businesses actually business. People like to project knowledge and throw out buzzwords but then when you get down to the nuts and bolts the discussions fall apart because people simply don't get the basics.
If is fine if people feel that apple should not buy things they don't like. However it is another thing to expect a hyper successful business to make its acquisitions based on customers ignorant hopes and dreams.
If apple had bought nest people would have been falling all over themselves about what a good fit it is and a good deal it is, when it would have been neither and fallen short of beats in both areas. Apple is not collecting businesses like Pokemon cards or pig figurines. It is not a hobby. What Facebook did with whatsapp was absolutely insane. It was massively irresponsible and there will eventually be fallout down the road from it. It is awesome to want to deliver the Internet to the whole globe and make messaging accessible but none of that justifies the purchase. In no way shape or form was it worth that much money or even a non marginal fraction of that. Zuckerberg didn't just spend his own money on that, he spent a lot of other people's money.
There is going to come a time when these big tech firms are not playing with house money and actually have to be responsible with acquisitions. Apple has always been very careful and I don't think they have been any less careful in this case.
If you use the same value metric on beats on Facebook then Facebook itself doesn't make anywhere enough money for what they paid for whatsapp. Facebook made 523 million dollars last year. So by the same metric we measure beats by, Facebook is only worth at most 10 billion dollars. Yet they are ridiculously over priced and pay 19 billion dollars for an app that generates very little revenue and no profits.
If we measured Beats by the same metric that valued whatsapp, beats would legitimately be worth 100 billion dollars. That is how absurd that whatsapp deal was. Facebook's P/E ratio is almost 75 right now. If we decided that beats only made one hundred million dollars they would be worth 7.5 billion dollars if priced like Facebook. If they made three hundred million dollars they would be worth 22.5 billion dollars. It is absolutely absurd.
By comparison apple's P/E ratio is just under 15. Which really continues to make apple stock undervalued against most of their contemporaries. Even in the more conservative days of the stock market a P/E ratio of 20 was considered sound. Once the dotcom boom happened things changed as you had so many companies with no earnings that valuations went haywire.
For people who don't know the P/E ratio is simply the price of the company compared to its annual earnings. Let us say you could buy apple outright for its current price. You would recoup your investment in 15 years. If you bought Facebook you would recoup your investment in 75 years.
Of course the stock market is no longer about investing in businesses anymore. It is entirely just a game of manipulation. That is why Apple can continue to be undervalued and other companies be vastly overvalued. Setting diversification aside for a second, in a sane world everyone who owned Facebook stock would sell it and buy apple stock. But the stock market has not been sane in a long time. However sanity does still impact the buying decisions of many people when acquiring private companies. If your neighbor asked you to invest in his new business and told you, you could expect to see your money back in 75 years, would you be jazzed? Me neither.
Let me refresh your memory then...
John Sculley was president of Pepsi at the height of the Cola Wars; personally recruited by Jobs. (Obviously didn't work out to well).
Angela Ahrends was CEO of Burberry, and also #53 on Forbes list of most power women in the world. (Remains to be seen how this works out).
Just two off the top of my head.
Dre knows hate
As long as Andre is working for Apple, they won't get a penny of my money. And I'm a strict Apple customer of 18 years and a former employee of seven.
Hip hop's first billionaire. Bring on the haters
As long as Andre is working for Apple, they won't get a penny of my money. And I'm a strict Apple customer of 18 years and a former employee of seven.
{snip}
Though if they really cared about the sound quality and benefits from such a deal, they could have bought BOSE.
{snip}
You mean there are people out there that just want to hear mid bass? Flat muddy sound, Restricted dynamics in the midrange and treble and Harsh treble.
If that is your idea of Music enjoy
But hey, image is everything!
Bose. I'm giggling. Bose has virtually the same reputation as Beats in the audiophile community. Bose? Not sure if serious.
Whether you like Beats or not, they are targeted and marketed very successfully. It's a mass market, high margin brand tailored to reach as many consumers as possible. Sounds similar to Apple.
As for someone's musical taste, that's completely subjective. What sounds good to you may sound terrible to someone else. If people like Beats more power to them. If they like Senn (me!) or AT more power to them as well. Same goes for someone who thinks Bose is quality.
Sorry, won't believe this until I see a mockup. Or two.
I can't imagine it without one. Or two.
Heh heh
I can't imagine it without one. Or two.
Heh heh
When Google bought Nest and Facebook bought Oculus, the news came completely out of the blue. With Apple buying Beats however, we already have more rumors and details about it for the second week without the deal even being finalized. We know how much Apple is paying, we know that Dr. Dre and Iovine may take new executive roles at Apple, we know Apple will probably keep Beats its separate brand but use their streaming service, and we know that Apple will probably announce all this at WWDC.
I can forgive Apple for the insane amount of iPhone leaks, because they can't fully control the supply chains in China, but this? I'm sorry, but Apple just isn't a 'secretive' company anymore, and I think they should embrace this fact a little more and start opening up from within the company. What's not fine is to say that you are a secretive company, but completely failing to live up to your claims.
I can forgive Apple for the insane amount of iPhone leaks, because they can't fully control the supply chains in China, but this? I'm sorry, but Apple just isn't a 'secretive' company anymore, and I think they should embrace this fact a little more and start opening up from within the company. What's not fine is to say that you are a secretive company, but completely failing to live up to your claims.
Bose have the same reputation in the audiophile community as Apple do in the PC community. Both groups dismiss the merits of the brands and focus on the price, which in my opinion was always justified. Bose made the first quality iPod dock speaker and they have the best noise-cancelling headphones bar none. Their surround sound systems defy their size, are simple to set up and unlike audiophile approved speakers, they blend into the living room instead of dominating it. Just like PC users who are adamant that Macs are over-priced vanity items, people who dismiss Bose do not speak from experience and cannot comprehend that something can look good and perform admirably.
Apple clearly made this acquisition for whatever advantage the Beats streaming service will give them in the iTunes Store/Radio. If better headphones was the goal then Bose would have been a better choice.
Except I think there is a difference.
I gravitated to Mac in 1988 after getting frustrated with DOS. Having to learn all the DOS commands and then pray was a huge hit on my productivity. I toyed with Windows at its various iterations but while easier to use than naked DOS, at its heart it was still DOS. That's not to say Macs, especial OS 9 and earlier didn't have their issues (extension conflicts!! Right before a report was due!!!) but it was still easier to isolate a Mac problem than any PC in my experience. Time is money and Macs always had better resale value than PCs, which were almost worthless from the moment you tore the security seal off the box.
Bose OTOH started off with a very unique speaker product which helped start the whole concept of "audiophile," but by the late 70s they starting living on their name and the value disappeared. You could buy much better sounding speakers for the same money. That's not true of Mac vs PC. Macs are still unique in that they can improve productivity and really do not cost any more than a PC when you consider total cost of ownership, not just initial sales price.
Apple buying Beats for headphones was not my argument. My response dealt with the context of the audio quality and brand asserted by the other poster.
Bolded: That's not exactly true now is it? Most of the negativity surrounding Bose comes from reviewers who not only have experience but can totally comprehend form and function. Most often criticism is along the lines of "equal or better quality sound can be had for much less cost". Same criticism Beats gets. Bose has a good mass consumer reputation. Not so much with audiophiles. Beats has a good mass consumer reputation. Not so much with audiophiles. Bose does not have the advantage the Beats streaming service nor does it have the industry connections.
Yes one can only hope this deal was never in the cards in the first place. Apple should be able to throw enough money at Jimmy Iovine to get him to come on board and run iTunes (and maybe oversee Apple TV as well). Then Eddy Cue could focus full time on iCloud, maps, Siri and App Store.
I think you take "secretive" a bit too literal. It's not possible for a company the size and popularity of Apple to enjoy a 100% news blackout and not experience leaks. But MR has been around for over 10 years and I've been reading Apple rumors online since before the WWW existed when the Internet was mostly just Usenet. It's not new. Not even Steve Jobs could seal it up completely, and he tried. He even sued a college kid out of existance.
But what Apple means when it "secretive" is that it doesn't pre-announce product. If you need to know why Google "Osborne effect." But for all the rumors we've heard this year we still don't really know much except possible sizes of the iPhone. We don't know zip about possible updates to the Mac Mini, iMac, iPod Touch, Aperture, or any other Apple product. We can only speculate. I'd say thats not a bad job at being secret.
Beats purchase
I don't think purchasing beats add anything to apple. If this is the direction they are heading they will go with out me. No more apple products for me.
I don't think purchasing beats add anything to apple. If this is the direction they are heading they will go with out me. No more apple products for me.
Or...... maybe it will not happen at all. It was all click bait.
That's pretty much all I've been thinking since this whole story picked up and went totally out of proportions.
Apple doesn't need Beats, they don't need their hardware (which is grossly overrated), nor their music subscription service (which doesn't have enough subs to be of any real value, especially not for iTunes), nor do their need their brand to enhance Apple's (Apple is the king of all brands). While I'm sure there's some useful stuff Apple could get by acquiring Beats, it's certainly not worth 3-some billions of dollars.
Frankly, this whole thing doesn't make sense, it's really starting to smell like a heist to boost traffic and fuel stock speculation.
Beats may very well have brand recognition, but it doesn't have prestige. Bowers & Wilkins to name just one headphone brand, is a much better fit.
Beats has credibility with the sort of people that follow will.i.am on Twitter.
The largest company in the world needs a plastic headphone maker to open doors for them, really?
Beats has credibility with the sort of people that follow will.i.am on Twitter.
The largest company in the world needs a plastic headphone maker to open doors for them, really?