Apple's quest for hardware perfection reportedly killed Beats' Sonos competitor

June 14, 2015

Apple reportedly scrapped a Sonos-like speaker project from Beats sometime after it acquired the company in 2014.

While the technology behind Beats Music may have eventually led to the recently-announced Apple Music, it looks like Apple's acquisition of the company may have ended in a casualty as well. According to a new report, Beats was developing a high-end home speaker system to compete in the same sphere as Sonos, but the project was eventually killed or shelved after Apple acquired the company in 2014. From Variety:

The product was supposed to be introduced in time for the holidays last year, but was effectively killed post acquisition. Some of the engineers working on the project have since left the company, while others have been shuffled to other projects, according to sources as well as information available on Linkedin and elsewhere.

The report goes on to mention that reasons for the early death of Beats' Sonos competitor were due to a number of production issues the ultimately caused the company to delay the product's launch date several times.

Beats isn't new to the speaker space at all; while its most popular products are, without a doubt, its headphones, the company also makes Bluetooth speakers. However, Variety notes that Beats was looking to go a step further with a range of speakers that would use Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and NFC to do things like start play music when you entered a room. It isn't entirely clear if the project was entirely killed off completely, or just temporarily shelved. It's entirely possible that Apple could debut a system of its own at some point in the future that works off of Homekit and AirPlay, for example.

Source: Variety