You can even pay monthly if you want – it’s $8.33/mo for 6 months plus a $3 down payment (for a total cost of $52.98). You get great bass output, which is basically a requirement in Beats headphones beats studio3 which made their name from punchy bass . Tracks like Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name of and White Stripes Seven Nation Army had the kind of punch that we’d hope for.
As long as you have more than an hour’s worth of power, it will glow white. There are two thicker portions of the strap that help weigh the rigid wires down, and give somewhere for the innards and battery to live. This is where you’ll find the USB-C port for charging, a mic for taking calls and chatting to Siri/Google Assistant and a couple of buttons. All these buttons are easy and reliable to press, with firm feedback and a nice click.
At either end of the U are elongated plastic housings that contain the battery and electronics (including the Apple-designed W1 Bluetooth chip), as well as the USB-C charging port and the power/pairing button. These plastic housings are where Apple has focused most of its redesign (cost-cutting?) efforts. Instead of placing the microphone and controls in an inline pod on the left earbud’s wire, these are now contained in the left housing.
The earbuds themselves are magnetic, attaching to each other back to back when not in use. The neckband is also flat and designed to prevent your Beats Flex headphones getting tangled up beats studio3 when they’re in your pocket, and let us just say thank the lord for that. Beats Flex are actually a replacement for the old BeatsX earbuds, which were also rocking the neckband design.
I think the best customer for the Beats Flex is anyone looking to replace a set of wired earbuds with something wireless that won’t break the bank doing it. The target audience here isn’t the person looking at AirPods or other true wireless earbuds that are more than twice the cost of the Flex, and the audio quality/features reflect that. And, although I’m never a big fan of the in-line controls you find on neckband-style earphones, I don’t mind those on the Beats Flex. The multi-purpose button is located on a different face of the left remote to the volume controls, meaning you never inadvertently press one instead of the other. And this multi-purpose button only very subtly protrudes, so it’s unlikely you’ll knock it by accident. As you’d expect, they come with a range of different earbud sizes in the box – four to be precise – to help ensure a snug fit.