Beats X – Four Months after

After using the Beats X for hours every day for the last four months:

  • Sound quality improved dramatically after I started using earpieces made from memory foam. Highly recommended. The only downside of this setup is that phone calls sometimes become uncomfortable because the ears are tightly sealed and (at least for me) pressure inside my ears gets out of balance and blurs the audio. What is clearly a boon for listening to music can be a bane for making phone calls.
  • Bluetooth range is still outstanding. I’ve read reviews of Bluetooth headphones that dropped connection if you put your phone into the jeans pocket. The Beats X easily tolerates several meters1 without dropping the connection.
  • Pairing with iOS devices keeps being unbeatably fast and comfortable, best I’ve ever experienced in any Bluetooth peripheral so far.
  • No visible wear of cables or buttons. I originally didn’t have much confidence in the cables. They seemed very frail and, after all, my last two pairs to headphones had died primarily because of failing cables.
  • Battery life is stable, no perceptible degradation so far. There was this one anecdote where the Beats X died after just five minutes out of the house. But that could easily be explained by the temperatures (less than -10 degrees Celsius) and the fact that the part of the cable that houses the batteries was directly exposed to the cold. After I put the cable into my jacket the headphones came back to life.
  • The cable is a bit too long. It’d be good if Apple had shortened the cable by a couple of cm.
  • While traveling, I’ve been increasingly happy to carry a pair of headphones that can be charged by a Lightning connector. I’d hate to carry an extra micro-USB cable solely for this one purpose.

  1. I never really felt the need to find out at which distance exactly the connection would break. Let’s say: it’s generous. 
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