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Teardown reveals how Beats headphones use metal to add heft

Loved by hipsters and sneered at by audiophiles, Beats By Dre has made billions the world over, thanks to strong marketing and celebrity endorsements.

It’s easily one of the most recognised names in headphones, but a recent close examination of Beats’ hardware seems to show that consumers are paying more for brand recognition than they are for actual quality.

This bit of somewhat disturbing info came from a recent teardown of a pair of Beats headphones by the smart people over at Bolt.com, in a very informative How It’s Made article that appeared on Medium.com.

Bolt’s prototype engineer Avery Louie and other Bolt staff took the headphones apart piece by piece and analysed what exactly goes into them. They discovered several metal pieces tucked away inside “that are there for the sole purpose of adding weight”.

That’s right, that feeling of heft that Beats headphones have which  some consumers have come to associate with a sense of solidity, reliability and quality, is provided by a few pieces of – otherwise useless – metal.

But that’s not all. When Louie and his cohorts got to the headphones’ drivers, he remarked that “So, do Beats by Dre headphones really enhance the bass? I couldn’t tell from the product teardown but the generic drivers make it seem unlikely.” Burn.

Moreover, Louie et al estimated that the cost of the parts that go into a set of Beats headphones to be $16.89, or R204.86 by today’s exchange rate, and that the most expensive component is the packaging, which costs $4. Obviously labour and shipping costs are added to the total cost before the headphones hit the shops, but it’s still pretty low.

Compare that price to the retail cost of $199 in the States and over R2 000 here, and you will start to get an idea of how much money Beats makes per sale. This, Bolt says, is the “power of brand”.

[Source – Medium/Bolt, Image – Medium/Bolt]

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