Take the RTFM Challenge

We admire your daring, Turtle Beach. You originally marketed these Ear Force i60 headphones as high-end Mac gaming headphones. Mac gaming headphones. That takes some guts.

There’s hardly any hardcore gamer community for Macs. Almost nobody builds their own Mac gaming rig. You can’t really overclock a Mac. The kind of people who spend hundreds of dollars on Bluetooth headphones with 7.1 surround sound and dual noise-cancelling boom mics - not very many of those people game on Macs. Marketing these headphones to those people was a bold statement that you were going to leave no niche unserved. Like we said, daring. Admirable.

Of course, it flopped.

We also admire the next statement you made: “Never mind! They work with Windows too! And they’re not just for games!” The next wave of i60 marketing dropped the Mac-specific and gaming language and touted their acoustically tuned 50mm drivers, their uncompressed audio, their dual-band interference-free wireless connection - they’re media headphones for any operating system. Nothing wrong with recognizing your mistake and making a little course correction. Also admirable.

Also flopped. Not just because it takes some fiddling around with settings and whatnot to get that sweet 7.1 acoustically tuned action flowing. After all, if we’re talking PC gamers now, we’re talking about people who are already tweaking their computer’s resolution and alpha channels and Weissman score and parsecs and obviously we’re no experts but you get the point. They won’t mind making a few adjustments.

Except, from what we can tell, that message didn’t really get out beforehand. So a bunch of people bought these - for a lot of money at the time, we might add - and then got upset when they didn’t just work with Windows. Oops!

Oh, and also, near as we can tell,the Ear Force i60 Headphones manual that tells you how to get it working with Windows wasn’t included in the box. Double oops!

That second flop spawned a fresh wave of misguided reviews from people who didn’t understand what they were buying, or who didn’t RTFM. And those bad reviews and poor sales drove these headphones down into our murky layer of the ecommerce swamp. They’re still pretty damn good wireless headphones, and now the price is equally damn good - if you don’t mind R’ingTF’ingM and following seven or eight steps to get them fully operational on a PC.

And when you finish that, while you’re enjoying their awesome surround sound and solid Bluetooth connection, raise a Five-Hour Energy to the visionaries at Turtle Beach. If they hadn’t taken this insane risk, if they hadn’t dared to fly, these headphones wouldn’t be here at this price. Some crazy ideas take off and become the stuff that dreams are made of. Others become the stuff that deals are made of.