Luke Wood, left, pictured with Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre (photo: Kevin Mazur/Wire)
Beats President Luke Wood, who runs the audio products side of the business, told Mashable that the acquisition was a great fit because the company shared DNA with Apple.
We’re looking at our little audio slice of the world and trying to focus on creating a stellar product experience. I think that’s also the fundamental DNA of everything Steve wanted to accomplish at Apple. By product experience, that includes ID, design, technology, innovation, simplicity. Those are always things that have been fundamental to our DNA, too.
He said that the early days of low-quality digital music resulted in a ‘lost generation’ for premium audio, but that we now live in a very different world …
Where it started to become a chronic issue was in the early 2000s during the height of file sharing and torrents and compressed audio. Suddenly, people were able to stream things off their laptop, and we lost a generation to the degradation of audio. Now people are getting it, getting addicted to it, and you never go back.
Unsurprisingly, Mashable‘s Ariel Bogle pressed him on the description of Beats products as ‘premium audio,’ and unsurprisingly Woods defended the company’s record.
We came out with the first Beats’ headphones to address a specific problem: No one was tuning headphones to replicate the excitement of modern albums. Music has significantly changed because of digital recording. The advent of sampling, for example, or the advent of digital synthesisers. The creation of sub-amplifiers too, it’s a technological innovation that lets you hear the bottom end [of music] in a different way.
Beats headphones, he argued, filled that gap – though he said he was “probably prouder” of the Studio 2.0. You can check out Zac Hall’s review of the Studio Wireless here.
Read the full interview over at Mashable UK.
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Steve must be rolling over in his grave at these comments. OMG. To compare the DNA of the hacks at Beats who farmed out every aspect of their product to Monster, purveyors of terrible audio mass-market snake-oil, is positively laughable. Sorry,everything that goes into an Apple product has a purpose beyond putting a shiny gloss coat on a turd and selling it for an enormous mark-up.
Look, Apple bought Beats for the urban brand goodwill and their deep connections to the music industry. It wasn’t for their uninspired headphone technology and it wasn’t for their intern-level software. A dozen other companies on each side of that coin would have made better acquisitions from a technological/performance standpoint.
I’m sure this article at Mashable UK will be the most stupid thing I read all day.
The Beats app was pretty good. Arguably better than the Apple Music app. Just saying.
So, Beats are tuned to today’s brickwalled music?
I still think Beats is probably the worst thing Apple bought into. I actually have a pair of wireless on-ear original Beats that I got on super clearance at Target while I worked there, and within a year the damn things won’t even connect to Bluetooth anymore. When they miraculously do, the audio quality is so bad I can almost hear my ears screaming through the cups. I did everything I could to save these painful-to-wear headphones.
And you know, the audio quality isn’t god awful like people whine about. It’s serviceable, especially for the very nice wireless capabilities…while it works. But man, everything about Beats just screams anti-Apple. Short lifespans, less quality, and somehow they sound worse than the free EarPods Apple have been giving out lately (which actually are quite lovely). It’s clearly for the posh look, wireless functionality in conjunction with their new Macbooks, and various other little things like that. But for them to just eat up the brand and upsell it at every keynote they present now, it’s painful.
As someone who has fairly tried and even fought for the product’s strengths, I can wholeheartedly say that Beats just aren’t worth it. It’s even more sad how music that the Apple people love so much like Coldplay, U2 and Foo Fighters sound absolutely atrocious on a pair of these bass-heavies. It really was meant for music leaning closer towards the EDM/hip hop/rap genres.
They are tuned for Hip Hop, or at least what THEY think it should sound like. If you listen to that stuff, then be my guest. But for the rest of society that doesn’t listen to that, we have a lot of other choices that are better.
I think Beats was a waste of money for several reasons.
They have had at least 4 or 5 very negative problems starting with that leak of the buyout with Dre partying with his friends. It’s still on YouTube and it was embarrassing.
The way they released the U2 album, plus I know a lot of people that thought that album sounded like crap. I don’t think that had a single major hit on that album either. It kind of came and went. Maybe that’s why U2 opted to have it as a free album so they would get the marketing of Apple to pay them rather than trying to sell copies the normal way because I don’t think they would have sold as many if they did.
Then they got sued by Bose, and had to deal with the dropping and bringing back Bose products in Apple Stores.
Then they got sued by Monster, time will tell what happens with that law suit.
Then they got a lot of negative attention because of Dre and this Compton album soundtrack since a lot of his victims were going vocal on how they never forgave him for the way they were treated and that’s even after his public apology.
I think all they are doing is damage control trying to get these guys to say positive things about Beats. That’s what I think is going on. Sorry, but some of us aren’t stupid enough to buy into what these guys say.
There’s no such thing as “tunning for hip-hop”
Headphones are electronics, they don’t know what “hip-hop” is.
Stopped reading there.
Get these people and their egos out of Apple, they benefit only from the fact that a lot of people out there don’t know a whole lot about music. For the record, most of what they say is nonsense.
Apple’s success is its biggest problem (wouldn’t we all love to have such problems). The folks at Cupertino can afford to throw cash at virtually anything they like, and the halo glow of the brand promises enough buyers to guarantee success. Whether that success is merited is usually the question du jour.
The money spent on Beats is a bit confounding to most observers, not to mention folks like Angela Ahrendts who oversaw one of the worst roll-out of a new Apple product lines ever. Whereas Apple used to knock out insanely great products, those same products are what enable Apple to afford insanely expensive mistakes. But have mistakes been made?
IMHO, it’s too soon to say, despite the broad swath of commenters which find many problems thither and yon with all the business with Beats. It has been exciting to watch as Apple makes moves into formerly untrodden territories. The bottom line is that they have to do something. And since they can afford to take risks, why shouldn’t they?
Stopped reading as soon as I saw “DNA”… This relentless pursuit of homogenous “corporate speak” is just so ridiculous.
DO you know what WOULDN’T have been a waste of money? Acquiring Lucasfilm for a cool $4B. THAT I would have loved to see – it would have been the largest splash imaginable to announce Apple was getting into content. Oh well, It’s Disney’s baby now.
Except that wouldn’t make ANY sense. Disney has what it takes to grow LF again – Apple does not