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Beats Teardown Guy Tackles Two Authentic Pairs This Time

Sticks to his guns on metal-added-for-weight, but that's not the real problem

By Rain Noe - July 10, 2015

in Product Design

Avery Louie, the prototype engineer whose knockoff Beats teardown made the blog rounds last month, has subsequently gotten his hands on two real pairs of Beats. After tearing down the counterfeit pair, Louie had concluded that the hinges were made from metal rather than plastic purely for the purpose of adding weight (and thus a perception of quality). Some of you disagreed, claiming that the hinges would need to be made of metal for durability's sake. Well, here's what Louie has concluded after getting inside the pairs of real Beats:

I stand by my original point that these metal parts are there to add a bit of weight and increase perceived quality with a nice look. With the addition of the metal ear cups, metal now makes up 44 grams of the 130 gram product — 33% of the weight.

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Some might assume that the metal hinges are used for function rather than feel. At first glance this seems reasonable but further disassembly reveals that the metal parts are actually mounted to plastic bosses. Nearly all stress on the metal parts is transferred to these plastic features, which are actually smaller than the beefy metal parts.

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As you can see, one of said bosses is broken in the photo above, but we assume that happened during the teardown process and not in actual usage.

Louie's also discovered that the hinges in the authentic Beats are made from stainless steel rather than zinc and are a bit thicker (see below, with the magnet sticking to the real deal):

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Perhaps most surprising in this new teardown is the BOM. Louie had the counterfeit pair costing $16.82; his estimate for the real deal is $20.19—a difference of $3.37. "Overall," he writes, "the genuine & counterfeit Beats are nearly identical."

And that, folks, is the real problem, not whether or not metal was added for weight. "It is worth spending some time," Louie concludes, "designing ways to prevent your product from being counterfeited." With unscrupulous manufacturers now having achieved a frightening level of duplication, that's easier said than done.

Beats is of course aware that their products are being counterfeited, but the "Spotting Fakes" section of their website seems woefully unaware of just how convincing the knockoffs are: They warn consumers to look out for "unprofessional looking" packaging. As we saw here, the pirates have got it pretty dialed in.

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Mark Thomas

9 years ago

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The luxury goods market (which Beats themselves says they are in) has long griped about counterfeiting, and of course many luxury goods are the easiest to counterfeit , since the luxury is not in the product per se, but in the branding. But I suspect the truth is that a certain level of counterfeiting is actually good for business, and the industry knows this. You don't want the hoi polloi degrading your "luxury" brand, but you do want them to aspiring to it , because a lot of luxury is about social class, and what's the value of displaying your Gucci if there's no one to envy it?

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So Ma

9 years ago

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Trying to blame Beats for the proliferation of counterfeiting is the definition of hating just to hate. A quick google search for "counterfeit iPhone 6" turns up all kinds of results where the iPhone has been faked with remarkable accuracy. This is despite Apple investing many millions of dollars into manufacturing R&D - the directive of the sloppy engineer who wrote this tear down.

This is a non-story. If the point is about counterfeiting rather than "adding weight" then it's a pretty shallow point. Whether you're Beats or Apple - like Mark said - if you're in the luxury goods market, people will attempt to counterfeit your product regardless of how much you invest in "designing ways to prevent your product from being counterfeit."

As far as adding weight - this guy can claim it all he wants. But I still think you're giving Beats too much credit by saying corporate leadership or even the ID folks hatched a grand plan to fool consumers into thinking their product was of a higher quality by adding metal parts.

Stop using disparaging stories about Beats as click bait. The company makes $600MM a year and was recently acquired by the most valuable company in the world for $3BB. Whatever they did, it worked. The hating is tiring.

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Mohamed P.Hassan

9 years ago

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Remarkable observations.

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Quan Li

9 years ago

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Goob job on finding out the tear down was of a counterfeit product.

The metal parts is mounted to plastic on the headband but the thinnest part of the hinge is still metal and would still be very weak if it was made out of plastic. I like the teardown, how he explains all the parts and technical aspects. But I still don't agree with the criticism of the design and engineer of it. The designers job is to make it look good and work well, using nicer materials where needed. The engineers job is to figure out the engineer of the design, making the cost and labor as efficient as possible while keeping the product integrity. A engineers job is not to make it as complicated and expensive as possible. And criticizing of the material choice or the design is like saying the Iphone's aluminum casing is used only to add weigh.

I would also like to hear more about how you can design ways to prevent counterfeiting. He can probably land himself a job at Apple or Beats if he can share some of his secrets.

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