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Apple Confirms Purchase of Beats For $3 Billion
SimonTheSoundMan writes: "Apple has confirmed it will buy Beats Electronics and Beats Music for $3 billion. Apple will make the purchase using $2.6 billion in cash and $400 million in stock. An important part of the acquisition for Apple is absorbing the Beats subscription streaming service, even though it only has about 110k users. The Beats brand will remain intact, and will continue to sell headphones. "
or maybe just a lifetime of conscription.
...but I appreciate what their marketing team has done for the rest of the headphone industry...
up 12 days, 22:30, 2 users, load averages: 993.20, 994.21, 994.56
*makes note to limit user processes...
I think it's safe to assume Apple wanted the Beats brand and styling, since the technology is nothing special. Beats headphones sound shit compared to much cheaper competitors, so apparently the logo is worth billions.
We seem to be in another bubble, where brand popularity is valued way too high.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Why don't they just buy iHome while they're at it? Then they'll control 90% of the iCrap market.
2.6 Billion dollar = 2,600,000,000 dollar
110k users = 110,000 users
this is equivalent to 23,600 dollar per user
Big bubble!
I wonder how many iTunes Radio has.
After all, according to Apple fans, "iTunes has 800 million credit cards!" You'd think they'd manage more than 0.01% of their users...
I gotta admit--I don't get this one. Streaming service? Apple has iTunes Radio. Headphones? Okay, but they're not folding it into Apple. As someone mentioned, Jimmy Iovine? I would think they could get him cheaper than 3 billion.
what exactly does Beats have that Apple can't come up with by itself in an afternoon? Hell they could get Eminem or some other rapper to endorse it for a lot less money.
I used to be an Apple faithful but I think their days of innovation are past. Even Samsung is still trying to make its own shit like the VR goggles rather than just buy whatever seems popular.
The markup in Beats puts iHome to shame.
Beats takes analog audio hardware that hasn't changed since the 70s, sprinkles fairy design dust on it, and sells it for big money. What better model for Apple's transistor & software business?
Now he can finish his Doctorate and stop living a lie!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I know apple have tried hard to get the labels to sign up to a music streaming service. Perhaps they bought beats because it already had a contract in place with the major labels, thus removing all of the complicated negotiations?
Jimmy Iovine is the deal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
Let's all go over Dr. Dre's crib and have a wild party!
Why not, the fucker's a billionaire
Everybody is bothered because their lame idea didn't win the internet lottery.
Oh yeah, and Dre can go get his doctorate, NOT!
The DJ responsible for "Fuck Tha Police" just made a billion dollars. I love it.
This still seems baffling. But WWDC is next week, so maybe that will shed some light on the real story.
I find it funny how many people break out their old favorite of Apple bashing when HP was the one that included Beats audio in their "premium" laptops and no one said a word. It is a vanity/luxury brand, it isn't about being the best audiophile headphones. They may not be for you, that is OK. However when you walk on any college campus you see quite a few Macs and Beats headphones so the acquisition makes sense.
Most of Beats products don't work with anything else than Apple products anyway... I bought a Beats earphones for my girlfriend's Galaxy S4, the microphone did not work, neither did the mute and volume keys. I searched around the web, and a lot of people experienced this, without fix. I called Beats, they said that Android is not supported, it's "made for iPhones, iPods and iPads".
So who cares ? Everyone should be happy, now it's clear.
Omg, two of the most overpriced brand fused together? Can't wait to see their new Beats+Apple headset for +1k$, everyone will love it.
Elok
I wonder if HTC will find an alternative brand to put on their phones which provide a 'premium' audio experience...
"The Beats brand will remain intact," says the headline. But will the Apple brand remain intact? This is one of the most confidence-shaking moves we've seen since Jobs died. Isn't quality central to Apple's value proposition? Doesn't Beats have a poor quality reputation? Doesn't everybody know that Dre prefers Koss Portapros?
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Clearly Apple doesnt care about quality.
Beats are over eq'd, overpriced, over-marketed with a high profit margin, a gimmick sucked up by the masses, nothing else.
Really not sure what Apple has planned for it, but dont expect affordable, high quality headphones with your next ipod anytime soon.
If you want quality over gimmicks, get yourself some DT990 Pros (or 770 for closed).
Obligatory: http://imgur.com/gallery/XETM0...
I despise apple. I refer to them as "the distilled essence of evil"
Nice to see them wasting money on a stupid purchase
At first I thought, good plan, because Apple doesn't seem to be able to make decent sound devices on their own. The trendy white earbuds may be, you know, trendy, but they sound like carp. But then I read that the Beats headphones (which I had never heard of) are carp also.
Has anyone done a hearing test on the Apple board of directors recently? Just askin'.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Beats just ate MOG, which I actually liked a lot. The Beats interface sucked so bad that I didn't bother subscribing after the trial.
Litigation over innovation. This is the watershed moment when Apple became a shitty company run by lawyers dedicated to suing everyone.
Apple just lit 3 Billion Dollars on fire? Awesome! It's not like they could have used that money for more important things like improving their own audio hardware using their own iconic music brand, start their own music service using their established music industry contacts and programming team, bought both Spotify and Pandora and still have enough money left to make the first rap star billionaire.
At this rate, Steve Jobs will be vertical due to the sheer speed of his spinning corpse.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
The only reason this happened is because of the future of LTE modems in cars. Apple, Google, whomever will create subsidized data plans based on Beats subscriptions that Based Inside Automobiles. This dre'ing around (dre is yiddish for f'n around) regarding the lifestyle brand that Beats is, is whatever, moderately relevant, the key is the emotional curation of the 'talent' Ian Rogers, Reznor, Dre (who Reznor included way back on the Natural Born Killers OST, in the guise of Thaa Dog Pound track, which was under the rubric of Dre) Anyways, pre-installed Beats apps in Cars from 2015 on, that's f'n why, if this comment doesn't get a damn 2.5 for insightful, well, that would be consistent with the cluelessness that abounds even on usually intelligent areas of the internet. I don't care, this is the reason. Apple's first successful cloud service where the device is a car, instead of an mp3 player connected to the internet, it's a car. Current estimates of data are like $499 for six months at 30gigs, theoretically 30gigs of just music streaming is about 5 gigs a month, maybe 3.5, therefore the price will come down as the volume of users goes up. Ok, solved that problem.
Never mind.
Have gnu, will travel.
Beats takes analog audio hardware that hasn't changed since the 70s
If a pair of headphones incorporates neodymium magnets, it was designed after the 1970s. As for analog? Most passive headphones are analog.
www.head-fi.org
Not as good as open in general, but not bad at all.
$27k per user
I mean, if you're really are into purple vegetables, I guess, but, crikey, that there's a fetish. . .
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Apple may have just managed to attract a new group of buyers with Beats purchase. Or it could have over estimated big time how Beats will attract those buyers to Apple products. In any case $3 billion is chicken feed for Apple and they need a new demographic of impulse buyers. Beats as a whole is just a company making fashionable products for a ethnic group of young people. The headphones are more fashion statements then good products. I doubt Apple can do much to save that pathetic fact. Apple can't even make good audio products. I am a bit concerned about Apple following trendy product trends which normally do not last very long.
This could be a boom or bust for Apple.
Beats takes analog audio hardware that hasn't changed since the 70s, sprinkles fairy design dust on it, and sells it for big money. What better model for Apple's transistor & software business?
I was going to object to your outright dismissal of design and how important it is to good (or sometimes just popular) products. But then I remembered that this is slashdot.
Hint: The failure of Linux to make inroads on the desktop is due to the exact same reason: the elevation of engineering above everything else.
(And yes, I too am an engineer).
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
...sign up.
I tried to sign up for the streaming service today. I pressed the prominent "free trial" button, read the terms of service and privacy policy, and filled out the web form, only to be told "username not reserved." WTF does that mean? Temporary trouble? Hit the sign up button again...username not reserved. Picked a different user name. "Email not reserved."
So, I read some of their support forum, where other people are asking, "wtf is username not reserved", and found you had to sign up through their mobile app before you can sign up for the free trial on their website.
I checked again and found no instructions to that effect.
Maybe there are only 110K people who have figured out how to sign up.
Time to buy NWA.com from Delta (was the domain for Northwest Airlines).
According to the wiki entry, they had a valuation of $1B in September 2013.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
I guess Apple can afford to throw money around.
Jump the shark Fonzie!
Yep, Apple have jumped multiple sharks and become the new Microsoft
They're even cheating with APIs to block competitors, just like Microsoft did. http://marksands.github.io/201...
Of course, this'll never be a story on Slashdot, 'cos Apple pays for it not to be.
Now he can finish his Doctorate and stop living a lie!
It's not a lie! He is not claiming to be a doctor, his first name is Dr., you insensitive clod! That's just how they roll in Compton. You sayin' his mama done him wrong?
Who swear there is no difference between a coat hanger and a properly constructed, designed for purpose, optimized, non-monsterbeatswankfad cable.
Same reason why people use coat hangers to connect to satellite dishes eh? Millions of technicians across the world have fallen for cable company marketing, paying for super expensive coax.
In the world of hifi, beats is like bose with 10x the marketing and hipster hype. Complete marketing shit like many products in the industry.
Bleats for iSheep
I don't know much about Beats, but I'll guess most buyers of Beats are NOT buyers of Apple products.
I have linux and windoze and some other version of unix on machines I use daily. I do not see the point of your argument other than that old wet geek dream of linux on everybdesktop. Neithercdesktopsvare all computers thesecdays nor we need ine os to prevail in all application fields.
While Dre is taking his time to perfect the beat... ... I still got a love for my Sennheisers.
Apple should have to change their name since they're now in the music business.
It was imperative that apple was going to get beats ever since they laid their eyes on them. But one thing that bothers me is that how come the deal made up to $3billion? was Beats was really worth that much or Apple just paid them way more just to get their hands on it?
Remember, Apple bought Soundjam and released iTunes something like 6 months later.
Buying something that already exists is much faster than rolling your own, even if you COULD roll your own. It's probably worth Apple's time not just for licencing reasons but for software reasons as well.
I'm predicting that iTunes will be phased out over the next couple of years in favour of the Beats software. Everyone agrees at this point that iTunes has sort of run its course, and this will give Apple something to transition to. This will unify all of Apple's music service, and Apple can merge the App Store stuff together on the Mac and release a stand-alone iDevice app store for windows.
This is wild speculation on my part, I admit, but it makes so many things so much easier.
The headphones business is just a nice way to make sure the company is paying for itself right away. This is an acquisition that won't lose Apple any money over the short term, and will make their long-term prospects in the space a lot better.
I think the mass consumerism angle is a good point and the main reason why we now have all these high-quality alternatives to the iPhone. Only three years ago, everything android sucked in comparison. I say this as a big fan of over-ear Sennheiser headphones (I have a nice inexpensive set of HD 202 right here at work).
I think both Apple and Beats realize that Beats Music in its current iteration is not as successful as they want it to be. Last night's interview for Code Conference seemed to indicate this. Perhaps they think they'll likely be more successful if they work together on a new version. I for one don't think they'll hit a home run. I don't know that they have a vision of something that much different than the current iteration of music apps & services. More thoughts on that here: http://www.alternapop.com/2014...
Heh. I once drank some pure RO water that I bought for my salt water aquarium just to see what it would be like. The water had no flavor at all. If anything, you just sort of noticed that your tongue was wet. Also note that drinking too much pure water is dangerous as it will leach minerals right out of your body.
I was just at Costco and saw some "Beats by Dre" headphones for $200. It seems he has dropped the Dr. part of his name.
AAPL: strong sell
Go submit it on SoylentNews if you think Slashdot is censoring things.
Here is my conjecture on how to get rich at the expense of the corporation.
I am a senior executive in a company with a lot of cash. That cash is part of the assets of the corporation. I would like to get my hands on that cash, at least as much of it as I can. What can I do. Of course, I would share any gains with some of the other directors. I could not ask the directors to plain give me a huge chunk of it.
Well, I find a company to take over, I purchase a large equity portion of that business, and make a deal with the existing shareholders re a takeover bid.
I then bid for that company, offering top dollar. I put pressure for the deal to proceed. The deal goes through, and my corporation has now exchanged cash assets for assets of the company I purchased, a company that may only be worth 50% or less of the actual purchase price.
As shareholder in the company that is purchased, that receives the cash for the purchase, we arrange that it gets distributed to the shareholders as an extraordinary divident, or as a share buy out. I sell my shares, (distribution of the purchase payment), I put that money in my pocket, and my employer, has, through this manipulation, been emptied of cash, and has received $cash/2 or $cash/3 in value. I of course, make $cash/6 or even $cash/3 via the ownership of the company being taken over.
Such a sweet deal, don't you think? And it is legal, or is it?
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
When I worked in various electronic stores during Xmas (Xmas break job for college) Beats was the most returned item each year. Common complaint was quality for price
The Apple deal was announced through Washington Business Journal, stating that "Beats has great profits - their $450.00 headphones only cost $14.00 to make". Yes, I would say they have great branding and marketing. Not sure if Apple wanted those numbers public.
"The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing
Apple will be purchasing both Beats Electronics and Beats Music for a total of $2.6 billion in cash and $400 million in equity, reports The Wall Street Journal.