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Beats Music To Shut Down November 30 (fortune.com)

Posted by timothy on from the as-the-apple-turns dept.

UnknowingFool writes: After November 30, Beats Music subscriptions will be cancelled and no longer work, according to Apple. Subscribers can use Apple Music, which has many of the same features. This shutdown was not unexpected when Apple purchased Beats last year for $3 billion, as Apple has a history of buying companies for various reasons other the products. Many former companies have been absorbed into Apple in one form or another in this manner: the technology of Fingerworks peripherals was the start of multi-touch for iPhones; PA Semi and Intrinsity personnel were the core of Apple's internal chip design teams; and AuthenTec made biometric technology that became the backbone of Touch ID.

9 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Beats Appliance? by penguinoid · · Score: 4, Funny

    What about all the ppl. that shelled out US $599.00 for the beats appliance?

    Beats me.

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  2. Better than what FingerWorks customers got. by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 4, Informative

    When Apple bought FingerWorks back in 2005, all we FingerWorks customers saw was a terse announcement that the company had ceased operations effective immediately, and that no further products would be released or shipped. It was quite some time before we could even be sure it was Apple that bought them, because the deal was wrapped in non-disclosure terms.

    The FingerWorks user community was very, very small -- so small that the company probably couldn't have kept going as an independent entity. I suppose having Apple rescue some of their technology was better than losing it all. But the gestures that Apple has implemented are a tiny, tiny fraction of the rich, well-designed vocabulary present on the FingerWorks TouchStream keyboards. I still wish they'd release the rest of it, but that's never going to happen.

    1. Re:Better than what FingerWorks customers got. by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 4, Interesting

      For a while. Mine doesn't any more, and support services were shut down shortly after the acquisition.

      You might think a keyboard with no moving parts would work basically forever, but there was apparently a problem with certain driver chips in the keyboard's circuitry. Some members of the FingerWorks Forum isolated the problem, and had posted a how-to for people to replace the chips (easy as pie if you're comfortable with surface-mount rework) -- but Apple eventually took down the forum, and with it, that information. I hope it's still available elsewhere on the Web; for various reasons, I haven't looked.

      There was one other issue -- the software FingerWorks provided to configure and customize the keyboard turned out to be incompatible with newer versions of Windows and OS X. We found workarounds, but again, they were documented on the Forum, which went away.

      Of course, none of this would have been any better if FingerWorks had simply gone bankrupt and shut down.

  3. Editorsneeded, apply within by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 2

    "Apple has a history of buying companies for various reasons other the products"

    1) No editing or proofreading needed here. God forbid we have coherent, readable sentences in the summary.

    2) Sometimes Apple buys things simply to shut them down or eliminate them, similar to the way that Amazon recently stopped carrying competitors to its streaming video service. Can't compete? Worried about eroding market share? No problem- just buy your enemy and dismantle the business.

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  4. Re:Just a branding change by UnknowingFool · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I see the main reason for acquisition was licensing. Beats had existing licenses with the big music companies that would survive the purchase. Apple didn't have these licenses yet. My opinion is that the music companies wanted a much higher rate from Apple as they know how much money Apple has.

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  5. Re:Confusion ensues... by toadlife · · Score: 2

    Embrace, Extend, Extiguish

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    I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
  6. Re: Everyone gets to keep what they bought? by Redbehrend · · Score: 2

    I can see the convo at apple.
    Beats is taking up our market what can we do?
    Why would anyone want to use anything but our service it's perfect.
    Let's just buy them and force customers to change, our service is better anyways...
    Great idea! let me get the checkbook

  7. Re:Confusion ensues... by wkcole · · Score: 2

    Apple didn't make chips before PA Semi;

    Except for chips like this: http://www.applelogic.org/file.... Late Apple ][ models, Lisa, Newton, every Apple printer since the Imagewriter,, every Mac, every iPhone, and most if not all iPods have included one or more chips designed by Apple, carrying the Apple logo, unavailable to anyone else, and usually very poorly documented (if at all.) One could also argue that the 680x0 and PPC versions that Apple commissioned for exclusive use in Macs amounted to them acting like a fabless CPU maker (e.g. like PA Semi) so if you meant "CPU" instead of "chip"

  8. Re:Beats Appliance? by rtb61 · · Score: 2

    More accurately they got exactly what they paid for advertising and an ego trip. Ohh, look I'm a victim of marketing with a massive ego and I can believe I can pose about by strapping a 'Beats' logo to my head. What happens to them, people point their fingers at them and laugh, well, that might not really happen but a lot of people are thinking it.

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