> As a customer, I just trust that Apple will not put out a crap product in this price range

You have airpods and airpods pro, and you don't care enough about sound to spend an hour or two researching headphones. Why would you want these then? What about your current headphones isn't good enough that you are willing to pay $600?

> They will also make a great gift for the people on my list that have everything

I mean, so would a really great pair of headphones that costs $200 less. Also, if you are giving out $600 headphones as gifts, I would like us to be friends.

I'm just saying I get having trust in a company, but what you are describing sounds like more than that.

Why are so many people upset by this?

It’s like they have some kind visceral reaction to seeing someone who isn’t being thrifty and researching every little thing out with spreadsheets.

It doesn’t affect you. They’re not telling you to do it.

If you want to get a better deal by doing the research then do it.

I’ll probably get these for the same reason as the parent; I vaguely want some air pods but I haven’t got around to it and I prefer this form factor.

I trust apple not to sell useless knockoff rubbish in a shiny box. My relationship with them is no more complex than that.

It's a discussion. If I saw someone on the street wearing these, it's not like I'd go up to them and be like "why did you waste your money on those?".

Anyway, the issue for me is that these are supposed to be audiophile/professional grade headphones - something you buy explicitly because you want the best audio quality. If you need these in the first place, then it's worth doing 20 minutes of research to see if it's the best quality for your money, or even in general.

I hate to say it, but I agree with the comments that mention these being more of a status symbol than anything. There's nothing wrong with that either, but that's the reality. I mean, they are pretty much guaranteed to perform worse than high end Sennheisers while still costing more, so what else could it be?

I find the argument of "I need professional grade headphones to do my job, but don't have the time to research the best option" just disappointing I guess.

I own AirPods Pro myself, but those are intended for a different market and are actually a decent value (compared to the Sony which has better sound quality but worse integration with Apple stuff).

> Anyway, the issue for me is that these are supposed to be audiophile/professional grade headphones - something you buy explicitly because you want the best audio quality.

No, they are not.

It's unlikely professionals are buying any wireless headphones and professionals definitely don't want/ need ANC.

These are headphones for people who want good quality sound and value the other features these offer. If you don't find the other features these offer appealing, they aren't worth the money.

Almost every criticism of these pits them against top end wired audiophile headphones... that's not what these are primarily competing against.

> Anyway, the issue for me is that these are supposed to be audiophile/professional grade headphones - something you buy explicitly because you want the best audio quality. If you need these in the first place, then it's worth doing 20 minutes of research to see if it's the best quality for your money, or even in general.

This is where you’re wrong. That’s not the audience they’re targeting. Their target is Apple users bought into the ecosystem who may or may not use AirPods. If they see an Apple made headphone, they implicitly trust it to be not crap and hardy even if it may not compare well to the competitors. Your passionate arguments for why there are cheaper alternatives don’t matter, this has been the same argument for a lot of Apple made products. They are one of the few companies on the market that has demonstrated a commitment to quality (for a premium, of course) for the masses. Their brand is very very strong.

I am not an audiophile and I don’t care to be. I like AirPods and my first reaction to this was: oh nice, my Bose headphones are pretty old. These look quite pricy but it’s Apple, I trust that I’ll get a fairly reliable product that looks beautiful and works really well with my phone (no custom janky apps).

> Why are so many people upset by this?

I can't even imagine why my response sounded "upset".

> someone who isn’t being thrifty and researching every little thing out with spreadsheets.

No, I don't think spreadsheets are required. I probably wouldn't spend $600 on something that doesn't seem like it usually costs that much without reading a couple of reputable reviews first, or maybe checking to see if the features I want exist in a popular cheaper brand. OP isn't doing this because OP isn't buying the headphones to fulfill any need, but because they "trust apple". It's bizarre and hard to understand for anybody who isn't used to thinking of $600 as pocket change, I guess.

> I’ll probably get these for the same reason as the parent; I vaguely want some air pods but I haven’t got around to it and I prefer this form factor.

This was the part that confused me. OP has AirPods and AirPods pro and claims that he loves both. The part I don't get is blindly dropping $600 to buy something that doesn't even solve a problem for you. Apple puts it out, OP buys because it's an apple product.

> I trust apple not to sell useless knockoff rubbish in a shiny box. My relationship with them is no more complex than that.

This is the part that DOES upset me.

You think Apple never made useless rubbish? As we speak I'm typing this on a piece of shit 2019 MB Pro issued by my job. It sucks. Bad design (no ports, no magsafe, no escape key).

> It doesn’t affect you. They’re not telling you to do it.

Sure it does. This religious consumerism is favouring one of the biggest polluters on earth, with products that are as hard to repair as possible. And the favorism it's not even warranted: Apple produced a bunch of crap over the years. But zealots just ignore that.

And not only has this a negative effect on our shared resources, many people also plainly abhor when other people refuse to think.

You have a good point regarding pollution and repair policy, however you claim they have produced a bunch of crap over the years. Are you saying some of their products haven't been up to snuff? Or everything they produce is crap?

Also, the comment about people refusing to think is a bit obtuse, don't you think? Assuming that people who buy Apple products don't think is a ridiculous claim. At least recognize that those people might have a different calculus for their purchasing choices.

It's nuts how much toxicity there is around Apple.

> Are you saying some of their products haven't been up to snuff? Or everything they produce is crap?

Some. They also make good stuff. But look at Louis Rossman's Youtube channel, he rants about the common defects in the bad Apple products better than I could.

> Also, the comment about people refusing to think is a bit obtuse, don't you think? Assuming that people who buy Apple products don't think is a ridiculous claim

It was the nice variant of what I was trying to say ;) The mechanisms of Apple fanboyism work like a religion or a cult, and that's not a novel thought by me. In that context it's not absurd, it really is what happens: People buy these products often enough without an ounce of thought, it's religious conviction and our primate brain wanting to signal status. Not always of course, but often enough. And that does produce the negative reaction in others -> parent was asking.

This cuts both way though. You can see it in this thread and any other thread with Apple in the title - people bashing the product without ever even trying it out. They do so without an ounce of thought. It's religious conviction and our primate brain wanting to signal status.

I see a lot of well founded criticism of the price point and the praise that it gets before it gets reviews, backlash against the "I will buy that" comments. Wouldn't equate that.

And it looks like you are implying comments like mine are made without thought, which would be neither nice nor correct.

> The mechanisms of Apple fanboyism work like a religion or a cult

OK buddy. Lemme go find you a soap box. BRB.

Most people don’t give a shit about understanding how things work. They want something that they can afford that doesn’t suck and looks good.

I assume this was meant to reply to a different comment?

Just in case: I did not say that people care about how things work. You get in every category Apple sells products in other products that are more affordable, do not suck and look good. Besides, many people buy Apple products that they can not afford, that's part of the problem.

People using 9-year-old laptops happily probably aren't agreeing with "Apple produced a bunch off crap over the years." There are plenty of things to dislike about Apple, but their products tend to outlast competitors, having very long lifespans. That helps to mitigate their non-repairability, though it doesn't eliminate it.

> There are plenty of things to dislike about Apple, but their products tend to outlast competitors

That's a myth.

Really makes you wonder how these delusional claims are being peddled all over this thread - especially when you can easily find fully functional 10 to 15 year old Lenovos and Dells across the enterprise world. They purchased some obscure chinese brands from Amazon one time and concluded this is what life outside of Apple is like.

It really is astonishing, isn't it? Here you have a company with scandal after scandal regarding their bad long term durability - batteries being neutered, keyboards with keys that break, laptop displays that disconnect, unibodies that aren't unibodies, laptop coolers that don't cool -, embarassingly bad repairability and expandability across their product range, and that has one of the worst warranty programs of all of them. And for one inexplicable reason (stockholm syndrom? No experience with other products? Status thinking as the sole decider on what is good?) people still claim that stuff. That's also where the cult classification is coming from.

High resale value is still high resale value.

I mentioned 2011, which is well before the nasty keyboards.

You guys are spending a lot of effort to respond to things I didn't say, including anything at all about competitors. Sony Vaio laptops probably hold their value longest, AFAIK, but that doesn't mean Apple laptop haven't traditionally held value quite well.

Funny that you mentioned VAIO, because that was the last in a succession of crappy machines that bit the dust within a year before I finally bought a Macbook Air 9 years ago. It's still going. As is the 2009 Mac Mini I got from eBay in which I just upgraded the RAM and hard drive (to an SSD).

It's a similar story for me with smartphones. My first was a Droid X2. After about 9 months I switched to an iPhone 4 and used it for the next 5 years. Then upgraded to a 6s which I only retired for an 11 Pro last year because work bought it for me. They all work fine today.

I babied every Dell/Sony machine and that Droid just like every Apple product I've purchased since; this is just the proof I've found in the pudding after eating both kinds.

You did not talk about resale value at all.

You're right, my bad!

Apple products have high resale value, at least before the recent keyboard crap, because many people find them to be very useful for a very long time.

That's what I should have said.

Yet somehow these products that are ‘as hard to repair as possible’, outlast all their competitors by years, are highly recyclable, and receive Greenpeace’s top rating.

I very much doubt you can find anything to substantiate your claim that Apple is one of the biggest polluters on earth.

Honestly, you're doing the same thing you are complaining about.

What exactly?

I'm only interpreting here (not judging). But I think s/he means you're spending a lot of time justifying the position that expediency is what's important, which is ironic.

I see. I gave the explanation because I experienced it and understand where it comes from. I am not particularly affluent, and therefore I often need to make the 'best for the buck' decisions, that also includes buying books and whatnot. I know that had I been affluent, I'd spent more on my hobbies over minmaxing.

I mean that's basically Yubikey. There are cheaper alternatives for the actual product and a browser-based password manager and a sw authenticator on your phone gives you all the same phishing and security benefits for $0.

I'm not about to be upset that someone still wants a Yubikey though.

Not OP, but:

* Knowing little about headphones it would take me more than a couple hours to research properly

* I don’t enjoy this research. So unlike most leisure this could be evaluated as a time cost against other activities like working on my business, which translates into a money cost.

* There is a seamlessness when everything is apple. It all works very well together. Having another sort of device makes it the odd duck out and a source of friction even if it is superior on one or two metrics. These headphones will seamlessly switch between multiple devices and work with Siri/Apple music etc

* If there is ever a problem, Apple support is excellent and there are apple stores all over the world. I’m also in the stores reasonably often if I need to buy some other thing, check out a product or need servicing on another device. Apple also offers excellent mail service with premade labels and pickup. Servicing things is work, so this servicing convenience lowers the effective cost.

I won’t personally be buying the overear headphones. I really like my airpods and have tinnitus so I’m not sure I should be using noise cancellation. But hopefully the explanation above gives you some explanation of how buying an apple product can make more sense once you’re already in the ecosystem.

I think it just blows my mind because no part of his reason for buying it is "I want a pair of over ear headphones". Instead it's just "they make great quality stuff".

Some people may enjoy listening to nice headphones and don’t enjoy reading about them.

This happens in just about every hobby. e.g. Some people buy expensive golf clubs and don’t know how to properly swing them.

I've dug into headphone forums and bought audiophile style headphones that are generally liked by the community.

- Sennheiser HD650s

- Schiit DAC

- Schiit Amp

They sound good (price ~$500, more after the DAC/Amp), but the build quality of the HD650s is poor, they feel like plastic crap. The Schiit devices are really nice and I like them.

Sennheiser also differentiates one of their lower models simply by stuffing a piece of foam into the ear cup to make it sound worse and then sells it cheaper than a more expensive model with the same driver. I find this to be a pretty disgraceful way to differentiate.

I think these Apple headphones are probably a better overall product at a cheaper price point. They've improved the beats products and the build quality is better than Sennheiser.

Audio stuff has a lot of snake oil around it and (ironically) a lot of extreme anti-brand tribleness that I'd argue is more irrational than what the parent comments suggests about buying Apple stuff. (Hatred for bose for example).

I think it's more about signaling some sort of in-group status than about the products themselves.

All of that Sennheiser stuff is currently in a cabinet, because it's a hassle to use and Airpods/Beats studio work better day to day.

GP is self-indulgent, not mentally ill.

My brother spent $2,000 upgrading his golf clubs, and didn't improve his score at all. GP said he's willing to spend an extra $200 to avoid two hours of research. Most of us here make at least $100/hr. The opportunity cost alone makes the purchase reasonable.

$100 * 40 hours * 52 weeks = $208,000 per year. You may want to take a step outside the HN "bubble of people bragging about their salaries" and realize that this is NOT a common salary level. Most people make less than half that unless they live in SV (and even then, many are making <200k a year...)

Fair.

I'd make a guess that majority of HN readers are located in SV (or work for SV companies). So for people who read this it probably is a common salary level.

> My brother spent $2,000 upgrading his golf clubs, and didn't improve his score at all.

Well, that's definitely the type of thing you don't let people know, haha

> Why would you want these then? What about your current headphones isn't good enough that you are willing to pay $600?

Can't speak for others, but I simply want good quality over ear headphones for sitting at my desk listening to music while coding. I have a set of decent AKG over-ear headphones, but I'm tired of the cable and there are times when ANC would be nice. It would also be nice to have a set for watching TV in the evening.

Not sure why so many people have their panties in a twist about this. Apple makes arguably the best wireless tech in the business. People keep comparing these to high end wired headphones (without ANC) which completely misses the point.

> I mean, so would a really great pair of headphones that costs $200 less. Also, if you are giving out $600 headphones as gifts, I would like us to be friends.

Also, please get me a line on these wireless over ear headphones with good sound and ANC you can pick up for $200.

I'm guessing that would be the Sony XB-900N, the little brother of the 1000-XM3. The noise canceling isn't quite as good as the XM3/QC35, but it's close.

Edit: I should admit that you are correct that $200 (MSRP, not paid price) won't buy a fair competitor. More appropriate is $350, which is what the XM4/QC35 II cost.

> I should admit that you are correct that $200 (MSRP, not paid price) won't buy a fair competitor. More appropriate is $350, which is what the XM4/QC35 II cost.

It's good to have a realistic comparison. All these comments comparing it to wires, non ANC headphones, and studio monitor headphones are pretty far off base.

I may have to pick up some.

$200 less than $600 is $400 not $200.

Indeed. I misread your comment.

Honestly as someone with $4,000 in-ear headphones that are just beautiful, the AirPods are great. I mean, subjectively crappy on any 1 on 1 dimension vs some competitor on the audiophile forums, but they sync, charge fast, shift between devices, etc.

My usage is 50/50.

Plus, the old apple stuff was hilariously bad on certain sound things; but it’s clear they’ve focused on it, and usually that means it’s fine.

No doubt Apple will have made a great product but that doesn't oblige you to buy them! What would the Airpod Max bring you that your existing Airpod Pros don't? What problem will they solve? It sounds like you're just buying things because Apple decided to sell them.

Buying apple also buys status

Excuse me, what?! How do you define status? Owning apple gear?

Owning Apple gear signals status among a significant portion of the population. Maybe not for you, me or the majority of HN's clientele. But even for those who don't buy into this definition, adhering to it can still bring tactically social advantages.

I have a very hard time believing you're not aware of this, and feigning ignorance in order to criticize the fact is just disingenuous.

Could you please define what status advantages Apple gear offers?

Apple gear is, to a degree, a classic Veblen good. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

They didn't.

The iPad Pro, the iPhone X, and the Mac Pro were all shockingly expensive. I remember the chatter on Hacker News like it was yesterday.

The first two sold like gangbusters and the last is less of a Veblen good and more of an anchor price for the rest of their lineup.

Apple's 'affordable' version of a product is always "a good price for an expensive X", rather than actually cheap. And they go up from there.

And the iPhone SE, iPad Mini, and MacBook Air are extremely competitively priced, especially if you amortize over their lifetimes versus competing products' lifetimes.

There isn't even a competing product for iPad Mini.

Maybe a case can be made for the highest end Apple products are Veblen goods, but that's a far less interesting comment than all Apple products are Veblen goods.

Veblen goods as defined on the Wikipedia page (Veblen himself is more careful) are a bit of a spook, a product which sells more every time the price is raised to no limit is of course impossible.

In contradiction to your post which I replied to, Apple has raised the price of their flagship iPad and iPhone, and continued to bust through sales records. That's Veblen enough for me.

They have also lowered the price of their most affordable product in a category, and in any case, this being tech, each new product isn't the same as the predecessor, which complicates the analysis.

I don't think "people buy the latest flagship iPhone because it's expensive" is as true for Apple as it is for, say, BMW.

But it's reasonably true, and there's a trope to go with it: Apple keeps releasing products where the commentariat say "that's so much money for an X! who is going to buy this?" and then sell millions of that product.

>In contradiction to your post which I replied to, Apple has raised the price of their flagship iPad and iPhone, and continued to bust through sales records. That's Veblen enough for me.

Seems like a useless concept to me. If the flagship phones are getting better and better each year, why is it noteworthy that the price might increase? Is there a business that sells a better product at the same price as an inferior product?

You're right, there's not a direct and linear increase in demand as price goes up. I concede my Veblen point.

And what's wrong with that if you can afford it like the OP said they could?

Waste. Physical electronic waste and opportunity cost.

For example, these cost more money than an average resident of Sierra Leone earns in a month. You could donate to feed their family.

Or for $550, you could spend $300 on buying a Kenyan family 5 sheep, $100 on gifting 5 Serbian women a month of literacy classes each, and $150 on 15 rides to school for refugee children in Egypt. Taxes not included.¹

¹https://cwsbestgift.org/

Or you could buy yourself a really nice set of $200 headphones and still send $350 to charity.

You're asking what's wrong with wasting money?