- [Marques] Okay, it's kind of hard to believe, But yeah, this is a real product. What I'm holding is the new Dyson Zone air purifying headphones. That's exactly what they're called. You can look it up. So when this first started popping up on Dyson's social media channels, I had to double-check the calendar to make sure it wasn't April 1st because seriously? Dyson, are you pranking us right now? This is a thousand dollars for air-purifying headphones. I wasn't sure what to think. Probably safe to ignore it. But then one by one, videos started popping up on YouTube, on Twitter, on Instagram and people started asking, like, "Hey, Marques, Can you check out those Dyson headphones? " "Can you check out the Dyson Zone? " So that look you see here is me realizing I just spent a thousand dollars plus shipping on something that I already believe is a terrible product but I'm still here to do my job and find out anyway. But here's the thing, and probably the weirdest part and the most important part of this whole thing, Dyson, this product could only have come from Dyson. It makes no sense, but makes all the sense in the world. So ignoring the whole embarrassing social media campaign
around the vacuums for a second, I love my Dyson vacuum cleaner, right? A lot of people I know have bought Dyson vacuums. No regrets. We love these things. They're great. And then over the years, Dyson has built up a cult following and loyal fan base over what is motors and filtration. Dyson is a motors and filtration company and they've built that out and turned it into some of the most amazing vacuum cleaners in the world. And they're also some of the most expensive. Seriously, if you want a stick vacuum, you can just get one on Amazon for a hundred bucks easily. But then you kind of get the feeling that Dyson is the brand name that they're all copying. But naturally, you don't stop there, right? You're successful with one thing, but you gotta branch out. So what else do you do? You've all seen the Dyson bladeless fan thing, right? I mean, this is almost a legendary product on its own. The Dyson fan slashes the air purifier in the corner of the room of a $ 500-a-night Airbnb. Do other companies make bladeless fans now? Sure, but people want the Dyson one, the $700 Dyson one. Another successful implementation of motors and filtration. There's also the Dyson hair dryer, another cult classic. This thing is incredible. I don't even use a hair dryer. I use this thing to heat the Dbrand skins to put on the back of my phones
And it's awesome for that too. Another successful implementation of motors and filtration. So Dyson is no stranger to charging a lot of money successfully for a seemingly niche product. But that doesn't mean they can't miss. You guys have probably heard about it, maybe you haven't, They made a floor lamp too. Maybe you haven't heard about it because it's less successful. It's also $850 so they can miss it. You also might have heard about the car prototype that they brought to CES, which like, okay, Yes, you make motors, and motors are one part of an electric car, but there are lots of other parts of a really hard car. And trust me, a Dyson car is kind of a tough sell no matter what you're gonna price it at. So Dyson has a lot of hits and some complete misses. So what's this one gonna be? (bright music) Okay, so this product is part headphones, part air purifier. And I know about headphones, so let's talk about the headphones part first. And these headphones are wild. First of all, they're gigantic. They're huge. I don't even have to tell you that. Now, a lot of the size will make more sense when we get to the filtration part and everything that's also inside these ear cups later.
But just like a pair of headphones on your head, these things are huge, they stick out a lot to the side. But honestly, it's mostly the weight. Okay, so Audio-Technica's M50s. I've talked about those in the past. Very familiar headphones, totally normal. 288 grams. Not that bad on your head. Then you get to the heaviest headphones. We talked about how heavy AirPods Max are. Those are 388 grams, which is a lot. These are 588 grams. So it feels like I'm wearing a football helmet, These things are so heavy. Now, there's a lot of metal but they do try to maximize comfort With these soft cushions And the ear cups are super soft and the top of the headphones are soft And then it's this purple velvet color. The side pieces are more for stability to keep them in place on your head. And honestly, if you're just sitting in one place, not moving around too much listening to music in a chair or on a train or something, I guess then they're not terrible. It's just the second you start moving around or looking up and down or walking that you feel the weight. It seriously feels like a helmet. The material though, is nothing but the premium materials, I gotta say.
The headphone band is metal, the cushions are super soft, and the ear cups are metal through and through. You can see the microphones very clearly around the bottom, the USB-C port, and the controls are very, very clever. Everything is on the right earcup And it's mostly via this little joystick here. So instead of trying to swipe on a finicky touch surface Or something like that, you tap up and down on the joystick for volume, Tap left or right for the next track and the previous track, And amazingly, you can hold down the joystick to the right or left to scrub forward or backward in whatever audio you're in. And it worked in a bunch of apps for me too, to my surprise. Worked in Apple Music, worked in Spotify, and my podcast app. It didn't work on YouTube or SoundCloud, But even, yeah, just the thought of being able to fast forward a little bit to the middle of a podcast or something on Spotify is kind of sick. I've never seen that before. But of course with the super high price tag, You hopefully care about how they sound. So how did these sound? Big premium, expensive, active noise cancellation, 40 millimeter drivers. How did these, do they sound as high-end as they cost? No. They don't. But they sound okay. I mean, they sound like some two to $300 headphones
that I've heard, even though they're built like $400 headphones. But I'll say the sound overall is pretty balanced and reasonably bassy and punchy in the low end. There's a pretty good passive seal with these ear cups. And then the active noise cancellation does a little extra work for you. It is just a Bluetooth headphone. There's no wired connection and nothing fancy As far as lossless audio or special codex or anything like that. But you know, they sound crisp with a little extra brightness in the highs. What's more impressive is that the active noise cancellation is pretty good, but the transparency mode is excellent. This is the best I've heard from anything that isn't AirPods. You can double-tap the right ear cup to switch between transparency mode and noise cancellation. The battery life of these is about 50 hours which is right at the top of its class for noise-cancellation headphones with ANC on. They also don't have an on-off switch so they do on-head detection, kind of like AirPods Max. So when you take 'em off your head, they go into this idle mode and you put 'em back on, they play this nice chime, they turn back on and now you're listening to music again. Ergonomically they're not anything special, but with the joystick for the controls, and the transparency mode, these are pretty good headphones.
So that brings us to part two. So as I said, this is a two-in-one product, part headphones, part air purifier. Let's just completely ignore the way for a second just so we can just understand what's happening and how this works. So these headphones come with this little plastic visor thing. So inside the ear cups of the headphones, you can pop off the outside cover and that's where these filters go, that came in the box. And those filters are covering these air intakes and tiny micro compressors that suck in the air from the outside world. These filters help purify the air by cutting down 99% of pollutants as small as 0. 1 microns. Then they pass that clean air through these slots. The visor connects the headphones via magnets to these slots and creates a seal so that the air is channeled down through it and passes over your nose and mouth through the mesh at the front. It is a pretty intricate setup but the idea is pretty straightforward. Basically like, oh, okay, you've got noise pollution, noise-canceling headphones, got you covered. Oh, you've got air pollution too? Fresh air all the time. We got you covered. Now, the timing of these was super unfortunate because contrary to what you might be thinking right now,
This has nothing to do with the pandemic, nothing to do with Covid. It happened to be announced right around the same time, But this is directly advertised at people who live in or commute in cities with bad air quality, dust, pollen, smog, gas fumes, grass clippings, whatever it is, just bad air quality. So the idea is you're about to go out on your commute With the polluted world around you So you put the headphones on, snap the visor on, And now you're getting the fresh air The entire time you're outside with these fans spinning. It's the idea anyway. Now, I went through the painful exercise of going out and testing these things So you don't have to, okay? So I'm looking kind of ridiculous on public streets Because hey, I wanna see if this will work. I walked past roadways to see if I could smell gasoline. I walked past landscaping to see if I could smell pollen and lawn clippings. I walked into a public Porta-John to see if I could survive, you know? And bad news, I could still smell a lot of everything. I mean, there was a nice little stream of fresh air going over my nose and mouth, it was a nice little breeze. But yeah, you can still smell everything. I think right off the bat There are two main problems That hit me immediately with this setup. One is when you put all these together and you put them on, The fans, which are in the ear cups,
start spinning up and the air compressors turn on And you can hear that 'cause it's right on your ear And so you're hearing that through your music so you can kind of drown it out by turning the audio up, But that right off the bat was kind of annoying. But then the second is there's no seal. You can still have air passing over your nose and mouth, but things can also slip in above and below, even if it's close to your mouth. So they want you to have as little of a gap as possible and it's adjustable so you can shrink that visor down As much as you want to have it touching the tip of your nose. But stuff will still get in as long as there's no seal and nobody wants to walk around breathing from a literal tube, like a scuba diving mouthpiece. So yeah, this is just a built-in flaw of the fact that nobody wants that, that's the way it's designed. Plus there are a bunch of other quirks like once the filtration gets going, The battery life goes from 50 hours to two hours. The visor is super light and flimsy Because it's completely plastic, presumably to be lightweight and keep it balanced on your head. But then it also has all kinds of weird scratches and poor finishes on the mesh rubber and plastic and just feels cheap and none of that, None of that even touches just how ridiculous you look. And then there's the whole medical problem. So I'm not a doctor, but I do have a friend who is. Mike also happens to have a YouTube channel.
You might have heard of him. But he explained to me exactly why this product is even more flawed than I realized on the surface. - Yeah, so I see a product That confuses me more than anything because I don't know who the intended customer is because they very clearly say This is not a medical-grade product. No seal exists here, unlike a traditional N95 mask. - I look at the marketing material and I see somebody out in a city, in a subway station, on the streets and there's pollen, there's smog, There's all kinds of other things and they put this on and suddenly the air they're breathing is clean. They don't smell or inhale any of it. Is that a dream or am I missing something? - They say that the product cleans up to 0. 1 microns particles out of the air, but it's not HEPA-rated because a HEPA-rated filter will filter particles with a 99. 95% efficacy. It's not as good as an N95 mask, which has a seal. And this is where a lot of misinformation spreads with N95 masks, because when we say N95, what we're saying is they have a 95% efficacy at filtering particles that are 0. 3 microns. And you might say, well, a Covid particle is 0. 1 micron.
So does that mean they get through N95 masks? That's what some people who are anti-maskers said. Most COVID particles that travel, They are attached to things, water droplets, respiratory droplets, that kind of thing. So they're already bigger than 0. 3 and they end up being captured by the mask. But they specifically chose 0. 3 microns because when you go smaller than that, like a Covid particle at 0. 1, It follows something known as Brownian motion. And this is where these small particles move so randomly around When they're dissolved in a gas like our air, that they end up being trapped by the N95 mask, even better than the 0. 3. - Okay. There are a lot of things to why this doesn't make sense. I also saw a tweet about how if you are specifically thinking about Covid and you are someone who has Covid and you wear this, Now when you exhale, all of that air blowing is now just being ejected out into space Where does it normally stay in the mask? - Yes, this device is not designed to keep your air and your particles to your face like a mask would. So what the company has said in response to this, that there's enough room to wear a mask in between.
But to me, if you have room for N95 masks, this eliminates the need for this product. Because the N95 mask is more effective at filtering the air and creating a seal than this product. So why in the world would you wear a mask that filters better than this and then this thing on top of it? But what I worry about is it creates risk and it creates risk in two ways. One is that it blows air directly onto your nose and mouth, which are your mucus membranes. Anytime you have air-circulating areas that have a natural level of moisture, you dry them out. Dry mucus membranes are a problem because they crack and create openings for pathogens to enter your body. Then it's cold outside, This thing is blowing cold air at your mucus membranes which causes vasoconstriction, meaning less blood flow, less white blood cells in the area protecting you. Another problem. And then the real problem, I'm going to hammer it home right now. - Yes, yes. - They say this is like urban environments where pollution is high, there's break dust, car pollution, all very valid, all big problems we should address. But in urban environments, based on CDC data, the rate per hundred thousand deaths from chronic respiratory disease is around 35. But you know what's 33% higher than that?
Unintentional accidents. That goes up to 47 per hundred thousand. And you know what's increasing rates of unintentional accidents? - Are you saying that these noise-canceling headphones might cause more problems than they solve? - Yeah. - So why did they do this? Dyson is a weird company. Like I said at the beginning, they're a motor and filtration company, But they've had so many hits. They've made these niche products like stick vacuums air purifiers and hair dryers into cult favorites, which is crazy. I can see how this product came to exist and how it ended up being a thousand dollars. Honestly, the thousand dollars part is the easy part. When you just look at the materials and the cool tech and the packaging that went into this thing, it's kind of silly. These headphones themselves are super heavy, But yeah, they're all metal. The cups are metal, the bands are metal, and there's a ton of tech in here. The packaging is hilarious. There's not just the headphones and the visor, which looks like a smiley face, But there's also a super high-quality carrying case with felt lining. There's a thick braided elastic strap
for that carrying case. There's an extra set of filters. There is the softest velvet headphone-carrying pouch I've ever seen. There is a dual-color braided USB-C cable with a headphone jack adapter. There's a metal airplane adapter. There's what I assume is a reusable filter cleaner with a handle and another carrying pouch for just the cables and the accessories, also super soft. And then there's this Dyson app that connects the headphones that lets you not only change the settings, but also gives you a live look at a summary of the air quality in your area and then gives me a live readout of the audio levels of my environment and how much sound the noise cancellation mode is preventing it from getting to my ears. I've never seen anything like this with headphones and live real-time data visualization like this. Gives you a summary of your fan speed usage, your noise cancellation usage over time, and gives you an estimate of your filter life and a direct link to buy new filters For once you run out of the ones that come in the box. If you showed me all this for a pair of headphones And never even told me about the filter thing or what brand it was from, I would assume that these are at least $400 headphones. But at the end of the day, most of this, Like so many other things in the tech world, can be explained by branding.
It's only Dyson that could have pulled this off and gotten this thing as far as it has to get into this video. But there's a sort of a term that you've probably heard in the business world before that a lot of companies use called the loss leader strategy. - Barbara Corcoran was on my podcast from "Shark Tank" and she taught me about this concept called loss leader. And basically, she believes that products that are gimmicky in this vein will not make the company money, but they'll draw enough press that they'll sell other products. Perhaps that's what's going on. - They earn press. - Yes. - Yeah, 'cause there's loss leaders that are like, "Oh, we can afford to sell you this hardware for cheap and lose money on it because you'll buy the software and we'll make the money back. " This one is a loss leader because no one should buy it and probably no one will, but it'll generate enough buzz that people talk about Dyson- - We're doing it right now. - And they'll be, hmm. Yeah, you win this round, Dyson. Here we are talking about your stupid headphones With your stupid filter And you didn't even have to pay for an ad like you wanted to so yeah, well played.