APPLE-BEATS: FUTURE TECH

As we noted in yesterday’s story, Apple’s willingness to pay $3.2 billion for Beats was about getting Jimmy Iovine’s star power and posse, and about the technology to come. Time to geek out about the latter.

When the iPod and iPhone rolled out, they became the must-have electronic accessories, and Apple somewhat extended this streak with the iPad. Since then, however, Cupertino has failed to maintain its monopoly on consumer cool.

To reiterate another point from the prior article, wearable tech is where digital cool is going after the handheld device. Beats has had people wearing its tech for some time now.

Beats headphones and affiliated products have achieved an unprecedented level of adoption and hipness as lifestyle accessories. The company achieved this by very consciously marketing to urban/hip-hop kids first, creating the kind of cool that brings suburbanites along in its wake. Wearable tech with the Beats imprimatur gives Apple the lead in a field where other tech companies have stumbled.

It’s important to remember that Apple is acquiring not just the Beats brand and products but the research and design teams that built them and that will be brainstorming the extensions of that brand.

Headphones are, if you will, a gateway drug for a young consumer base that will be using tomorrow’s Beats-branded gear by Apple, including smarter smart watches, health-monitoring tools, high-quality headsets, heads-up displays and other wearable gear that blend fashion and functionality in unprecedented (and as yet unimagined) ways.

All of this adds up to the coveted spike in per-consumer "spend" as Apple—which is said to have more credit-card numbers on file than any company in the world except Amazon—rolls out a new line of lifestyle products.

As for the streaming service, Beats Music flows beautifully into that ecosystem, furnishing a user- or service-curated soundtrack that can move continuously from home to work to car to gym. Beats was built on the bones of an existing streaming system, MOG, but we can expect it to be remodeled and improved significantly under Apple’s eye.

But streaming is just part of the picture. So when you think about Apple and Beats, picture the tech that hasn’t happened yet—and how it gives Apple a shortcut back to the cool.