[brycesbeard]

This was my experience as a contractor for the Navy, years ago. We’ve had radar systems that can detect planes after a reflection on another plane, but the software is dogshit.

Someone once told me, it’s because generals and admirals can see hardware, and fell like they got value for their money. Software, not so much.

Perhaps it’s something innate in humans. Remember how Beats headphones used to add weights to feel more substantial?

[dantiberian]

> Remember how Beats headphones used to add weights to feel more substantial?

This was not really true, the original tear down that found weights was of a counterfeit pair of Beats headphones.

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/07/are-beats-headphones-real...

[BEEdwards]

"As a few folks have pointed out, the version of the headphones we tore down was likely counterfeit. We have posted an in-depth comparison of these and a pair of authentic Beats headphones here. TL;DR: the authentic pair is nearly identical to the counterfeit one."

https://medium.com/@BenEinstein/how-it-s-made-series-beats-b...?

[kalleboo]

That article says that while the first pair was counterfeit, real Beats still include weights to feel more quality...

[mrunkel]

This reminds me of when I gave an tour of the software development company I was working for (we had about 250 employees at the time) and his reaction was "so many people, but you guys don't produce _anything_".

He was right, we didn't ship anything physical.

We just lined up electrons. :)

[smadurange]

"We just lined up electeons" :)

[coob]

> Remember how Beats headphones used to add weights to feel more substantial?

Beats didn’t do this. Cheap counterfeit headphone manufacturers did.

[DaiPlusPlus]

Adding weight to headphones does have a practical advantage: it keeps them firmly on your head.

I had a relatively expensive - but very lightweight - set of headphones a while ago and I swapped them for a cheaper but heavier pair because they just wouldn’t stay in place.

[nosianu]

That doesn't sound right to me. I don't think gravity is or should be the most important or even merely a significant factor keeping headsets in place. That, and less weight on the head should feel better to the head-holding muscles (not to your biased conscious self evaluating "feel" for the only brief time while you concentrate on it).

I would even say it is the opposite: The heavier the headset the tighter its grip has to be so that it stays in place during head movements. A tighter grip means more pressure around the ears, which for most people means less comfort.

I could see that while you concentrate on the feeling of headsets you may have that same bias as most people probably have that heavier equals better (quality, more solidly built), but I doubt that is true for the rest of your brain and your body.

I tried to find something, anything of substance on this concrete subject but this time my Google-foo failed. Links to research would be appreciated, if somebody else has better luck. A possible confounder is that heavier headsets - if it's not a cheat like in the discussed example - might indeed be better built, but I think we are talking about similar built quality here that only differ in weight, and objective criteria, not self-reported biased by already known to exist weightier-is-better value bias.

I only found this, which is really just a statement: "Relation between weight and comfort?" -- https://www.headphonezone.in/pages/headphone-weight

The weight of objects has interesting effects on our judgement: https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/holding-heavy-objects-... -- but obviously that does not mean the body sees weight the same, physiologically.

[Mathnerd314]

Here's an explanation by a rating company about their headphone comfort scoring: https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tests/design/comfort

It seems the padding matters a lot more than the weight, but lighter headphones need less padding, so for a given price point the lighter headphones are more likely to be comfortable.