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Comment by NoPicklez | Hacker News Reader

I own the Bose QC 35's and I never had to use an app at all until I decided to update them to the latest software

I used to love my Bose QC 35 ii's but now I'm convinced they're kind of a scam.

Bose deliberately made the battery enclosure very difficult to open so that you can't replace the battery yourself. Why do you need to replace the battery? Because if you use them every day, the battery degrades so that a full charge only lasts about 1 hour, down from 20+ hours, within just 2 years.

So you aren't really paying $250 for a pair of headphones, you're paying $125 a year to rent them, as they will only last 2 years due to planned obsolescence. This seems to have been a deliberate decision by Bose as the previous model had a removable battery.

> Bose deliberately made the battery enclosure very difficult to open so that you can't replace the battery yourself. Why do you need to replace the battery? Because if you use them every day, the battery degrades so that a full charge only lasts about 1 hour, down from 20+ hours, within just 2 years.

I've used my QC35 II's 6 to 8 hours a day for 5 days a week for 4 years. They last approximately a full week on one charge; they'd die mid Friday if I used them a lot that week or early Monday if I forgot to charge over the weekend. I've had them unplugged and unused since March (work from home) and they still had 60% when I tried them just now.

Okay, that's interesting. I've used mine ~6 hours per day for 5 days a week for 2 years. Why can't mine hold a charge for more than an hour? Maybe there's something I don't understand about how batteries work that I am doing and that I could do differently.

I mostly don't use bluetooth. I keep them wired 95% of the time and noise cancelling just eliminates office noise. The remaining 5% of the time is typically on a flight to somewhere connected to my iPhone a couple of feet away.

I wish I could justify wired headphones but I'm too much of a dolt, I've chopped the cord too many times and broken more laptops than I would like to admit.

You are not alone.

>I mostly don't use bluetooth. I keep them wired 95% of the time (...)

IMO this seems like a very big detail that should be included when describing your battery longevity.

I'm using mine for over 3 years over bluetooth, somewhere between 10 and 20 hours in a regular (pre-covid) week, the battery feels like new.

I use bluetooth 100% of the time and I use them indoors so the temperature shouldnt be too bad.

Temperature may play a critical role. Do you use them outside in the cold a lot?

Could yours be stored or used in extreme heat frequently?

Beyond that, it could just be a battery defect. Devices that last for multiple days should last for several years before seeing that kind of degradation.

This is a interesting point.

Many Big Tech ask their suppliers to use green energy or reduce carbon footprint.

But, their product is not "green" at all. Many of them make battery extremely hard to exchange. It is quite common in laptop and cellphone.

You can’t change the noise canceling settings without the phone app. They also default back to “full” after you power cycle the headset. I wanted to use them with a PC and no ANC but no luck without the clunky phone process.

QC35's have a hardware button on the side of the volume buttons that allow you to change ANC. Not sure which model you're using.

I have the first gen, not the model II’s. It doesn’t have the button on the left side.

I'm a buffoon! I meant the QC30's - the in-ear ones. Sorry! It appears mk 2 of QC35 has physical ANC buttons, but the originals do not.

Even worse, on my QC35 II's, the hardware button defaulted to Google Assistant on Android, and I had to use the app anyway to set it to modify ANC on press.

At least that’s just a one time setup process.

This is actually a positive to using the app.

I have the original QC 35's and they never originally gave us the option to change the ANC. Only through an update and using the app that they switched it on.

If our headphones didn't use can app, we would still be stuck without being able to modify the ANC level.

That finally explains why it has hardware to remember the voiceover setting but not the ANC setting

Its bugs me as well

I think they are referring to the Bose 700 model.

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