Technically, they aren't lying about the product here. The foam in the 555 model degrades the performance, compared to the 595. It is a lower performing product, and it's pricetag reflects that.

I do, however, find it ironic that the $199 555 model physically contains more "parts" and more manufacturing costs than the $349 595 model.

Curious if anyone has thought about the correlation between shareware/trialware software and these headphones, being that HN readers are generally more software than hardware people. I mean, the only difference between my 30 day trial of Something.app and the unlimited version is a 32 character string, and depending on my current morality level, I could find any number of those strings floating around the internet.

> I do, however, find it ironic that the $199 555 model physically contains more "parts" and more manufacturing costs than the $349 595 model.

That's true, but imagine what they could do differently. They could have a whole separate assembly line to make the cheaper headphones out of different material, for example. But ironically, this might actually drive up the cost of both headphones, since they'd lose the economies of scale that they have now.

I agree that it seems wrong to intentionally make your headphones worse, but it might be the most cost-effective way of producing a cheaper set, given that you're already making the expensive model.

Yes, but trialware publishers are up-front about this difference. Sennheiser was not.

Why are they required to be up-front about this?

I can't really see any lying being done here. Is microsoft lying to people when it's selling windows 7 home edition to people for less money than the ultimate edition even though it wouldn't cost them any more to make copies of the ultimate?

I think it is pretty well understood that the manufacturing cost of the Microsoft products are close to zero.

When I buy headphones I expect more than a license to use technology.

> there is however a moral obligation to not lie to your customers.

Why do you believe that? A company has no moral obligations to its customers in any way.

Company doesn't have legal obligation to not lie (in most industries anyway).

However everything we humans do has moral implications, and company that lies is clearly behaving in immoral way. Then it's up to a customer to decide based on her morals what is the right approach to dealing with such company.

A company can't be immoral, no more than an axe can be immoral.

Can a machine that eats babies, whose owner isn't really interested in it one way or another but does happen to recall that it was left switched on in a public place, be immoral?

no

axes aren't made out of people, unlike companies.

Companies are not some organic-made-out-of-people creatures. Where did you get that idea? Seriously, why do you think that?

think what? of course company's registration certificate and brand name cannot be immoral (unless registration states "we kill people" and brand name is something like Murder-by-Order"). things are not what makes companies, are they?

A company has no feelings, no concept of regret or remorse, it simply lacks consciousness. Without this you cannot have morality. A chair, an action, not even an animal can be moral or immoral.

you still don't understand that by company I mean people it consists of?

Oh please. You can't just make up your own definitions of words and then use those definitions in discussions. There is a definition of what a company is, and it's not 'people it consists of'. The wikipedia article about Company is actually quite correct.