One possibility: Apple intends to bring its quality and engineering expertise to bear on the Beats product line. They might be thinking that they can take the #1 seller and preserve that position indefinitely by decreasing the price and improving the quality. Apple's supply chain can probably result in better build quality (or a reduction in price for the current builds), and its engineering can probably bring better audio quality.
If "Beats Suck" turns into "Beats are Really Good, and Less Expensive", then they will lock up a good deal of the higher end headphone market.
There may also be some interesting exploration of what's possible with a headphone-based wearable. Plenty of room in that particular fashion accessory...much more so than in a watch.
> There may also be some interesting exploration of what's possible with a headphone-based wearable. Plenty of room in that particular fashion accessory...much more so than in a watch.
Let's look at this from a different angle... What if Apple already has a super cool headphone based wearable tech.
Maybe Apple RND came up with something like "Google Glass minus the visor" a while back. That something could well look like a chunky set of headphones, right?
Now let's take a look at the current wearables market... The high profile items are things like Glass, Pebble, Samsung Gear. And they're almost all painfully uncool (outside of Sillicon Valley, anyway).
If Apple were going to launch its chunky iHeadphones, it would know that it'd be up against the "dork factor." So it would make sense to spend some cash to negate that. If so, purchasing the coolest headphone manufacturer you can find, and tying their brand to your upcoming tech, makes a lot of sense.
> There may also be some interesting exploration of what's possible with a headphone-based wearable. Plenty of room in that particular fashion accessory...much more so than in a watch.
While I applaud your imagination, this seems to go against Apple's vision of elegance and miniaturization (i.e., the perfect technology is invisible).
If "Beats Suck" turns into "Beats are Really Good, and Less Expensive", then they will lock up a good deal of the higher end headphone market.
There may also be some interesting exploration of what's possible with a headphone-based wearable. Plenty of room in that particular fashion accessory...much more so than in a watch.