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Comment by disillusioned | Hacker News Reader

My goodness. I've been following this issue, and avoiding upgrading my firmware, for about two years now. But this is so incredibly thorough and shows just how seriously they took these concerns, and validating, or invalidating them.

They really dug deep here, and I respect them all the more for it. I've had really good experiences with Bose products, even though they're priced at a slight premium. They're just VERY high quality.

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Silly question, but how the heck do you update the firmware? I have QC35 and I never realized they could be updated. Do I need to use the app? If I just never use the app am I safe from this bug?

Yes, you use the app to upgrade the firmware.

They also have a Windows app to do it

Like you have to install the app just to turn noise cancellation on and off? And if you install it, they milk personal details out of your phone?

Or is that a different model?

I would never, ever buy headphones that need an app, for any purpose.

You don’t -need- the app to use the headphones. It’s just useful for some extra functionality and upgrading the firmware.

They hide the setting not to harvest your data in the privacy policy - you can use the app, make sure you turn off tracking, upgrade the firmware, then delete the app. It makes sense that you need some kind of app to upgrade the firmware. The only thing that is in the app that you can't do from the headphones is the level of noise cancelling, but that doesn't bother me because I always have it set to max.

Huh? Pressing the button on the left side cycles NC levels for me with a voice saying "Noise cancellation high / low /off" for me.

If you have that mapped to alexa/ok google/etc, there's some other button combo to hit to cycle the NC level, but totally doable in hardware. (Though, changing the mapping DOES require the app).

I don't have a button on the left side, just volume up, stop / start, volume down on the right. Perhaps we're talking about different iterations of the QC35?

I agree with you, but for now at least it seems manufacturers don’t yet dare make the app a requirement. I have the QC35 and my SO has the QC35II and we deliberately didn’t install the app. So far no problem.

However I suspect there will be a push for app-dependent headphones in the near future, I can only hope it will fail.

Has there been any significant improvement due to firmware? I’ve never updated. Am I now safe from this bug?

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