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Despite Patent Settlement, Apple Pulls Bose Merchandise From Its Stores

Apple has long sold Bose headphones and speakers in its retail stores, including in the time since it acquired Bose-competitor Beats Audio, and despite the lawsuit filed by Bose against Apple alleging patent violations on the part of Beats. That's come to an end this week, though: Apple's dropped Bose merchandise both in its retail locations and online, despite recent news that the two companies have settled the patent suit.

13 of 328 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Tit for tat by rmdingler · · Score: 5, Funny
    True.

    And the NFL isn't doing very well with their Beats women & children shenanigans either.

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

  2. Re:One crap audio brand battling with another by dgatwood · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I always find it amazing that audiophiles want 'flat'...this is nice is you want to listen to 'audio' as opposed to music. Unless I'm doing sound design work where the stuff is intended to be in a variety of types and styles of music (i.e., owned a company that use to provide instrument samples / libraries for synth companies), I'm not going to want to listen to anything flat.

    Audiophiles—at least the ones who competently seek ways to improve quality, as opposed to the pseudoaudiophiles that spend $200 on a power cord—often listen to a wide range of music. For us, flat is a virtue, because any accentuation of frequency ranges that makes one style of music sound better invariably makes another style of music sound worse.

    --

    Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  3. Re:One crap audio brand battling with another by sound+vision · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Flat" relating to headphones usually means a flat frequency response, unless you are talking to people who don't have a clue (which is a very real possibility). A flat frequency response is the goal of a high fidelity system, the very word "fidelity" means trueness to the original source, which is what you get with a flat frequency response. The idea that a speaker needs to distort the sound because it "sounds good" is absurd, and in fact it's the exact same rationale audiofools have for preferring vinyl. Vinyl inherently has an uneven frequency response (among other things) and it is those characteristics that give it is distinctive sound, leading some to prefer it. It is distinctive but it is low fidelity, just like a poor set of speakers. Besides, if you want the treble or bass jacked up or some other frequency band notched, that's what equalizers are for. Although it should be noted they are called equalizers because the intent is to bring an equal loudness to all frequency bands - aka, a flat frequency response. To compensate for speakers that are not already flat.

  4. lol by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So 3 companies, all of whom make electronics that consist of about 99% hype and about 1% tech, sue each other?

    What's funny is Bose has been at this a very long time. Don't buy Bose people! It's a scam, it's always been a scam. There are plenty of good stereos and speakers out there, Bose doesn't make any of them. And beats? That's literally the cheapest Chinese headphones they could find this month and they slap a Dr Dre sticker on it.

    1. Re:lol by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      As a former audiophile (my ears are getting old), here is my take on Bose. Yes, Bose did some research on speaker design. To say it changed things...? Well, Bose went one direction, whereas the mainstream speaker companies went another direction. And a lot of other companies, and the NRC of Canada also did research. For more info (maybe not much on Bose) see Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms by Floyd Toole (Aug 22, 2008) (book or kindle) if you want too much information.

      Research: one thing common in marketing audio, automobiles, --- political ideologies, can be summed up as: we did research (or thunk it up, or it was revealed to us) and we have unique technology/knowledge/beliefs that is superior to any other speakers/ political ideology. Just pick up any issue of Popular Science of Mechanics from 1970 to 1990, or listen to Faux News.

      A little thought (gee!) will quickly reach the concept that research or clever insight by one person is rarely exclusive, and rarely exhaustive (there is a lot more going on that their insight doesn't address).

      Bose's direct/reflective (I think that's what it's called) technology in it's early 801, 802 and some other models created a large sound-field with a large sweet-spot, or almost no sweet-spot. (A sweet spot is the place the listener sits to get the full stereo effect). This can be, hmm, I'll use the words very different and seductive. On the other hand, those Bose speakers could suffer from comb filtering effects, lumpy frequency response, phase shifting effects, and limited frequency extension at both high and low frequencies. Not exclusive to Boze, sometimes instruments sounded larger than life. The 20 foot long piano.

      Other Boze Speakers not using the direct/ eflective lack the large sound-field effect. About 1998 I needed new speakers, and tried with an open mind to check out Bose products. I found:
      1. almost exclusively sold at the time in Bose owned stores
      2. information, specifically frequency response specification were not provided by the company. this was/is very unusual for a speaker company. I eventually figured out that the entire Bose line at the time had little frequencies below 50hz.

      The rest of the speaker/audio community was mostly working toward flat frequency response, reduction of box resonances, controlled dispersion or the sound coming out of the drivers, and greater extension in low and high frequencies.

      A joke among audiophiles, in response to the great success of Bose--they sell by far more speakers in America than any other company, is "Friends don't let friends by Bose."
      The rational reason (there are irrational reasons) is that Bose does not offer good value. For $X00 spent on Bose, it is almost generally possible to get a better speaker from another company for the same amount of money.

      Final issue, look up the lawsuit between Bose and Consumer Reports. Bose sued Consumer reports over a review. Consumer Reports eventually won, but Bose almost bankrupted them. Which may partially explain why you rarely see any reviews of Bose in the audiophile press. And Bose likes it that way.

  5. Re:One crap audio brand battling with another by CRCulver · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "Invest" in this case is a venerable old metaphorical usage (see "to make use of for future benefits or advantages" in Merriam-Webster), meant in this case to express my outlay of a considerable amount of money in the expectation that these particular headphones would provide me with such long listening enjoyment that the initial purchase price would hardly seem excessive.

  6. Re:One crap audio brand battling with another by CRCulver · · Score: 5, Informative

    You consider $230 a considerable amount of money? Do you live in Sub-Saharan Africa or some shit?

    I live in Romania, where the headphones I mention cost around half the average monthly salary. There's a wide range between Third World poverty and your presumably US income, and many Eastern Europeans would balk at spending so much for headphones.

  7. Re:One crap audio brand battling with another by Aighearach · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's like saying you prefer to look at photos that haven't had any work done in photoshop because it's more true to the source or some shit. Sort of like how audiofools never seem to have a problem wacking off to lossy jpegs but put on an mp3 and you'll never hear the end of it.

    No, it is like saying you prefer to look at photos that haven't had any extra photo filters applied after the artist has already completed and distributed the image. Yes, of course the artist uses photoshop; just like the recording professionals use distortion!

    The reason you want a flat frequency response from the speakers is because the sound has already been properly distorted by the artist. Just like, a computer monitor with accurate color will reproduce the colors the artist chose in photoslop!

  8. Re:Bose is overpriced crap and always has been by BronsCon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Without needing VMWare or any third-party VM, Apple (unlike Windows or Linux) fully supports dual-boot out-of-the-box.

    That's a function of the bootloader, not the OS. GRUB, the default bootloader for most Linux distros of any popularity, supports dual-boot, tri-boot, quad-boot, however-the-fuck-many-boot, right out of the box. In fact, the Windows bootloader supports this, as well, though it's a bit more work to set up.

    I'm sitting here typing this on a Mac, because the platform does have its advantages, but dual-boot isn't something unique to the Mac.

    --
    APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  9. Re:Bose is overpriced crap and always has been by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Every time I've priced them out against something like Sony, that's correct.

    However, against Asus, who IMO makes better products, they are much more expensive. Let's do it now.

    Holy shit, the only Apple laptop that doesn't use Intel Integrated, is the 15" Macbook Pro with Retina display. It's come along a lot, but still sucks if doing anything 3D that actually uses the graphics card.

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
    Differences: +.1GHz Lenovo
    256GB SSD (Lenovo) vs 512GB SSD (Apple)
    Resolution: 3840 x 2160 (Lenovo) vs 2880 x 1800 (Apple)
    Screen size: 15.6 (Lenovo) vs 15.4 (Apple)
    Graphics: 860M (Lenovo) vs 750M (Apple)
    Weight: 5.29 (Lenovo) vs 4.46 lbs (Apple)
    Apple lacks a built in Gigabit Ethernet port. It has 2 Thunderbolt ports (basically can be considered proprietary, given usage at the moment)

    Cost?
      $1,269.99 vs $2499
    So 2 laptops with almost all specs, exceeding the Apple's specs for the same price. (~230 for a 512GB SSD, if you want to increase storage that way, which still puts it at 60% of the cost)

  10. Re:Bose is overpriced crap and always has been by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    it's part of the OS

    When was the last time YOU wrote a fuckin' bootloader? Last time I did that was oh, about... a week ago. It most certainly IS a separate piece of code--maybe bundled with other bits of the OS, but it isn't the same binary. A bootloader needs to be SMALL. A kernel can be quite LARGE (and that is the OS *proper*).

    Citation, because I fully expect you to be a dumb shit and claim I'm wrong:

    BootX (/System/Library/CoreServices/BootX) is the default bootloader on Mac OS X.

    BootX is also the name of an open source bootloader (different from Apple's BootX) that allows dual-booting Mac OS and Linux on "Old World" machines.

    At this point, BootX draws the Apple logo splash screen, and starts the spinning cursor. If booting from a network device, a spinning globe is drawn instead.
            Depending on various conditions, BootX tries to retrieve and load the kernel cache file.
            The next step is to "decode" the kernel. If the kernel header indicates a compressed kernel, BootX tries to decompress it (typical LZSS compression is used, as you compress this kind of data once but expand it many times). Since the kernel binary can potentially be a "fat" binary (code for multiple architectures residing in the same binary), BootX checks if it indeed is (fat), and if so, "thins" it (figures out the PowerPC code).
            BootX attempts to decode the file (possibly "thinned") as a Mach-O binary. If this fails, BootX also tries to decode it as ELF.
            If the above fails, BootX gives up, draws the failed boot picture, and goes into an infinite loop.
            If BootX is successful so far, it saves filesystem cache hits, misses and evicts, sets up various boot arguments and values (such as whether this is a graphical or verbose boot, whether there are some flags to be passed to the kernel, the size of installed RAM), and also calls a recursive function to flatten the device tree.
            Finally, BootX "calls" the kernel, immediately before which it "quiesces" Open Firmware, an operation as a result of which any asynchronous tasks in the firmware, timers, or DMA get stopped, etc.

    If you mean bundled the same way OS X is, then GRUB is part of the OS too, since distros package it up with the kernel.

    You fail. Please do not ever write system software because it would be worse than The Poettering. This comment is on par with you claiming that iOS is part of the "Linux theme". FFS, you keep showcasing how ignorant you are about system dev, so please do us all a favor and SHUT THE FUCK UP.

    The worst part is that you make some pretty intelligent comments--until you get into talking shit out of your ass about things you clearly don't know diddly about. So again, SHUT THE FUCK UP.

  11. Re:Bose is overpriced crap and always has been by Dog-Cow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You are an idiot.

    I was using the same NT 4 install as a native boot and under VMWare, under the original VMWare beta. Back before it was Workstation, back before Player or any of the server products existed. Back when you had to build the kernel modules by hand after tweaking the kernel. Back when the only VMware version available outside the company was for Linux. Back before OS X was released.

  12. Re:Bose is overpriced crap and always has been by ray-auch · · Score: 4, Informative

    But mainly, as I clearly stated above, what you are missing with other products is that you don't have the option of dual-booting AND, at the same time, running the SAME foreign OS install in VMWare or the like. If you want to do that you are stuck with 2 different foreign OS installs, and your files won't be in sync.

    I didn't say dual-booting was unique to Mac. Read it again. What I wrote was that it's BETTER. Especially if you have VMWare. While that's a third-party product, it enables you to do what other OSes won't do, even with VMWare.

    Without specifying which VMWare product it is a bit difficult to see what you are getting at - workstation or full ring-0 hypervisor like ESX ?

    If you mean just the option of booting a virtual disk (vhd) which you can also use in an emulator, Windows has had that for 5 years (since 7) without needing a third party emulator (VirtualPC from MS).

    If you mean having the option of booting a vhd and having also a full hypervisor that can run that vhd as a virtual machine, built into the OS, Windows has had that for six years on the server OS versions, and two on client (Windows 8) - Hyper-V is built in along with native-boot-from-vhd.

    There are also Linux options for both boot-native-from-vhd and built in hypervisors.

    So, struggling a bit to see what it is you think other OSes can't do ?