Apples Beats

Vikram Bath

Vikram Bath is the pseudonym of a former business school professor living in the United States with his wife, daughter, and dog. (Dog pictured.) His current interests include amateur philosophy of science, business, and economics. Tweet at him at @vikrambath1.

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4 Responses

  1. Saul DeGraw says:

    That cartoon made me laugh. Cute.

    I pretty much agree with this analysis. I have a tendency to break headphones so I generally go for cheap ones but Beats controls a large part of the headphone market (70 percent I’ve heard) and it strikes me that your analysis of Apple is correct. They are not really a software company but are what you described.Report

  2. James K says:

    Incremental innovation in general gets far less attention than it deserves. In consumer electronics, it’s usually the second entrant to the market, not the first, that makes the big money and that’s because the second-mover has the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the first-mover: mistakes that are very hard to predict in advance, but only become apparent when you had your product over to actual consumers and see how they use it.Report

  3. Mo says:

    Defining headphones as a wearable computing really, really stretches the definition. As you state, the earbuds do no processing themselves. Noise canceling headphones maybe count, but if headphones are wearable computing devices, than so is a regular watch.Report

    • Vikram Bath in reply to Mo says:

      > if headphones are wearable computing devices, than so is a regular watch

      That’s a good objection. On the other hand, maybe it should be so considered. I personally went from a fancy-schmancy watch to one of the Casio G-shocks because I wanted something with multiple alarms and could thus serve as a backup to the alarms on my phone.

      But I do think it is important to think about what functions are enabled by a product rather than how it actually happens. To me as a user, I don’t really care whether Siri lives in my headphones, my phone, or somewhere in the cloud. To me, she lives in the middle button.Report