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Seems like Beats hardware is still a separate company. I wonder how involved Apple hardware engineers are in these products?
of course Beats is still a separate company..Apple just bought it, doesn't mean Apple designs and makes Beats..that's why they are called Beats not Apple..
similar scenario is Volkswagen buying and owning Audi,Porsche,Lamborghini,etc but that doesn't mean Volkswagen is engineering Lamborghinis..

(well I have to also mention in case of Apple/Beats it's other-way-around meaning high end brand owning a much lower end brand unlike VW owning Lambo/Porsche..)
 
These seems to be released at a perfect time for the new iPhone's. Considering they won't be available until mid-October it almost seems like Apple just decided to announce them now so people would know about them before the release of the new phones. Why else wouldn't they just wait for October before launching them?
 
I have the Beats Headsets. After an hour or so wearing them they start bothering my ears (too much pressure on them). Does anyone else have this issue?
 
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Don't bother with these. Get the Bose QuietComfort 35 instead.
I wanted to say the exact same thing (happy QC35 owner) but these cans can realy be a good Beats product. Waiting for the reviews, might give them a try.
BTW, way too much Bose and Beats hate...
 
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I'd rather not buy Bose anything - horrible sound signature. Yes - even Beats is better - and that's probably the first time I've ever said that.

Beats better than Bose? ROFL..Bose are overrated and overpriced for sure but Beats is bottom of the barrel plastic Chinese made garbage. Apple only bought the company for the streaming service.
 
Seems like Beats hardware is still a separate company. I wonder how involved Apple hardware engineers are in these products?
Exactly. I can't see Apple including micro-USB in any product released in 2017. The Beats designers must be working somewhat independently.
 
Don't bother with these. Get the Bose QuietComfort 35 instead.
The QC35s are great but how can you say don't bother with these? They've only just been announced so you can't have tried them. I've always thought the 35s would be better if they handled other sounds as well as they handle aircraft noise which they're particularly well tuned to eliminate.
 
So, MacBooks get USB-C for charging, and no USB3. Iphones get lightning ports for charging. Beats get Micro USB for charging.

Let's be honest here, this takes a lot of courage from Apple to put three different charging ports on their products.
 
Former Beats Studio 2 wireless owner here. Had them for 3 years and one of the hinges broke. Then, the headband snapped in two on the opposite side. I’m not a careless person with my tech either. I treat my expensive gadgets with the utmost care. I was just going to repair them and keep using them but changed my mind and purchased the Sony MDR-1000X headphones instead since they dropped the price by $100 bucks a couple weeks ago. After hearing the quality of the NC on the Sony’s, my old Beats Studio wireless 2.0’s sound amateurish by comparison. I’ve been able to test my Sony’s against my co-workers QC-35s and the NC is just as good (if not a tiny bit better even). My only disappointment with the Sony’s so far is the ease of switching between multiple devices (something Bose has perfected) and Sony’s own headphone connect app doesn’t support the 1000x headphones, unless (fingers crossed) they realease a firmware update in the near future. I’d be curious to see how the NC has improved on the newer beats but it’ll have to be REALLY good to beat the Bose QC-35s or the Sony 1000X’s.
 
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Really funny how the timing of the new Beats release lines up nicely with the end of the education promotion (free Beats headphones).
 
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I just love how people here bash things they’ve never even tried.
Low IQ but they have lots of opinions!
[doublepost=1504564936][/doublepost]Micro USB, this far into acquisition? Good luck selling them at this price. Fortunately, as some others have said, the market is going toward in ear and portable headsets. My solo 3 are too hot and too clunky for travel and around town.
 
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So now you need a separate micro usb charger along with your lightning cord? Iphone has no headphone jack but iPad and MacBooks do? WTH is going on Apple?

Oh these look like some great new headphones I'd consider buying. If they weren't Micro-*****-USB.

Are you kidding me Apple? Why the hell did you acquire beats if you are going to continue using legacy ports. Fckin insane.

I have a sneaking suspicion that part of the deal of acquiring Beats was to let them make their own decisions and not let Apple executives interfere too much. These are not branded  in any way.
 
There are many nice bluetooth heaphones. I just don't understand how there is no information about how much base and audio accuracy each one has. It is just impossible to tell how they would sound online and hard to tell when you are testing them at a store with canned audio and not on bluetooth anyway. Perhaps you can do some actual technical tests?
 
Might it be because Apple support Bluetooth AAC? That's 256kbps AAC, the exact same quality as Apple Music offers on "High"? APT-X is only 356 kbps so it's hardly any better and it has a major drawback in the fact that you have to re-encode all the audio as none of your audio on iOS, Android or anywhere else really is encoded using SBC which is the codec APTX uses. So if Apple had used APTX the audio would be encoded lossy 256kbps AAC, then re-encoded/transcoded into lossy SBC before playback. Re-encoding/transcoding from one lossy encode to another will almost always reduce the quality even further, even when going to a higher bitrate. It will NEVER be able to improve the quality as you can't take a lossy format and add back information that has already been lost during the first encoding.

So there is basically no way that APTX could improve the audio quality for Apple. For Android it makes more sense as Google has no guidelines for what codecs is being used in their apps, so some apps features MP3 (LAME), other OGG Vorbis, some Opus, some AAC, other FLAC etc... When you have no control the best thing is to simply relay on whatever gives you the highest bandwidth and APTX has an edge with its 356kbps vs 256kbps for AAC.

But for Apple, especially with iOS where 99% of all audio is encoded using AAC as that's what Apple guides all developers to use in apps and is what pretty much every music streaming services uses on iOS it doesn't make any sense to use APTX (SBC) over AAC.
SBC is a codec. AAC too. AptX another one. Much more efficient.
Apple Music / iTunes is maybe the only large music service on iOS that I can count as using AAC. Spotify uses OGG Vorbis... Deezer and Amazon use MP3... Tidal uses MQA... Qobuz uses ALAC... Anghami uses Dolby Digital+...

Spotify is by far the most popular streaming service and I use it in 'extreme' quality i.e. depending on the track and on the traffic on their server, 192 to 320 kbps OGG.
When I use it on my iPhone over Bluetooth it sounds like crap on my MDR 1000x! Why? Because iOS recompresses the audio to AAC to send it to my ears...
On my work phone, which runs Android and is AptX compatible, the sound is much, much better. As good as with the cable plugged in on the iPhone. And there are even better codecs like LDAC.

Listening to Apple Music in AAC on the iPhone via Bluetooth is not as bad as Spotify (as, indeed, there is no re-compression) but the 256kbps AAC on iphone is still inferior to the 320kbps recompressed to AptX on Android...

So, yeah, why I applaud their work on extending range with the W1 (sharing pairing via iCloud is cool too), Apple's Bluetooth implementation is stuck 5 years behind everyone else if you care about music quality...
 
I have the Beats Headsets. After an hour or so wearing them they start bothering my ears (too much pressure on them). Does anyone else have this issue?

The only Beats I owned was part of the back to school special like a year or two ago. I had the same problem where they clamped too tight on my ears and would get painful after prolonged use. I wear glasses too so that made it worse. I replaced them with the QC35 and never looked back. Super comfortable. No ear pain.
 
I'd rather not buy Bose anything - horrible sound signature. Yes - even Beats is better - and that's probably the first time I've ever said that.

Sound wise, yeah you would NOT go Bose like ever. For ANC, definitely Bose is top tier, Sony is a little better with the 1000x. What Bose rains supreme on is the ANC + Comfort level for long hours. Good for long travels and study.

I have the QC35 and yes im disappointed that the sound signature is so flat, so it sucks listening to EDM. Wish it had the same bass as the Sonys. But I chose it cuz of comfort.
 
The whole reason that I have given Beats the advantage is the convenience of the lightning port to charge. That's quite disappointing.
Agreed. I would like to get a new pair of wireless over the ear, but I refuse to get another cable to charge. I was hoping these would have lightning or USB-C. I will not be buying them with micro-usb.
 
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