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Comment by 55555 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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