Beats are awful for the price, but I do wonder how much of an improvement in audio quality can be had with tiny laptop speakers.
It was little more than an equaliser profile for the audio output, AFAIK. Mind you, it's about time people realised that Beats is just bass-heavy mediocre audio gear, with clever marketing and a high price.
I think the vast majority of Beats customers couldn't care less about the audio side of it - they're a fashion statement more than anything.
B&O is horrendously priced gear but sooooo much closer to being worth it than Beats. I tried to use my old HTC One X as a music player and that used Beats audio, lasted a track and a bit before I decided that putting up with the screaming kids on the bus was a better option. Far too much bass and wooley sound.
Dr Dre was cool in 1992. He is not cool any more. I'd be far happier seeing mobile partnerships with some of the less known audio labs who produce functional gear of the highest quality. But they don't have wicked-awesome logos 'n' ting.
There seems to be some confused people around... speakers on portable devices are crap no matter who makes them due to the limitations of portability, you really wouldn't want the magnets inside decent drivers to be anywhere near your screen for example. The audio processor is going to be the same (Realtek/Creative...) no matter what the branding associated with the device is and so if you are using decent earphones/speakers and still don't like the sound then you just need to adjust the equaliser to something you prefer, this is something I do as standard as I hate pre-sets. I have an ASUS N53S Laptop that is around 5 years old now that features Bang & Olufsen ICEpower and yet under Sound in Device Manager it states Microsoft as the manufacturer, although I understand this to also be a Realtek HD Audio chip.
They will always be crap compared to proper speakers, but as HTC proved with the One there are varying degrees of crapness.
the HTC ONE M7 i got seems to be very good personally quite good with front speakers compared to phones that use mono or rear speakers (properly ony reason now i stick with HTC now i be having the HTC M9 soon as my contract allows me to upgrade for free and £10 monthly discount hopefully (still on Orange/EE contract not full EE so hoping i can get one more phone upgrade out of them until i am forced to move to EE and lose my 15 year discounts)
Not only that, there is simply not the physical space to fit a speaker big enough, to shift enough air, to deliver anything resembling reasonable bass.
While there are physical limits to what you can do, clever engineering can maximise the quality of the sound within those limitations. I've heard (within reasonable expectations) very impressive useful sound from compact devices, and also terrible sound that is basically useless for anything other than windows dings.
