[paulsmith]

Did you read the post? The $200 headphones are /exactly the same/ as the $350 ones, except for a piece of easily-removable foam they crammed in the opening to reduce the sound quality.

That's not "market partioning" -- that's utter hostility toward your customers.

[meastham]

I did. I just don't see how this is any different than intentionally removing features from software in order to sell it at lower prices.

[jbri]

In the general human mindset, there's a huge difference between "they're adding extra for those who pay more" and "they're taking stuff away from those who pay less".

If the feature differentiation is achieved by taking the premium offering and adding a component to remove functionality, then that feels a lot worse than taking the mid-range offering and adding components to result in the premium one.

[kenjackson]

I agree. This seems like a reasonable thing to do if you want to have multiple price points for your product.

Would people feel a lot better if instead they just went and changed the circuitry to produce lower quality sound?

[marshray]

Would people feel a lot better if instead they just went and changed the circuitry to produce lower quality sound?

Yes, as long as there was a halfway plausible explanation that it cost less to produce.

[jmaygarden]

In this case it does cost less to produce since they don't have to develop a new product and setup separate manufacturing processes. That piece of foam saves a lot of money.

[colanderman]

My guess is the headphones cost $20 to produce. The $350 price tag covers R&D.

[cabalamat]

Software doesn't have a per-unit manufacturing cost, and everyone knows that, so it does feel bad if a firm offers different versions of the software based on price.

Hardware does have a per-unit manufacturing cost, and people expect a more expensive product to cost more to make.

[sharmajai]

But those features cost them time and money to put them in place originally. A piece of foam didn't.

[kscaldef]

Actually, the article notes that there are aesthetic differences as well. Are those worth $150? No, probably not, but they aren't identical items.

(Also, FWIW, the "$350" headphones are currently $145 on Amazon and the "$200" ones are $85.)

[jrockway]

Makes you wonder what Amazon pays Sennheiser for them. Amazon is not known for their super-low prices, after all.