himbocat

I’m the audience for this. I’ve bought previous android portable standalone players and it being a phone is actually a negative.

There are already plenty of good smartphone dacs so there’s no need to make a super high end battery chugging, chunky phone for a niche audience, when most people are just going to use Bluetooth headsets anyway and have a good experience doing so.

Im not just carrying these things around like a phone because the types of headphones I’ve run with these devices are not the type that I would bring with me on a bus or to the store. Portability really doesn’t matter to the target audience of these.

I pull my standalone player out when I want to sit in front of my my garden and listen to an album all the way through. Getting a call or a notification would kill that for me.

It’s like a boxing match where the republicans pull a knife out of their glove before the round starts and the democrats just pat themselves on the back while congratulating themselves on the clean match they’re about to have.

You actually have to pay a premium to avoid lightshow pc hardware nowadays. If i had to guess, someone over at marketing for these companies figured out that people who want blacked out hardware skew older or professional and are willing to pay.