Just hours after announcing two new pairs of earbuds, Jabra parent company GN revealed that the Elite 10 Gen 2 and Elite 8 Active Gen 2 will mark the end of its consumer earbuds business. That’s all she wrote for the long-running Elite series after years of quality products.
The decision seems somewhat abrupt; earlier this month, Jabra invited selected press to an “all-expenses-paid media trip” to its headquarters in Copenhagen. (The edge was not among them.) Now, just a few weeks later, GN acknowledges that “the markets have changed” and that trying to compete with Apple, Samsung, Sony and countless other earbud brands is no longer worth the cost.
“The investments required for future innovation and growth in this highly competitive space are considered unwarranted,” GN wrote in its press release. It doesn’t get much blunter than that. There’s simply more money to be made with corporate hardware and hearing aid technology.
I’m sad to see Jabra bow out. I was looking forward to testing the company’s new LE Audio charging case, which can transmit audio from other devices like treadmills or in-flight entertainment to the earbuds. That excitement has already dimmed now that the end is in sight, even though GN says it will continue to support existing Jabra hardware for a number of years to come.
But I can also admit that Jabra’s best days in the consumer market have been behind it for a while. In the early stages of true wireless earbuds, when many products suffered from audio dropouts and other annoyances, the company built a solid reputation. The Elite series became the de facto recommendation for those looking for an alternative to Apple’s AirPods. I’ve used the same review headline twice in a row to praise its quality. For a company previously best known for its dorky Bluetooth earphones, it was an impressive feat.
The high point for Jabra was actually in the Elite 65t/75t era between 2018 and 2020, when heavyweights like Sony and Samsung were still making their way with true wireless earbuds and before a slew of other competitors entered the ring. This was also when the company started adding a feature – multipoint Bluetooth connectivity – that required bigger players ages to implement in their own buttons.
Multipoint lets you pair with two devices at the same time, so you can listen to music on your laptop and then seamlessly answer a call on your phone. We’ve finally reached a point where this feature has (for the most part) become the status quo as Sony, Google, Sennheiser, and others offer it. You can even pair with the AZ80 earbuds from Technics three devices at the same time. The big multipoint holdout remains AirPods, but Apple would tell you that automatically switching between iPhones, iPads and Macs is a better solution anyway.
Jabra has done other things well too. I always liked the mobile app. Sure, it was packed with features that some people probably didn’t even know were there – like white noise and nature sounds – but it always worked reliably when it came to adjusting the EQ or updating the earbuds’ firmware.
But inevitably, Jabra was outpaced by its much bigger rivals. The company reached a point where it simply couldn’t hold its own in crucial areas like sound quality, noise cancellation, and so on. We’re increasingly seeing Apple, Samsung and Google saving the best ecosystem tricks for their own earbuds, which doesn’t help. And more recently the Elite range became a bit too bloated and the trend towards quantity over quality started. The best thing I can say about last year’s Elite 10 earbuds 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 walking away from a market that has never been more competitive at any price point. So much so that GN simply no longer sees the point.