So the big rumor blowing up my Twitter feed this afternoon (yeah I still use Twitter, more on that some other day) is that Apple is apparently in talks to buy Beats Electronics for something like $3.2 billion. The Financial Times broke it, then everybody else piled on within about twenty minutes. If this actually goes through it would be the biggest acquisition in Apple's history, by a wide margin, and I've been sitting here for the past hour trying to figure out why it makes me a little annoyed.
I should say up front: I don't like Beats headphones. Never have. I tried a pair of Beats Solo on a friend's head at a party two years ago and thought they sounded like someone wrapped a subwoofer in a wet towel. Bass for days, everything else kind of mushy and recessed. My own cans are a beat-up pair of Sennheiser HD 25s I bought secondhand off Craigslist for 90 bucks in 2012 and they still sound better to my ear than anything with the little "b" logo on it, at a third of the price of the Beats Pro, which run $349.
But sound quality was never really the product with Beats, was it. Dre and Jimmy Iovine built a fashion brand that happens to make audio equipment, and they built it fast and they built it huge. Everyone from LeBron to random kids at my gym has a pair. That's worth something, I get it. What I don't totally get is why Apple, of all companies, needs to buy that. Apple's entire thing for like twenty years has been "we design it ourselves, in house, and it's better because of that." Buying your way into cool feels like a very un-Apple move.
The part that actually makes more sense to me is Beats Music, the streaming subscription thing they launched back in January for $9.99 a month. iTunes has been slowly losing ground to streaming for a couple years now and everyone knows it, even if Apple won't say it out loud. If this deal is really about buying a working streaming service with real licensing deals already signed, rather than the headphones, that's a much more sensible $3.2 billion. Still a huge number for a service that, last I checked, had something like 250,000 paying subscribers, way behind Spotify. Do that math and it gets uncomfortable fast.
Also, and this is a smaller complaint, but: Beats headphones break constantly. I know three separate people who've had the ear cushions peel off or the cable go bad within a year. My cousin's Beats Solo HD stopped charging after like fourteen months and Beats just told him tough luck, out of warranty. Compare that to my ancient Sennheisers, which I've dropped down a flight of stairs twice and they just keep going. Maybe that's not a fair comparison, a $90 secondhand pair against a $200 retail one, but it colors how I read this whole story. I keep picturing Jony Ive's team having to figure out how to make these things stop falling apart, and honestly, good, they need the help.
None of this is confirmed yet, to be clear. It's a Friday afternoon leak from the FT and nobody at Apple or Beats has said a word on the record. Deals like this fall apart all the time between the leak and the actual signing. But if it does happen I'll be curious whether Apple keeps the Beats brand as this separate, loud, celebrity-driven thing sitting next to their normal minimalist stuff, or tries to fold it in and sand off all the personality, which is usually what happens to acquisitions once the Cupertino machine gets its hands on them.
Anyway. I'm going to go put my old Sennheisers back on and pretend none of this concerns me, even though obviously it kind of does, because I've spent the last hour writing about it instead of the thing I was actually supposed to be writing tonight.