Beats has new over-ear headphones coming, but the company itself didn’t announce it, neither did Apple. The reveal comes from an 18-year-old Barcelona forward arriving at Spain’s World Cup training camp.
Lamine Yamal posted photos and a video on Instagram (which garnered over 1.8 million likes) showing him walking into camp with a pair of unreleased Beats headphones in pink.
Where did these headphones come from?
The headphones aren’t a complete surprise for us. A week before Yamal’s Instagram post, a new pair of over-ear headphones appeared in a US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) database.
For those catching up, it’s the mandatory regulatory filing that any wireless device must go through and pass before the company can sell it in the United States. MacRumors had already flagged them as likely a Beats product, and Yamal’s appearance confirmed that.
What do the headphones look like?
If you ask me, these don’t look like the Beats Studio Pro. The design, I’d say, is meaningfully different.
The ear cups have a flatter exterior profile, and the headband uses a tubular telescoping arm design rather than the wider, flatter arms on the Studio Pro.
Whether this is a next-generation Studio Pro under a new name, or an entirely new product line, has not been confirmed. The pink colorway Yamal was wearing is the only color confirmed so far.
A launch timeline hasn’t been announced, but FCC approval and early seeding to high-profile influencers ahead of the World Cup are both strong signals that a release is not far away.
Beats providing unreleased products to athletes and musicians ahead of major sporting events is an intentional marketing exercise. The World Cup timing here is almost certainly not coincidental. What makes this one interesting is that the FCC filing came first, meaning the product was already in regulatory approval when Yamal posted.