Beats Pill+ First Look & Quick Previews || Apple's Beats Pill Plus Features

Subscribe for more tech videos. Apple's Beats Pill+ Announced Preview & Features || Apple Redesign-Best Speaker Ever for $229 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXRTyYZ47I0 A fresh look and sound in a familiar shape The new $229 speaker isn’t any sort of radical redesign. Instead, it’s a refinement on the recognizable Beats Pill look. It’s shaped like — you guessed it — a pill, but the new version feels much sturdier than its predecessors. It’s topped with four buttons: a squishy rubber power button on the left, a metal pause / play button emblazoned with the Beats "b" logo in the center, and two more rubber buttons for volume control on the right. The Pill+ only comes in stark black or white options — the total opposite approach of LG, which wraps its Bluetooth speakers in brightly clashing colors. If this all sounds very Apple to you, it should. From the "plus" branding right down to the color choices, the Pill+ looks a bit like a reigning in of Beats, as if someone from Cupertino was watching the entire production process. More important than the look and build is the sound, and judging from my brief demo the Pill+ is likely the best-sounding Pill ever. That’s apparently all thanks to what’s called a two-way active system, meaning that amplifiers are built into the speakers — two in fact, one for each pair of woofer and tweeter. This helps better assign the different frequencies of music to the right parts of the speaker, resulting in better sound. A big part of that could be that first three tracks were all being streamed from Apple Music, which serves up tracks at a high bitrate of 256kbps. When I played the punk track from Spotify on my phone at 96kbps, the quality was noticeably worse — but it still sounded better than I’d expect low-bitrate LTE streaming to sound.