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Businesses Music The Almighty Buck Apple

Beats Music To Shut Down November 30 (fortune.com) 61

Posted by timothy from the as-the-apple-turns dept.
UnknowingFool writes: After November 30, Beats Music subscriptions will be cancelled and no longer work, according to Apple. Subscribers can use Apple Music, which has many of the same features. This shutdown was not unexpected when Apple purchased Beats last year for $3 billion, as Apple has a history of buying companies for various reasons other the products. Many former companies have been absorbed into Apple in one form or another in this manner: the technology of Fingerworks peripherals was the start of multi-touch for iPhones; PA Semi and Intrinsity personnel were the core of Apple's internal chip design teams; and AuthenTec made biometric technology that became the backbone of Touch ID.
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Beats Music To Shut Down November 30

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  • "...as Apple has a history of buying companies for various reasons other the products."

    wat

    • it's true. usually Apple buys them to poach a user base, gain credibility, and/or acquire engineers and patents, rather than to just rebadge the product.

    • Eliminate a competitor.

      • Except in some of these cases Apple was not making products beforehand but merely did not continue them afterwards. Apple didn't make chips before PA Semi; they only wanted the personnel. In the cases where there was some competition like Fingerworks (peripherals), Apple incorporated their technology in their own products. Apple didn't have music streaming before Beats Music but created Apple Music.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by wkcole ( 644783 )

          Apple didn't make chips before PA Semi;

          Except for chips like this: http://www.applelogic.org/file... [applelogic.org]. Late Apple ][ models, Lisa, Newton, every Apple printer since the Imagewriter,, every Mac, every iPhone, and most if not all iPods have included one or more chips designed by Apple, carrying the Apple logo, unavailable to anyone else, and usually very poorly documented (if at all.) One could also argue that the 680x0 and PPC versions that Apple commissioned for exclusive use in Macs amounted to them acting like a fabless CPU maker (e.g. like PA

          • I should have clarified that to be ARM chips. By the time Jobs came back, Apple had long moved out of making chips. Most of the computer manufacturers had started to use more and more commodity parts. By the time IBM sold off their PC business, an IBM motherboard might be custom made for IBM but most if not all components could be bought separately. In the early 90s that motherboard might have had some IBM custom chips (ie, microchannel).

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by wkcole ( 644783 )

              I should have clarified that to be ARM chips. By the time Jobs came back, Apple had long moved out of making chips.

              Still not really right, except for the narrow issue of Apple not visibly doing any custom ARM CPU work between the ARM610 and buying PA Semi. A lot depends on what you mean by "making chips" because they have never owned their own fabrication plants, but there has always been some Apple-labeled, Apple-only, and at least partially Apple-designed silicon shipping in Apple devices since 1983. In the sense of running a fab, PA Semi also never "made chips." However:

              Every Mac (even every one of the 90's PPC Mac

              • Still not really right, except for the narrow issue of Apple not visibly doing any custom ARM CPU work between the ARM610 and buying PA Semi.

                Since acquiring PA Semi (and later Intrinsity) Apple has done more and more design work for ARM CPUs for their devices. With each Ax generation of chip they are customizing it further. The A4 used a Cortex A8 core. The latest design A9 is a custom ARM core designed by Apple.

                My point however was that Apple didn't buy PA Semi for the Power products. They really wanted the personnel and expertise for chip design specifically to be used in their mobile devices.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Better than what FingerWorks customers got. (Score:5, Informative)

    by jeffb (2.718) ( 1189693 ) on Saturday November 14, 2015 @09:51AM (#50929923)

    When Apple bought FingerWorks back in 2005, all we FingerWorks customers saw was a terse announcement that the company had ceased operations effective immediately, and that no further products would be released or shipped. It was quite some time before we could even be sure it was Apple that bought them, because the deal was wrapped in non-disclosure terms.

    The FingerWorks user community was very, very small -- so small that the company probably couldn't have kept going as an independent entity. I suppose having Apple rescue some of their technology was better than losing it all. But the gestures that Apple has implemented are a tiny, tiny fraction of the rich, well-designed vocabulary present on the FingerWorks TouchStream keyboards. I still wish they'd release the rest of it, but that's never going to happen.

    • fingerworks sold keyboards, not subscriptions. your keyboard still worked.

      • The problem is support. With Fingerworks keyboards some of the features require drivers which disappeared. As a normal keyboard they still worked; the multi-touch gestures were iffy.

      • Re:Better than what FingerWorks customers got. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by jeffb (2.718) ( 1189693 ) on Saturday November 14, 2015 @10:49AM (#50930151)

        For a while. Mine doesn't any more, and support services were shut down shortly after the acquisition.

        You might think a keyboard with no moving parts would work basically forever, but there was apparently a problem with certain driver chips in the keyboard's circuitry. Some members of the FingerWorks Forum isolated the problem, and had posted a how-to for people to replace the chips (easy as pie if you're comfortable with surface-mount rework) -- but Apple eventually took down the forum, and with it, that information. I hope it's still available elsewhere on the Web; for various reasons, I haven't looked.

        There was one other issue -- the software FingerWorks provided to configure and customize the keyboard turned out to be incompatible with newer versions of Windows and OS X. We found workarounds, but again, they were documented on the Forum, which went away.

        Of course, none of this would have been any better if FingerWorks had simply gone bankrupt and shut down.

    • Same thing happened with Authentec (the fingerprint scanner company) when Apple acquired them. As the new owners I don't have a problem with them withdrawing the product from the market for use exclusively on Apple devices. But they also took down the website where all the drivers and software for previously-sold devices were distributed. Yeah you could still get drivers from your laptop manufacturer. But because of how Firefox's and Chrome's version numbering worked, the browser extension software need

  • Editorsneeded, apply within (Score:3)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Saturday November 14, 2015 @10:19AM (#50930029) Journal

    "Apple has a history of buying companies for various reasons other the products"

    1) No editing or proofreading needed here. God forbid we have coherent, readable sentences in the summary.

    2) Sometimes Apple buys things simply to shut them down or eliminate them, similar to the way that Amazon recently stopped carrying competitors to its streaming video service. Can't compete? Worried about eroding market share? No problem- just buy your enemy and dismantle the business.

    • Sometimes Apple buys things simply to shut them down or eliminate them, similar to the way that Amazon recently stopped carrying competitors to its streaming video service. Can't compete? Worried about eroding market share? No problem- just buy your enemy and dismantle the business. Flag as Inappropriate

      While some companies have seemingly disappeared I don't know if there is any glaring examples of Apple's intention to do this. Sometimes it's just a bad acquisition. In this way it's not similar to Amazon no longer carrying competitor's products as they still exist.

    • for god's sake fuck off.

      • for god's sake fuck off.

        Why would god need you to tell me to fuck off? Couldn't He tell me Himself, or failing that couldn't He just make me fuck off?

        Are you God's official mouthpiece on Earth, or is the pope out sick today and you're just covering for him?

  • Gee, so glad I had to lose MOG [wikipedia.org] with its very nice interface to Beats with its horrid interface.

    I knew Beats was going to be a disaster as soon as I tried it out (and dumped it).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nemyst ( 1383049 )
      Anything that touches the Beats brand is terrible. I still find myself depressed whenever I see someone walking around with their crappy shiny plastic headphones.

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