5 ms·
Drop, formerly Massdrop, ends most collaborations and rebrands under Corsair
- andymegacreep 6mo agothis is terrible, imho. defeats the purpose of the platform. i'm sad for 6XX series headphones :c
- mapontosevenths 6mo agoSennheiser is basically dead too. https://www.headphonesty.com/2026/03/sennheiser-officially-discontinued-operation-actually-worse/ https://www.headphonesty.com/2026/03/sennheiser-officially-d...
- henrebotha 6mo agoThat's a bummer. I was just wondering where my HD 280s went (did I sell them when I emigrated?).
- mrala 6mo ago[dead]
- malfist 6mo agoGot a source that isn't ai slop?
- mapontosevenths 6mo agoThe first line of the linked article contains a link to Sonova's statement (Sennheisers new owner). It's actually much worse than the linked article though, since it's corporate BS style AI generated slop. https://www.sonova.com/en/sonova-presents-renewed-strategy-expand-market-leadership-ambition-reach-chf-6-billion-revenue-fy https://www.sonova.com/en/sonova-presents-renewed-strategy-e...
- ebiester 6mo agoThat was a bad acquisition and their parent company is now in a bind, but I don't see a world where they can't sell it somewhere. Hopefully it doesn't end up in private equity hell because the 600/650 line is legendary and the HDB 630 is a true leap forward.
- mapontosevenths 6mo ago> Hopefully it doesn't end up in private equity hell By this time next year we'd be seeing some Chinese owned company producing "Sennheiser HD9000000000+ Pro" headphones that are leftover Shrek themed earbuds that smoke when you turn the volume up too high.
- ebiester 6mo agoI think that's unfair - if HiFiMAN, Moondrop, or even KZ bought up the Sennheiser assets there would be very little difference. (HiFiMAN had QC concerns 7-8 years back but as far as I've heard they have been much better over the last 5 years.
- mapontosevenths 6mo agoFair point. I have a set of HiFiMAN cans that I adore.
- mrbigbob 6mo agoSenheiser's CONSUMER side of the buisness is basically dead. Senheiser still makes headphones and such with the focus more on business/production products
- sergiotapia 6mo agothis is quite sad. i used to love and recommend sennheiser wholeheartedly. when i migrated back to the states they were the pinnacle brand for me. :(
- ThatPlayer 6mo agoSimilarly sad for their PC38X headset. Though I know they shut down their Epos brand it was under a while ago.
- arvinsim 6mo agoMy 6xx still worked when I left it at home when moving countries for my siblings to use. I really loved that headphone!
- onli 6mo agoMassdrop was interesting, as a place to get stuff you couldn't get elsewhere easily (even if I never bought something there, I considered it multiple times and I think I had some things on my wait list). Is there already something like a successor platform? Drop.com as a site for branded corsair gear is completely useless.
- adamgordonbell 6mo ago> Is there already something like a successor platform? I too would like to know. I bought many keyboard build kits from massdrop back in the day as well as my terrific Sennheiser headphones.
- nerdix 6mo agoFor keyboards specifically, there are still community run group buys happening on the geekhack forum. It's both a lot more interesting and a lot more risky than Massdrop used to be in the sense that there is lots of stuff that even the old Massdrop never would have offered but you're sending a random person on the internet money (sometimes hundreds of dollars) and hoping to receive a product many months later. They have added a "vendor trust" program in recent years to better help inform buyers but there is always risk.
- drakonka 6mo agoI think I got a really cool wallet and notebook from Hand & Sew through Massdrop many years ago. The wallet is long gone but the notebook is still around with a wonderful patina. It used to be a really cool site for unique items. I stopped using it when they had a falling out with Input Club and it seems like they've just gone downhill since then.
- seabrookmx 6mo agoI still daily the wallet! It's just a very simple leather card pouch but the raw leather ended up looking really nice once it wore in. I recently discovered they're local to me but seem to only do custom items now.
- bargainbin 6mo agoIn other words they’ve shut it down, and are going to use the brand recognition to hawk as much low quality gaming merch as they can.
- da02 6mo agoWhich brands do you usually recommend for desktop/laptop related accessories?
- satvikpendem 6mo agoIt's product specific rather than brand specific, I suggest looking around on various subreddits like r/MouseReview or r/mechanicalkeyboards for example.
- kotaKat 6mo agoJust like Gamestop!
- rollypoley 6mo agoSad to see it go, but it had degraded significantly from the Massdrop era. It used to be a place to get a decent discount on pre-orders from good to great brands, but it slowly became nothing but second rate computer accessories. I still have most of the things I bought from Massdrop - pocket knife, leather belt, headphones, etc. Those products lasted.
- hakkoru 6mo agoSame, still use my pocket knife that I bought off Massdrop 12 years ago.
- windowliker 6mo ago>Starting our next chapter, drop.com will become a hub for our collaborations with truly exciting titles—from The Lord of the Rings™ [...], and more—across the full CORSAIR family of brands. Gandalf wept...
- eeks 6mo agoGood thing I stockpiled on Planck boards. All good things have an end I guess.
- avs733 6mo agoI read this twice thinking it was an April fools joke I wasn’t getting.
- hgoel 6mo agoDrop/Massdrop had been on the way out for many years, I don't get the impression that they ever truly recovered from the transition away from the "group buy for anything" model. They were probably just barely kept afloat by the audiophile gear and keyboards.
- pram 6mo agoAgreed. As someone who spent thousands of dollars at early Massdrop, when they switched to 'basically just a store' + their branded products the goods weren't as appealing and I eventually just stopped visiting. And that makes sense if you think about it: if a group buy gets fully funded people obviously want it. They ended up having a lot of non-group buy things like extremely esoteric keycaps probably only a couple dozen people on earth are willing to spend money on.
- whitexn--g28h 6mo agoThe business of demand aggregation has been replaced by Temu, where the consumer data is worth more than the average item.
- dsr_ 6mo agoEven worse, most of their products weren't special: - available faster from Amazon - available cheaper from AliExpress - sometimes both faster and cheaper from the manufacturer And Massdrop didn't provide exceptionally good customer service or warranties. The best thing I bought from them was a pair of JBL LSR-305 powered monitors for $180. Great bedroom speakers at about a 50% discount.
- hgoel 6mo agoYes, that's a good point too, I never ended up buying any of my audiophile stuff from Drop because the stuff I was interested in was usually available with faster shipping from Amazon for either the same price or only a slight price increase.
- m_w_ 6mo agoUnfortunate, but as others point out, quality was on the decline for a while now. That said, I use their iteration of Holy Pandas on every keyboard I can. Wish I had hoarded some when they were still available.
- chaoticmass 6mo agoI don’t know if it was just me but I had bad luck with my holy pandas from them. I build 3 different boards using them and they all started having issues within a few months of use. Double bboounce, and keys nt htting. This was several years ago mind you, so maybe they eventually did get the quirks worked out, but by then I’d gotten over the custom board hobby.
- richwater 6mo agoSaw this coming a mile away. Brand was completely ruined after several debacles.
- SirensOfTitan 6mo agoAccording to Crunchbase, Massdrop raised ~92 MM through their series C, and then another ~40 MM in debt over the last couple years. There is no way that MassDrop was ever going to justify that kind of capital investment. VC is such an inefficient and frankly delusional form of capital deployment at this point -- they have no idea what they're doing. It ironically looks a lot like central planning, where the VCs themselves invest with the intention of picking the winners and losers themselves. This company should've bootstrapped and remained small-and-manageable. Not every business, not even most businesses, should raise money with the intention of becoming a "unicorn," it is nonsensical and this model has a lot of deleterious effects for our society, namely and most obviously enshittification when the outcome doesn't justify the investment.
- vlovich123 6mo ago> VC is such an inefficient and frankly delusional form of capital deployment Can you suggest other saner forms? For example, having experts pick, government pick, or only one single debt instruments all have problems with the kinds of investments VC funds, not to mention that they also have their share of ludicrous and bad investments. Also please suggest how you’d stop VC as is at its core a private investment club - you and other investors get together to invest capital into a profitable but risky venture. The only way to stop it would be to either ban private capital or to ban coordination of capital which on net ends up significantly worse.
- ashtonshears 6mo agoIm no expert, but thoughts: 1. Large firms investing in early r&d instead of aquisition. 2. Its a symptom of decades of poor economic policy rewarding speculation, to a scale that impacts society by disencentivizing stable investments that benefit humanity. Main lever causing this is through Federal reserve poor policy since 200
- vlovich123 6mo agoLarge firms investing in early r&d happens regardless. It does not explain how you build new business on an idea you can’t convince large org politics to try. It’s also what Xerox and Bell labs were doing in the 70s and what Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft etc are doing today but it took smaller more nimble players to actually do anything with the research. Case in point: transformers came from Google.
- __mharrison__ 6mo agoBought my ergoxdoxen from them when they were just starting out. They even sent me a gift box because my blog post about the keyboard had driven so much traffic. It had a CST mouse in it (among other things). Still using the mouse. Nowadays you can buy awesome small batch keyboards from small vendors.
- Crushable-E 6mo agoDo you have a recommended small vendor? I am on the look out for some new switches!
- __mharrison__ 6mo agoJust bought a lily 58 from these guys. Highly recommended https://typeractive.xyz/pages/build#lily58_choc https://typeractive.xyz/pages/build#lily58_choc
- eschneider 6mo agoWell, this is disappointing. They were my goto site for keyboards. :/
- bschwindHN 6mo agoThey basically had a clearance sale on MT3 keycaps in the last week, I couldn't resist picking some up.
- makeitrain 6mo agoWhat are you doing Corsair? I have only ever shopped for RAM by comparing specs and price. I want affordable RAM, not merch collabs for overpriced rgb heatsinks.
- r_lee 6mo agothere are consumers who legitimately drool over RGB
- Anonyneko 6mo agoI'm still sad that the Drop THX Panda never took off (planar-magnetic cans that had 3.5mm passive mode, USB audio mode, and wireless mode, all of which sounded nearly identical thanks to great tuning). It had a physical design flaw with hinges that kept breaking after a few months of use (happened to both of mine), but surely that could have been easily fixed. These could have been the ultimate power user cans, but the production was very quickly stopped.
- Tsiklon 6mo agoThe panda were wonderful, and based off a headphone I loved to bits in the Oppo PM-3. If Corsair still own the design, they could simply reimplement the original earcups/hinge mechanism from the Oppo as it was super solid.
- nilleo 6mo agoLoved those headphones. I forget what defect mine suffered from, I think they were ultimately bricked and I was offered a sincere apology and a full refund well over a year after purchase -- some of the best support experience I've ever had.
- pdpi 6mo agoThe fact that the Cyberpunk-branded stuff is all Arasaka-styled is kind of ironic.
- chwonl 6mo agoI still wear those Massdrop socks!
- kenhwang 6mo agoDrop ran into the problem every other high quality retailer/manufacturer did before it, when you sell good enough stuff, you don't get repeat business fast enough because the original is still working, and eventually fail due to lack of new buyers to sustain the business. I'm still using my Drop CTRL keyboard from 2018. I haven't bought another keyboard since then because it's a good keyboard. Going through my order history, everything I've bought from their early days are still in use or usable. Keycaps. Mics. Pocket knives. A leather belt. Titanium reusable straws. A couple of headphones and DAC/amps. Ultralight camping/hiking gear. There hasn't been any reason I needed more of those things I already had, so unless Drop continuously expanded its customer base or product offerings, there wasn't a strong case for repeat business. Then the quality and uniqueness of their offerings dropped and I had even less reason to buy from them. I don't know what the solution is for survival for retailers and manufacturers offering long lasting products, but I really hope someone figures it out because I really don't like how the world is racing towards disposable low quality junk. But disposable products leads to repeat business.
- dsr_ 6mo agoThe retailer's problem can be solved through diversification. If you sell enough different things, and they are all of good quality, people will come back to shop for other things that you sell. The manufacturer's problem needs more capital, because it is also solved through diversification. If the total market for space oscillators is 120,000 a year, with about a 2-3% annual growth, making the best space oscillators has a cap. You'll need to figure out how to turn your expertise in space oscillators into neighboring products - space modulators and electromagnetic oscillators, perhaps - each of which is an R&D investment itself.
- altairprime 6mo ago> The retailer's problem can be solved through diversification. Perhaps in a textbook economy, yes; but in the U.S. economy that Massdrop operated in, continued sales of products hinged upon wages being available to spend on optional desires. That economics assumption has not held: most people’s inflation-adjusted pay decreased over Massdrop’s lifetime while the inflation-adjusted costs of necessary goods increased (thanks, enshittification and shrinkflation!), and so their potential customer pool would have been steadily draining throughout their operating years. The private equity model of ‘diversify to generate horizontal revenue’ only functions in a wages-dropping economy for retailers selling necessary goods, such as Walmart; for Massdrop, whose goods are exclusively non-essential, they had little chance to survive by increasing product diversity. (And effectively none whatsoever, considering how small their niche was to begin with!)
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- solarkraft 6mo agoI liked the idea of Massdrop. I’m still not much into fountain pens, but the idea of fairly high quality/luxurious “enthusiast” items at relatively low prices still appeals to me. Where does one find that nowadays?
- fnordian_slip 6mo agoForums. Budgetlightforum, geekhack, backpackinglight, fountainpennetwork for flashlights, keyboards hiking gear and fountain pens, for example. The first two even organise group buys like massdrop, and have done so for a long time.
- robertakarobin 6mo agoI was Massdrop's first customer support employee, way back in 2013 or something. I quit after a few months because I was living in DC and don't like remote work, but enjoyed the team and flying out to spend a few days at the "office," which at the time was just a house in Mountain View where most of the guys also lived. Hope Steve and company are happy with the outcome.
- digitalPhonix 6mo agoI thought Corsair gave up on the consumer RAM market because Altman would pay more. How is Drop going to compete internally for their resources (time/attention/rtc.) when the entire consumer RAM market can’t?
- lmz 6mo agoI think you're confusing Corsair with Crucial/Micron.
- digitalPhonix 6mo agoAhh whoops, yep!