Just hours after announcing two new pairs of headphones, Jabra’s parent company GN has revealed that the Elite 10 Gen 2 and Elite 8 Active Gen 2 will mark the end of its consumer headphone business. That’s all she wrote for the long-running Elite series after years of quality products.
The decision seems rather sudden; earlier this month, Jabra invited select journalists on an “all-expenses-paid media trip” to its headquarters in Copenhagen. (The Verge Now, just a few weeks later, GN acknowledges that “markets have changed” and trying to compete with Apple, Samsung, Sony and countless other headphone brands is no longer worth the cost.
“The investment required for future innovation and growth in this highly competitive space is considered unwarranted,” GN wrote in its press release. It doesn’t get much more blunt than that. There is more money to be made in enterprise hearing aid hardware and technology.
Sad to see Jabra bow out. I was looking forward to testing the company’s new LE Audio charging case, which can stream audio from other devices like treadmills or in-flight entertainment to the headphones. That excitement has already died down now that the end is in sight – although GN says it will continue to support Jabra’s existing hardware for several years.
However, I can also admit that Jabra’s best days in the consumer market have been behind us for some time. In the early stages of true wireless headphones, when many products were plagued with audio dropouts and other annoyances, the company built a solid reputation. The Elite series has become a de facto recommendation for those looking for an alternative to Apple AirPods. I used the same review title twice in a row to praise their quality. This was an impressive feat for a company previously best known for its crappy Bluetooth headphones.
The peak for Jabra was really in the Elite 65t / 75t era between 2018 and 2020, when heavyweights like Sony and Samsung were still finding their footing with true wireless headphones and before a host of other competition entered the ring. This was also when the company started incorporating a feature – Bluetooth multipoint – that took the bigger players ages to realize in their own seeds.
Multipoint allows you to pair with two devices at the same time, so you can listen to music on your laptop and then receive calls on your phone seamlessly. We’ve finally reached the point where this feature has (mostly) become status quo with Sony, Google, Sennheiser and others offering it. Technics’ AZ80 headphones even let you pair them three devices at once. The great multi-point endurance remains the AirPods, but Apple would tell you that its automatic switching between iPhones, iPads and Macs is a better solution anyway.
Jabra got other things right, too. I always liked its mobile app. Sure, it was packed to the gills with features that some people probably didn’t even know were there—like white noise and natural soundscapes—but it always performed reliably when it came to adjusting the EQ or updating the headphone’s firmware.
But it was inevitable that Jabra would be overtaken by its much larger rivals. The company reached a point where it just couldn’t hang on in key areas like sound quality, noise cancellation, and so on. Increasingly, we’re seeing Apple, Samsung, and Google save the best ecosystem tricks for their own headphones, which hasn’t helped. And recently, the Elite line has gotten a little bloated and started to prioritize quantity over quality. The best thing I can say about last year’s Elite 10 headphones is that they are extremely comfortable. But they never had much of a chance to replace my current favorites.
It’s a shame to see the company go, but it’s leaving a market that has never been more competitive at all price points. So much so that GN simply doesn’t see the point in it anymore.