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Comment by noncoml | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. The great customer support is just PR and an image they managed to create. When it comes down to costing them money to do the right thing, they don't.

The headphones won't turn off, but Bose refuses to make it right for the users:

https://community.bose.com/t5/Around-On-Ear-Headphones/QC-35...

Note, the "solution" is buy new headphones if yours are our out of warranty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bugTnRbnhQ&feature=youtu.be

Edit: Wow, downvoted to -1 :/

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Hi,

I had the same problem as you and was very disappointed. Up until this problem I was very happy with the QC35, which I have used for hundreds of hours.

I followed the below YouTube video a few weeks ago, and the problem has not returned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3qHSaWi4X8

The process took about 20-30 minutes and was relativity easy, however some parts are quiet small and it took a few tries to get them into the correct position.

The problem is the switch becomes loose and touches multiple contacts, making the headphones turn back on. Don't bother with all the other troubleshooting advice Bose has told people to do (updates, resets, pair & unpair etc), the problem is a physical problem with the switch.

Wow I've had this issue for a year now, and just yesterday was thinking about taking it apart to fix it. This just made the task much easiser!

Bought my partner a pair of these (super expensive) headphones as an Xmas present and her experience is a little similar. Battery life on hers plummeted after about 18 months to the point where if they're fully charged at night, by the morning with no use they're at 20% or less.

Was super unimpressed with Bose support, both in store and online - they offered to wind back the firmware for us, or our other option was buy a new pair.

It's interesting reading about this not-turning-off bug as maybe something like that is happening which is killing the battery overnight.

Yes, your symptoms sound like this bug. Unfortunately it is hardware and not software.

Another user elsewhere in this HN thread says it might be caused by an app keeping the microphone awake — that the hardware on/off switch might be software-controlled, which does somewhat make sense if you want to “shutdown” the headphones firmware and disconnect the headphones before powering down...

Mine are 3.5 years old. I use them daily during all working hours and sometimes weekends.

The only thing that went thus far were the leather cups (twice) that are fortunately easily replaced. OEM are $$$, while after market alternatives I found to be just as good and are only $.

My battery is still strong. Probably around 10-12 hours of use.

> The only thing that went thus far were the leather cups (twice) that are fortunately easily replaced. OEM are $$$, while after market alternatives I found to be just as good and are only $.

The analysis in the page discussed in this thread doesn't match what you're saying: knockoff cups are inferior and degrade noise cancellation.

No, that’s not what the analysis said. It said that the one pair of aftermarket cushions were of inferior quality. No findings were made of all aftermarket cushions.

I don't have anything to sell, if you want to roll the dice on aftermarket earcups, knock yourself out :)

But you paid 300-400$ for headphones, to me it's worth paying the OEM premium just to make sure they keep delivering the quality and experience I was looking for initially when I paid the high price. Otherwise, you might as well buy the lowest priced noise canceling headphones: you'll get a commensurate experience but you won't break the bank.

Anyway, to each their own :)

An ear cup is an ear cup, hardly military precision required in manufacturing. I got a pair of aftermarket cushions for my QC35s and I found them to be more comfortable, if there's any difference to noise cancelling I certainly haven't experienced it. Why pay 3 times more for something that does the same job, doesn't matter if I paid $1000 for them.

You're right - there's no reason to pay 3 times more for something that does the right job.

The problem is aftermarket cushions may not do as good of a job at passive noise reduction.

Follow the link and check if you have the right number of clips on your aftermarket cushion. Obviously this isn't the full picture but is certainly a large piece of it.

The question isn’t whether the aftermarket cushions perform at the same level as OEM, it’s whether they have sufficient performance for ‘outoftheabyss’s needs. If they’re good enough, why pay more?

> it's worth paying the OEM premium just to make sure they keep delivering the quality and experience I was looking for initially

And I am the guy who spent 4 times a few hundred on AKG studio headphones but replaced the ear cups with some much, much cheaper but better feeling ones.

To each their own :)

Note that he report is by the seller themselves. Can you imagine them saying: "yes, we overcharge you for the cups, the off-brands work just as well"?

likewise I used mine daily up until a couple months ago without issue. my leather cups are TOAST. Where did you get your replacement cups from?

I got a pair from AliExpress. I didn't notice a significant change in noise cancelling performance (active or passive). But I'm not a picky listener anyway. YMMV.

Amazon

Yeah I've had no battery issues. I use mine daily for a couple of hours and change them about one every two weeks. They're about 2/3 years old now?

> My battery is still strong. Probably around 10-12 hours of use.

Mum bought new last year because pads were worn, I got her old set - uses a single AAA battery and lasts across the globe and back (~30 hours). Unfortunately she didn't like the new rechargable set, and neither do I..

Are these "leather cups" you're talking about these "ear cushions" (https://www.bose.com/en_us/products/headphones/headphone_acc...)? If yes, then that's only 30-40$, which does not seem unreasonable for a product you use so intensively? I replaced mine after about 2 years. I remember the sound insulation being a _lot_ better afterwards.

I have the same experience on the battery: my pair is almost 3 years old and I can go about 2 days of work (~12 hours) before I have to charge them.

I found out I could do the same with my Logitech wireless/wired headset. They also allow me to purchase a replacement battery.

I’ve had mine for four years in June. Still as good as the day I got them - I’ve just changed the foam once. YMMV, of course.

That sucks :( My QC35 are one of my favorite purchases still, something like 5+ years on. The battery life is simply astounding. I've worn them on entire journeys, from lounge to plane to plane through customs and to my destination and been shocked to find them with 40% battery life reported remaining after 16+ hours of constant use. It sounds like there's absolutely something faulty with her product, and Bose customer support should really step up and make it right.

> is just PR

I would not dismiss the tremendous engineering + coordination effort required to pull this off as "just" PR.

If you do this, while simultaneously keeping a practise of wearing out your user's battery with no option to switch it off and no option to change a worn out battery (except to buy a new device) — then calling this a PR move is not far fetched.

Bose might care, but they care magnitudes less when it goes against their environmentally unsustainable business practise.

How is their response to quality issues of noise cancellation, what this article is about, in any way related to batteries dying out?

Intended to reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22783497

I managed to get a free replacement and upgrade to QC II for my out-of-warranty headphones just by asking nicely a second time after the first offer of a discount. There’s a lengthy thread on their forums posting the phone number you need to call.

Having to find a magic phone number on a forum is NOT good customer service.

Having to call customer service to get customer service is not good customer service?

Only if the number for real customer service is publicly available, which I'm guessing it's not if it's considered a magic phone number buried deep in a forum somewhere.

I'm always amused by how often just being nice to people manages to unlock customer service doors. Listening to people in the offices I've worked in talk on the phone has been pretty eye-opening about how terrible, entitled, and just plain mean people can be when things don't go perfectly.

I'm sure there are bad customer service people out there, but I really wonder how often reports of bad customer service are actually just pointing out that the poster was a jerk. See also Yelp reviews.

Being nice even when the company is at fault pays off. I ordered a base model Dell XPS 15 (i3 8gb) which got delayed about 3 weeks. After going back and forth with the support I finally asked nicely if it's possible to get an upgrade as a make up for the time lost. I received a maxed out model (i7, 1tb SSD, 32gb, GPU and 4k screen).

I'm not going to down-vote your post, but I do disagree utterly. The linked article from Bose blew my mind on how far they are willing to go for customer support.

Why would one downvote for disagreeing?

Simply because it's easy and anonymous.

What has your experience been with the multipoint feature of Bose QC35 IIs? I'll make do with above average noise cancellation; doesn't have to be top shelf in that aspect. I mainly want multipoint[1] and Bose I've been told does it absolutely seamlessly more so than the Jabras, Sennheisers etc.

[1]

What is Bluetooth multipoint, and why isn’t it more popular?

https://www.soundguys.com/bluetooth-multipoint-explained-286...

Yeah it works well enough. I have an iPad and my S10 connected and it works as expected. Are you looking for any specific use cases?

Very positive. IMHO they have the only Bluetooth implementation that doesn't suck. I had no problem with having it paired to multiple devices and switching from one to the other.

It works great. I didn’t know that all Bluetooth headphones don’t do that.

Incredibly, the Sony WH-1000XM3 (the 3 in XM3 is because this is the 3rd generation of the product) at this point still doesn’t have it. Similar price range, and maybe the closest direct competitor to the QC35/700 series in terms of audio quality and noise cancelling, yet it’s still missing this feature.

My Airpods pro don't have it either apparently.

I bought a Sony WH-1000XM3 lately and i was so disappointed compared to my other Bose or Jabra product...

It's a start, but personally, between my work phone + laptop, and personal phone + laptop, along with misc other devices, means that I find myself in the app switching devices more often than is ideal. It's a bit cumbersome. Better than competing products, way better than trying to manage without, could still use additional improvement to support additional devices.

On the QC35 II you can cycle through the devices by using the power button.

Surprisingly these cheapo Anker Noise Cancelling headphones do support multi-point.

https://www.soundcore.com/products/variant/life-q20/A3025011

I was considering several different pairs including the Bose and picked up these as I couldn't stomach the cost of the more expensive headphones. At 60$ they are great, the noise cancelling is good enough. The battery life is amazing. I can sit down at my desk and use them all day while connected to my laptop and phone. If either device reports a "Call" coming in it gets priority and I hear the ring. 10/10 Experience for the price.

Flawless. It's connected to my work laptop and phone at work, and my personal laptop and (same) phone at home. Never gets confused, just "$device_name disconnected" when I leave one place and "$device_name connected" when I get to the other.

It's so jarring to use anyone else's Bluetooth products after using them. It's so smooth.

Have the same issue with mine and many times the battery would've discharged when I need it the most. Horrible switch design. Someone on their forums posted how you can fix it:

> So I removed the old switch slider and spring, used 96% ethyl alcohol to clean the bottom part of the switch left on the PCB (filled it with alcohol, let soak for a few minutes, then used tiny cotton wool balls and a pair of pointy tweezers to clean the contacts, then dried it off using compressed air).

Its funny, I needed to clean my old nintendo GBA with the same method.

When it comes down to costing them money to do the right thing, they don't.

The investigation outlined in this would have cost a lot of money.

The headphones won't turn off, but Bose refuses to make it right for the users

There are plenty of countries (outside the US) with powerful enough consumer protection agencies to force Apple to change it's practices (eg, the ACCC in Australia[1][2]). If this really is a widespread manufacturing fault we'd see them forced to act elsewhere.

[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/public-registers/undertakings-regist...

[2] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/apple-australia-gives-...

> If this really is a widespread manufacturing fault we'd see them forced to act elsewhere.

Pretty much every Apple product is far more popular and has a higher public profile than any one Bose product. It's entirely plausible that Bose gets away with not fixing flaws because the products and their flaws simply don't get enough attention.

I've had a great experience with Bose. The only premium product I bought were the QC35s, but they replaced mined even after 2 years (in EU) due to a sound issue.

I'm impressed with this reach out, something Apple are unlikely to do (even though I use their prem products)

I’m sorry you had a bad experience, but mine was fantastic. When I had problems with my pair of Bose headphones they immediately sent new ones, even out of warranty.

Your Bose community link is broken. Maybe add the correct one?

Ooops sorry, fixed.

I also had a great experience with Bose costumer service a while ago. I had them for more than one year. The audio was cutting off in one of the headphones. I emailed them about the issue and I got a new pair mailed to me right away. No fuss. I didn’t have to mail mine first. They got a customer for life with me.

The deal seems to be working great for them since you give them free advertising.

What would be the right thing in this case?

Isn’t this a different topic than a change in their noise cancelling properties? I thought that’s what this article is about.

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