[HN Gopher] Drop, formerly Massdrop, ends most collaborations an...
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Drop, formerly Massdrop, ends most collaborations and rebrands
under Corsair
Author : stevebmark
Score : 118 points
Date : 2026-04-06 04:24 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (drop.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (drop.com)
| andymegacreep wrote:
| this is terrible, imho. defeats the purpose of the platform. i'm
| sad for 6XX series headphones :c
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| Sennheiser is basically dead too.
|
| https://www.headphonesty.com/2026/03/sennheiser-officially-d...
| henrebotha wrote:
| That's a bummer. I was just wondering where my HD 280s went
| (did I sell them when I emigrated?).
| malfist wrote:
| Got a source that isn't ai slop?
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| The 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-e...
| ebiester wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Fair point. I have a set of HiFiMAN cans that I adore.
| mrbigbob wrote:
| Senheiser's CONSUMER side of the buisness is basically dead.
| Senheiser still makes headphones and such with the focus more
| on business/production products
| sergiotapia wrote:
| this 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 wrote:
| Similarly sad for their PC38X headset. Though I know they shut
| down their Epos brand it was under a while ago.
| arvinsim wrote:
| My 6xx still worked when I left it at home when moving
| countries for my siblings to use. I really loved that
| headphone!
| onli wrote:
| Massdrop 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| For 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| Which brands do you usually recommend for desktop/laptop
| related accessories?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| It's product specific rather than brand specific, I suggest
| looking around on various subreddits like r/MouseReview or
| r/mechanicalkeyboards for example.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Just like Gamestop!
| rollypoley wrote:
| Sad 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 wrote:
| Same, still use my pocket knife that I bought off Massdrop 12
| years ago.
| windowliker wrote:
| >Starting our next chapter, drop.com will become a hub for our
| collaborations with truly exciting titles--from The Lord of the
| Rings(tm) [...], and more--across the full CORSAIR family of
| brands.
|
| Gandalf wept...
| eeks wrote:
| Good thing I stockpiled on Planck boards. All good things have an
| end I guess.
| avs733 wrote:
| I read this twice thinking it was an April fools joke I wasn't
| getting.
| hgoel wrote:
| Drop/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 wrote:
| Agreed. 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 wrote:
| The business of demand aggregation has been replaced by Temu,
| where the consumer data is worth more than the average item.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Even 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 wrote:
| Yes, 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_ wrote:
| Unfortunate, 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Saw this coming a mile away. Brand was completely ruined after
| several debacles.
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| According 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Im 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 wrote:
| Large 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.
| ashtonshears wrote:
| Sure I agree and good points. But my view is moreso in
| the scale of VC operations being a symptom of excess
| speculation, and society would be better off with stable
| investments. They are poor stewards of capital, and
| subsidized by the federal reserve.
| ashtonshears wrote:
| Nobody needs to stop VC or speculation. The issue is that
| society has been structured to subsidize hyper speculation,
| which current VC landscape is a symptom
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Bought 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 wrote:
| Do you have a recommended small vendor? I am on the look out
| for some new switches!
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Just bought a lily 58 from these guys. Highly recommended
| https://typeractive.xyz/pages/build#lily58_choc
| eschneider wrote:
| Well, this is disappointing. They were my goto site for
| keyboards. :/
| bschwindHN wrote:
| They basically had a clearance sale on MT3 keycaps in the last
| week, I couldn't resist picking some up.
| makeitrain wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| there are consumers who legitimately drool over RGB
| Anonyneko wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| The 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.
| pdpi wrote:
| The fact that the Cyberpunk-branded stuff is all Arasaka-styled
| is kind of ironic.
| chwonl wrote:
| I still wear those Massdrop socks!
| kenhwang wrote:
| Drop 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_ wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| > _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!)
| nickstinemates wrote:
| Wasn't that the entire premise of drop, though? Massive stock
| of quality, curated items. Not necessarily in a specific niche.
| The "what new drop is there today" _is_ the appeal.
|
| If it's now a glorified Amazon, who cares?
| sithadmin wrote:
| At first, the entire premise was facilitating group buying to
| meet manufacturer order minimums for unique or high-demand
| hardware, and discounts for meeting manufacturers' volume
| discount targets. Then it morphed into a general
| specialty/niche retailer for people with keyboard, headphone,
| "EDC" and began to also focus on "house brand" type merch.
| Sparkyte wrote:
| We definitely should not be incentivizing e-waste. I think the
| sign of long living product is a good product.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| I mean even cheap keycaps won't wear out for many years for
| most people, so I don't think quality is a big factor. I got
| tons of keycaps from Ali Express which are just as good as the
| high quality stuff, in fact most of them are made on thre same
| machines...
|
| So not sure if that was really the issue, people ordered
| keycaps because they liked the design, e.g. the Dasher MT3 set
| was super popular due to a similar one being used in the
| "Severance" show.
| kenhwang wrote:
| Keycaps were the expansion that came after the era of group
| buys and keyboard/headphones/audio/EDC curated niches. I'd
| say because the preceding eras weren't sustainable.
|
| If you think about it, keycaps makes sense strategically.
| They're cheap and small enough for hoarding, with a wide
| range of easy customization, with all sorts of trends that
| could be capitalized on for seasonal/repeat customers, they
| also last basically forever and are light so it's dirt cheap
| to ship. All for probably 90%+ profit margin.
|
| Why grind away at heavy, expensive, complex, fragile, or
| specialized hardware for thin margins when you can ship
| colorful plastic at high markup? Sell the disposable
| personalized accessories to the hardware: keycaps, cases,
| dongles, cables, straps!
|
| Well, customers like you wise up and cut out the middleman
| and buy straight from the source. If there's a profit to be
| made for those things, almost anyone can make those things
| for niche sized demand.
|
| Seems like Corsair is taking it one step further, why even
| have a quality/niche hardware base? Just do trendy
| accessories or modifications to commodity hardware.
| eitally wrote:
| I bought a few things via Drop in the early days, when it was
| still Massdrop and they weren't exclusively focused on keyboard
| and headphones. When they shifted their focus... I just wasn't
| their target audience anymore.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I 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?
| robertakarobin wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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?
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