This is how "end of support" should be handled. Instead of turning devices into e-waste, open-source them and let the community extend their life. Kudos to Bose for setting a good example.
More companies should follow this approach - especially as right-to-repair becomes a bigger issue.
Bose should not receive praise for this move. Bose only took this action after community backlash. In an older version of their end-of-life announcement, most functionality of the speaker systems would have removed and transformed the devices into dumb-speakers/amps.
Good that they changed their statement and took the right action. Even better for the community for stepping up and 'forcing' Bose to do so.
> Bose should not receive praise for this move. Bose only took this action after community backlash.
They received the backlash, they responded to it by properly addressing the criticism and doing the right thing. It should be praised. Especially since it wasn't some PR-centric damage control, but an actual direct address of the specific points their original approach was criticized for.
Compare Bose's response to that of Sonos (another large techy audio brand). Sonos had an absolutely massive backlash recently (within the past few years iirc) in regards to deprecating software support for their older speakers that I'd read about everywhere (including HN) for months and months.
Afaik, it didn't lead to Sonos doing the right thing in the end (unlike the scenario at hand here), despite the online outrage being way more widespread than in the Bose's case.
Agreed. When someone does something, hears the complaints, and changes, it's charitable to bin them as someone who made a mistake and wants to improve.
Not every company deserves this charity, but the social media default nowadays is to deny that charity to everyone, and to go scorched-earth.
Even if they don't want to improve, and just do it reluctantly, it's best to reward them for doing something good, because otherwise they'll have no incentive to do something good in the future.
A few years back Sonos was going to EoL and brick a huge humber of their "legacy" devices and that those devices would prevent new ones from getting updated. After backlash they reversed their decision and all devices remained functional: https://www.businessinsider.com/sonos-device-support-ceo-apo...
However, I wouldn't expect anything from Sonos at this point in time.
Not the OP, but IMO as soon as a company becomes successful, the leadership becomes focused on making money and not making a good product.
Sometimes making a decent product is part of making money, but that's never a motivation in itself. We have enough examples showing that if it makes more money to enshittify (and usually it does), then they will gladly enshittify.
I wouldn't say it's just the smart speaker industry.
And some people have been advocating for Apple to do something similar with old iPhones and tablets for a decade, and there’s no sign. Their privilege but not great for the world.
Would you elaborate? Because my understanding is that Apple has offered outstanding support for older devices in terms of iOS support for quite old devices.
Apple don't give people the tools/keys/etc to load new OS (etc) onto a device once it's no longer supported.
So, at best the device can just be used with the latest version of the software Apple allows until it's a security nightmare and better off no longer used.
Instead, if Apple gave people the ability to load something (prob a Linux) onto those old devices, then those old devices could be used usefully for quite a few more years.
You can't release all the documentation just because the entire phone isn't supported. Many of the components come from other suppliers and aren't obsolete, and you can't just reveal all your suppliers' IP.
They don't have to - just give an option to unlock the device when it's EOL.
It's not a security problem, since they don't support it anylonger anyways!
They could even make it so, that iOS itself refuses to boot if the device is unlocked. That way you can't accidentally have an iOS running that's compromised in some way.
But you can still boot Linux or Android or whatever you want to do to it.
Apps that connect to a service over the Internet (maps, music iMessage) could stop working if Apple changes the APIs that those apps use. This is even more likely to happen to third party apps.
You won't get updates to the trusted root CAs, which means you won't be able to visit sites with certificates signed by CAs created or renewed after support is dropped. And your browser will continue trusting CAs that have had their trust revoked.
And as web standards evolve there will be websites that use features and APIs that your browser doesn't support and may break in subtle, or not so subtle ways. And there is no way for you to install a more up to date browser.
And then of course, you won't fixes for any new security vulnerabilities that are found.
So yeah, it's not as bad as getting bricked, but it as also worse than continuing to work as it always has, but with no new features.
Yeah, it’s good to see a sensible response to community pressure here. While I take the point that they only conceded after pressure, at least they did concede. I’ve upgraded their brand in my mind from “planned obsolescence e-waste villain” to “cares about PR and will do the right thing while being watched”. I think the only truly trustworthy companies regarding end of support handling in consumer tech are those whose brand is explicitly tied to openness / repairablity ala home assistant, framework laptops, etc…
Sadly those tend to be niche companies already focused on power users, but any other firms should be considered guilty until proven innocent of enshittification (forced bricking, closed source, subscription creep, privacy violations and data brokering).
Remind me of any other vendor in recent history that end of lifed a hardware product and then open sourced it whether they got backlash or not. Because I can’t think of a single one.
Google refunded all Stadia purchases, both hardware and software, after they discontinued the platform/product. Then they added functionality (the ability to operate the controller as a generic Bluetooth controller) afterward to keep the hardware from becoming e-waste.
Logitech are my go-to example of a company that does the right thing and deserves recognition for it. They kept their squeezebox.com servers going for a decade after they discontinued their Squeezebox hardware audio players. At the same time, they funded a maintainer to keep improving the open source server software that users can self-host on multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, macOS, Raspberry Pi). Two years ago, they finally shut down the squeezebox.com servers that they were running but the server software is still being actively maintained: https://lyrion.org/
I worked at HP as an intern during the saga. I even got to attend a training by the Palm team... Which wasn't great.
My impression just from that training is that WebOs was extremely mismanaged. The training was billed as a "how to write apps for WebOs" and it instead was an hour long meander by the Palm employee about how different the company culture is and how hard it became to do anything.
I had the distinct impression they didn't even know that the training was supposed to be before being assigned to do it.
I think that's indicative of everything. HP had this product that they were trying to shoehorn into the most bizarre places. At it's core it was a mobile Linux os which used html/css/JavaScript as the main user experience engine. And HP was trying to put that on printers and rack mount displays. The one place they didn't seem to care putting it was the mobile devices it was designed to target. They simply half assed the launch of a product.
Don't punish the behavior you want to see. Would we rather they defaulted there? Sure. But it's arguably an even better signal to see that they're willing to listen to their customers even when there is no direct financial incentive for them.
Their financial incentive is negative. They were hoping to force everyone to buy new speakers, driving sales. But if the community is able to get open source firmware to run spotifyd on them, there is a non-zero (not everyone, but it's non-zero) amount of people that will just not buy new speakers from them.
If they can make this OS story go viral, then they stand to have a lot of customers defect from their competitors even people who would never really care about open source.
It's not negative, though, or at least they don't think so. The fact that they are doing this OSS release means that they believe any loss of new sales would be dwarfed by a loss of goodwill if they'd bricked the old devices.
> Their financial incentive is negative. They were hoping to force...
Maybe?
People stuck with Bose bricks might show a preference for non-Bose replacements.
People who thought Bose speakers would stay useful longer might prefer Bose, or be willing to pay for a more expensive Bose speaker model.
(Yes, I agree that some PHB's at Bose were almost certainly imagining that their customers would be forced to re-purchase Bose speakers. I'm questioning the validity of their initial assumptions.)
From talking to friends and family, so n=10-ish, non-computer people have not realized that sticking computers in things means they die on computer lifetimes, not appliance lifetimes. No more switches that last for the life of the house; no more speakers that your kids can do modest maintenance to and keep using.
And, if I, a non-Bose customer, hear that Bose open sourced a previous version of their speaker, which gives me some confidence that a present purchase might be somewhat future-proofed, then I am more likely to buy a new Bose product vs a competitor who does not provide sources.
I've got a simple formula in life for when people do things beneficial to me: I praise them for it and encourage them to keep it going. If someone does things antagonistic to my interests, and then corrects course in reaction to objection, they can be sure they're going to be rewarded. This has worked for me.
If your belief is that some other tactic works, then I can see why you'd do that. For my part, carrot + stick has always worked better than stick + more stick.
It works on dogs, children, and adults, the inability to praise the good because they did something bad prior feels like more of the online black/white moralism that used to characterise Twitter dogpiles.
Bose: does something bad.
People: complain.
Bose: undoes what they did and does something slightly better.
You: complain.
I'm not sure I get the logic here.
Slowly but steadily I'm comprehending why companies are getting tired of some people. No matter what companies do, people will always complain. Don't get me wrong, there's always room for more improvement, but a slight complement for their slight improvement won't hurt anyone + a change in tone from complaining to suggesting improvements would be a nice bonus.
Why should Bose not get credit for this? If you are saying that people should treat them the same regardless of whether they listen to their consumers or not, then why would they ever bother listening to the consumers?
Also remember that there is no believer like a convert. A community helping guide a company towards open source culture could make for a very strong ally.
Then again I know nothing about Bose’s open source culture so take it with a grain of salt.
When presented with information that you're acting in bad faith, if you choose to change: that is praiseworthy.
It's very brave to take that in, and not worry about "brand damage" or "appearing weak". It's brave to even challenge yourself when someone tells you you're wrong. It's entirely admirable.
Bose's original plan was to remove all WiFi-dependent functionality (no AirPlay and no Spotify Connect)-- while they wouldn't quite be "dumb speakers" at that point (since Bluetooth would've still worked), it would've turned them into pretty much just overcomplicated Bluetooth speakers.
"Bose blows" is a popular comment amongst the audiophile community but, to me, it seems like they don't blow at all[0]. In fact quite the opposite: this is a fantastic example for other companies to follow. Top marks, Bose!
[0] What is actually true is that they are opinionated about sound reproduction in ways that a bunch of people don't agree with but which in the right context are often effective and enjoyable to listen to.
> "Bose blows" is a popular comment amongst the audiophile community but, to me, it seems like they don't blow at all[0]
That comment is not wrong, you are imo just not making an important distinction that the criteria on which audiophiles judge Bose as “blowing” (which is almost purely the sound profile + a few other smaller things like physical comfort/connectivity/price/etc.) vs. what you judge it on (which is more in the long-term technical user/community product support, idk how to describe that area much better) are almost entirely disjoint.
It is perfectly fine and valid for an audio product to “blow” from an opinionated audiophile perspective, while being exceptionally great from the long-term product/user/community product support perspective.
I heavily agree with you btw, Bose should be heavily lauded for making a decision to open-up their speaker firmware after it reaches the official end of support deadline. The fact that this is an exceptional practice is imo, a little bit sad, because I believe that it should be way more common.
Build quality of Bose products is good in my opinion. The headphones are alright but so are Sony, Plantronics and Apple. I love the sound of Airpods Pro in particular even if they don't want to stay in my ears [1] and the pairing experience even with the iPhone isn't what I expect of >$100 headphones in 2016.
If you want really good stereo or 5.1 sound there is no substitute for big speakers that can move a lot of air.
[1] maybe it is that gene polymorphism that makes my ears overflow with wax and has my doctor warning they will plug up one of these days
Agreed on pretty much all points. There is no "ultimate audio equipment piece" that is just perfect in all aspects, and the choice criteria are spread across both user preferences and specific use-cases as well.
I love the new airpods pro for my daily commute (subway, not a car; just clarifying before I get hammered down in replies for driving and using airpods at the same time), doubly so given their compactness+heavily improved ANC.
For home, I love my open-back Beyerdynamic DT1990Pro pair, due to the audio profile + insanely good physical comfort when worn for prolonged periods of time.
For gatherings with friends for when I need a somewhat-portable bluetooth speaker (that also happen to look good when sitting on a bookshelf outside of active use), I have a TE-OB4.
If I had a larger living space, I would consider getting a pair of high-quality speakers again too.
But there is not a single "this is it" piece of audio equipment that would just replace everything, so you gotta pick and choose your poison.
Build quality is trash consumer with a hefty markup. The older CD player era equipment has the cheapest CD mechanisms I've ever seen for the era. The audio pathway is the same hybrids that everyone else uses. Bose is 100% mass marketing. I'm old enough to remember the endless ads in the back of magazines.
Until the rest of the market caught up, Bose's noise cancelling algorithms were top notch. As soon as Apple entered the fray a bunch of money was thrown at the problem, the bar was raised, and now good quality noise cancelling is the norm.
But for awhile Bose's headphones had the best noise cancelling out there.
Their old ads were super irritating though, and many people (such as you and me!) are still irritated about them decades later.
> Until the rest of the market caught up, Bose's noise cancelling algorithms were top notch. As soon as Apple entered the fray a bunch of money was thrown at the problem, the bar was raised, and now good quality noise cancelling is the norm.
A minor nitpick: while Apple entering the ANC arena certainly set fire under the existing mainstream brands to improve their ANC headphones, imo Bose started facing serious competition on that front even before Apple moved in.
I remember Sony releasing their MDR-1000X par being the first crack in the wall. I specifically remember this, because I picked up those headphones in favor of Bose options at the time.
P.S. Yes, the naming scheme on Sony's side is atrocious, because MDR-1000X is the first gen of their very popular WH-1000XM line of ANC headphones that people treat as a flagship ANC headphone pair (with the most recent one being WH-1000XM6).
I had forgotten about Sony. They were indeed going back and forth with Bose on who could make the highest quality ANC.
I actually had a pair of Sennheiser noise cancelling headphones and they had a really good BT implementation, super low latency and the ANC was really good. Sadly they developed a persistent hiss in one earpiece.
Bose is fine for what it is, but it is overpriced for what it is. IMO the main point the audiophiles make is that you can get a superior product for the same cost.
If you haven't tried foam replacement tips, they make a world of difference for me. I couldn't use the airpods (non-pro) at all. I could barely use the silicon tipped pros. But when I put a foam tip on them it not only blocks out ambient sound better, they stay in place. Unfortunately the foam wears out rather quickly and I replace them around three times a year.
The audiophile community usually are people with more money than ears, their opinion on the quality of particular brands is easy to discard, it is usually correlated more with expense than actual measured performance.
Came here to say exactly this. I consider myself an audiophile (the sane kind) and, if I want “that sound” and have time, I use my HiFi, but if I want to enjoy music and just relax, I use my Bose headphones with whatever thing I have close.
I like how they color sound, and how they use psychoacoustics to do what they do.
Audiophiles using music to listen their systems are missing the point.
"Bose blows" is typically in regards to their price/performance, and especially with how they marketed themselves throughout the 90s and early 2000s.
Bose used to advertise that they were the best sounding speaker out there, while also running advertisements that made claims which violated the laws of physics.
For the same price as a Bose system you could get something much higher quality. Bose was selling at luxury prices w/o luxury quality. They got away with it because compared to the cheap garbage most people listened to, Bose's stuff was nicer. Their quality was mid to upper mid tier, and the build quality was generally good.
But people got irritated by a decade ads saying a tiny speaker is more powerful than a proper speaker setup.
Now days Bose makes good quality noise cancelling headphones (and I suspect they made more revenue selling NC headphones during the open office and then COVID era than they ever did selling speakers in the 90s!) and they brand car stereo systems.
Their noise cancelling headphones are good, even if the ear pads wear our way too fast.
Pretty much no one has a home hi-fi setup anymore, everyone just has a sound bar. I do have a hi-fi music setup, people are rather shocked when they come over that I even bothered. I got it for $2k on Craigslist years ago, the setup cost someone a small fortune when they were brand new. IMHO buying new hi-fi gear is pointless, Speakers made in 2005 sound just as good as speakers made in 2025, the laws of physics haven't changed any!
> "Bose blows" is a popular comment amongst the audiophile community
I have a 15 years old Bose system. Is it audio-transparent ? Absolutely not, its frequency response is well documented. But the sound is very pleasing, it's reliable and nearly invisble in my living room.
We have some really old Bose speakers my brothers and I bought 30+ years ago at my Moms place. Just listened to them over the recent holidays. Not ann audiofile but they sounded pretty good even now.
In a previous life, I was the platform architect for the Bluetooth headphones at Bowers & Wilkins. We, naturally, did tons of competitive analysis, and I tend to agree Bose blows sound quality-wise, but their active noise cancelling is hands-down the best in the biz, and they have the weight and comfort extremely dialed-in.
Glad to see them setting a great example here instead of letting these speakers become expensive paperweights.
Seems to me like an executive saw klipsch failures and saw an opening to kill two birds with one stone.
One, to show their support for audiophiles who supported them.
Two, make superior products to klipsch that - ummm - actually state the real ranges of the speakers and use real copper windings instead of “painted” copper.
Well, Bose has a long history of continually hyping whatever they're selling as the complete & utter pinnacle of sound reproduction technology, whether or not that's actually the case. Before the internet it was through their print media ads, starting with their Direct/Reflecting home speaker tech, continued through the 800 series PA speakers, Acoustic Wave tabletop radio, etc. Not to say there were not benefits, but that the choices they made -- single driver size, requiring certain room boundaries/geometry for optimal sound, need for active EQ/processing to get full-range response before the tech was really there to do so optimally -- did not always equal great trouble-free sound as advertised.
That said their implementation of noise-cancelling headphones/earbuds was a legit game-changer. And good on them for open-sourcing these speakers!
My comment about sound reproduction was more a point on Bose's longstanding philosophy in building speakers than in anything about this specific software but, to answer your question... quite possibly. Bose intentionally colour the sound and apply, at the very least, EQ and some sort of active processing to it to get what they believe is the best out of the speakers and enclosures they use.
And I'm couching this all in very neutral terms, not because I have an axe to grind with them, but because I don't want to get into a flame war with the kind of audiophiles who hate Bose.
FWIW the Bose products I've heard and used all sounded pretty good. At the end of the day they're designed for people to enjoy music within a particular target context, not necessarily to be the most accurate at reproducing the recording exactly.
(I'll say this as well: reproducing the recording exactly isn't necessarily what you want to get something to sound good. A lot of albums from the loudness war era benefit significantly from rolling off some of the higher frequencies, where clipping occurs, for example. So I have one amplifier that includes - gasp, shock, horror - tone controls that I sometimes use and, on another system where the amp doesn't have tone controls, I've hooked up a [true] stereo graphic equalizer. You also have to take the listening environment into account and when you do that some element of processing the sound before it comes out of the speakers can also prove to be beneficial. Anyway, I shall now go and brace myself for some righteous abuse from the purists.)
A better way to say that is "This will boost the second-hand value of older Bose speakers".
Budget-aware folks will buy these second-hand, neophiles will buy new, confident that long term solutions will exist even after "long term support" is over.
Heck, even knowing there's a second-hand market makes me more likely to buy Bose new.
Many companies miss how important this is, too: they get caught up in "but if they buy it second-hand, they're not buying our new stuff!". When people buy the stuff second-hand, though, they become Bose fans — that means when the second-hand Bose stuff dies, they're more likely to replace it with new Bose stuff. That's particularly true with audio equipment, where people become attached not only to how something works but how it sounds. If they like Bose's rather particular audio signature, they'll keep buying more.
Between that and the good-will they're getting from this move, this is making a ton of life-long Bose fans out of a lot of audio geeks. And if there's a community well-known for creating religions out of their hardware preferences...
Another thing companies miss is that the second-value is priced in to the price. If I know I can resell a thing for some value, that makes it more valuable than if I can't resell it all, and I can pay more for it. Contrary to what the companies think, they were in fact compensated for the after market value, and it's even better then they hoped, because that compensation occurred at time of first sale rather than some random time years later.
The most amusing anti-example of this was the Switch generation: $60 for a cartridge, or $60 for a digital license. Guess which is actually more valuable? Guess which you were more likely to find discounted, even if only by a marginal amount, by some store desperate to move stock out of the way?
By contrast, I'm not worried about the fact I can't resell my copy of Game X I got on Steam when I only paid $5 for it in the first place.
Indeed, and also people buying second-hand are pretty unlikely to buy brand new if they aren't able to find the second-hand item (or use it). It's similar to piracy in that respect, that some people who pirate might have actually bought it, but the majority likely would not have anyway so can't just say "1,000 people pirated our thing, therefore we lost 1,000 sales". The cynic in me thinks they know that and just use it as a convenient way to over-inflate the damage piracy is doing to them, but that's a separate topic
On the other hand, lots of people buying audio gear new DO take the second-hand market into account, and will spend more on the initial purchase if they think the product will retain its value.
Bose products seem like they are most popular with older, non-technical people who see it as a luxury brand. This is the same reaction that I would have with this news because I like modifying hardware/firmware, but I was never in the market to buy Bose products in the first place. My parents on the other hand have at least 3 wave radios in the house.
Bose hardware quality is rather low and, and their sound quality is sub-par, while forcing you to pay the Bose brand tax, riding the corpse of Amar around for profit.
> To be more specific, Sound Reproduction Fidelity is not the same as Pleasant Music
If a speaker reproduces some music with 100% accuracy and the result is unpleasant, doesn’t that just mean the original music—as created by the artist—is unpleasant?
Where possible, I’d prefer a speaker that respects the artist’s decisions instead of inserting itself into the creative process.
Unless you are listening through the same studio monitors in the same room or headphones as the mixing engineer, it will never be the same.
IMHO, people place too much importance on "accuracy". While accuracy might be objectively measured, it means nothing when it comes to individual taste.
There’s a whole field of research on this (look up Floyd Toole) - while any one individual can have skewed taste, on aggregate people prefer speakers that are as close to neutral as possible.
Signal reproduction matters quite a bit more for music production than it does for music listening and enjoyment. That's why producers and engineers look for 'monitors', rather than hi-fi speakers.
Hi-fi speakers, tube amps, and other accessories generally "degrade" the sound with added harmonics and natural smile EQs. That's what makes them sound more pleasing.
(I'm not disagreeing with you, just adding more color.)
You can certainly measure it, but the catch is that there is not always a single "correct" value. So just because you can measure what the speakers are outputting and then adjust it, it doesn't mean there is one correct output value.
There's arguably a subjective quality to sound enjoyment, though. The fidelity of reproduction can be measured, but I'd argue there's personal preference in the types of artifacts generated by inaccuracies in reproduction.
you can absolutely quantify certain metrics, and you can even generalize what "good" is by surveying listener preference but that isn't the same thing as any one individual's subjective preference.
People keep bringing dead Bose bluetooth speakers to our repair café. These are a lot more expensive than the competitors. Bose has a reputation so people think they’ll last longer, but they don’t, they’ll fail just out of warranty just like cheaper brands. They also don’t sound meaningfully better. And they’re not at all engineered to be repaired. I’d avoid.
I personally prefer corded headphones and mains powered speakers, but if I were to buy a small wireless speaker I would buy a cheaper brand and ideally second hand, because this category of devices are basically consumables.
Bose in general (there are many models...) is not what I'd call high-fidelity. It doesn't mean you can't enjoy your music or your movies with it. Just don't buy this if you care about transparency, otherwise it's usually a pleasing hearing experience. Their PA line is IMO overpriced and sacrifices too much to the design and weight.
I've been playing with the idea for a bit, can you give me an order of magnitude for "entry-level HiFi"? Even if that's an oxymoron, how many zeroes does it take to get an experience that's noticeably superior to, say, default car speakers or built-in Smart TV speakers?
It's like buying a gun or a car, there are all kinds of offers and all kinds of prices. You should be able to find great offers with amp+speakers under 1k€, including VAT. Probably even less with 2.0 or 2.1 systems.
It doesn't usually take much, because very few cars or TVs come with powered subwoofers or 6x9s or quality tweeters. Second hand amps, receivers, etc. are usually a good deal, entry-level speakers are pretty cheap new though.
Similar experience, even after picking up the new airpod pro 3's (the hearing aid stuff i great for my ailing ears) I still prefer, when I'm sitting at my desk working while listening to music, the quietcomfort 2 earbuds. The noise cancellation is hands down better than apple's an it's a more comfortable fit.
Typical so called audiophile stance here. I have numerous headphones (including high ends ones) and always been happy with my Bose. Sound is great and gently enhanced for listening enjoyment, whatever snobs could say about it, and the hardware is really nice. My Bose SoundSport earbuds are the best fit I ever had in 30+ years of wearing earbuds and my QC35 never failed on me. That move from them adds to all the great things I can say about this brand.
If you're talking about their headphones, I agree they _feel_ cheaply-made, but they are by no means low-quality. When you make headphones with premium materials, they get heavy, and that makes them uncomfortable/painful to wear. Speaking from prior experience. It's an incredibly delicate balancing act. Bose optimizes for comfort, which is important for e.g. long plane rides.
If you were going to consider Bose, you should at least take a look at Sennheiser. They are similar in a “can’t really go too wrong” sense. Nice build quality, generally pretty flat and analytical usually.
They are such a standard response that presumably a real audiophile will come along to point out that their favorite model is much better, than a particular well known Sennheiser model, but as far as one can say in brand terms they are solid.
Sennheiser sold out to a Chinese factory, and recently even stopped producing their flagship stuff in-house. They're even shutting their "cheap" Irish factory down (where modern HD650s and HD660Ss were made).
All the Chinese-made Sennheiser stuff has awful QA.
Beyerdynamic announced earlier last year they're finally exiting pro and flagship tier stuff, and selling out to a Chinese equity firm.
Their build quality is exceptional, and they're built like tanks. The only problem, imo, is the Beyer house sound is very shouty and fatiguing, especially with the "990" versions of the product line over the years.
Disclaimer: I owned a Beyer DT880/600ohm (the neutral one of the 770/880/990 siblings), paired with an amp that could properly handle it. Its one of the few headphones I sold and did not retain in my collection, it deserved someone that could love it. The new Tesla-based drivers are better (such as that 1990), but still retain that Beyer sound.
I can't stand Beyerdynamic audio and don't understand why anyone recommends it. It has an awful treble peak you can't stop noticing once you hear it, and you can't drive their headphones without an amp.
I recommend HiFiMan Sundara/Ananda if they fit your head and there aren't any CPU fans in your room.
Hifiman QA is exceptionally bad, and they tend to not stand by their warranty, and their US repair facility is just some dude's house.
The threads on /r/headphones over Hifiman shafting them are numerous.
Disclaimer: I too had a Hifiman pair, they sounded great, but their physical design just didn't hold up to daily use, no matter how much I babied them.
Some of their high priced noise cancelling headphones have excellent quality. I purchased the QC-25 ages ago, and when it stopped working I reached out to support, this was beyond their 3y warranty, provided serial number and they sent me a new QC-35 no questions asked replacement unit.
I am very happy with my QC-35 headphones. They are probably 5y+ now and they go with me everywhere. I think it is unfair to state their hw quality is low. It is much better than low.
Bose's QC/QC Ultra lines continue to receive praise for comfort, durability, sound quality, noise cancellation, etc. They make pretty great consumer quality headphones.
Until quite recently, they were widely one of if not the most recommended wireless headphones. The new Sennheiser's that come with a USB-C dongle might have finally stepped past what Bose has been delivering, but at a higher price.
I had the new QC Ultra and gave it away. The sound was mediocre at best and you can't turn NC off - a dealbreaker for me (no, passthru is not the same as off). Hope it helps someone make my mistake aa they are quite pricey.
Now if I could change the firmware to turn NC off, that would be something entirely different...
My wife normally isn’t one to splurge but after her Bose headphones died, we tried a couple other brands, returned them, and went with the QC-35 II despite them being more expensive. The “comfort” part is key, she’s on the spectrum and has a hard time with headphones irritating her, and these are hands down the most comfortable.
We also like the Bose soundbar as it has a mode that makes dialogue more intelligible on our TV.
I love my QCII earbuds, comfort and noise cancellation blow the airpodpro3's out of the water. But sadly the new hearing aid features of the airpodpros are very handy to me, so I have both. I wear the QC2's when I'm at home alone, and the app3s when I'm out and about and expect to have to have some conversations. My ears aren't so bad yet that I need hearing aids, but they are bad enough that I'm forced to lean in more than I used to. Aging is the worst.
This this also good marketing, if other companies I currently buy speakers from follow their footsteps I'll keep supporting them, but I might otherwise just move towards Bose in the future. I wish Apple would do this for their ultra legacy stuff, Microsoft does it for their legacy stuff. Not sure if we'll ever get a fully open sourced legacy version of Windows (ignoring the source code leak) but it would be cool to one day see the Windows XP source code on GitHub.
It would be an unwise business move. The moment that is done, Linux/WINE will be able to run the bulk of the software that keeps a substantial number of people locked into Windows. Most people don't need the newest version of their software to stay productive.
If society progresses as envisaged, people will always want newer and better technology. Living standards should improve for all, as the older technology is purchased second-hand by those who cannot afford the latest versions, and/or repaired as desired.
When a businesses chooses to drop support for a product entirely (hardware or spares no longer produced, and software no longer updated), they've presumably already made the business decision to drop the product for sale. If the product were still in demand and the existing devices still function, dropping product support could effectively render the devices useless or destined for landfill.
This often happens when: online services are dropped, devices cannot be repaired, or worse, software cannot be simply updated for security and compatibility reasons etc.
If manufacturers want existing users with working technology to upgrade, they should design compelling improved products, not force a load of e-waste and bricked devices. There's little reason for a manufacturer to quickly drop support without following this model of open sourcing, unless they know they are forcing existing customers to an unnecessary upgrade.
Manufacturers should support their products, innovate, or let them go over time. The "market" (consumer choice) should dictate when a product is obsolete. We own our products and should have the rights to maintain them. They should be paying us and taxed for damaging the environment for dropping support early and/or without open-sourcing.
Most newer technology hasn't seemed better in a while.
It's almost impossible to find a phone with a removable battery, or one that's easily fixable, and has a headphone jack. My galaxy S3 was all of those things. USB3 is good though.
I myself would be more inclined to move if I had an option to run Adobe suite, Excel, TouchDesigner, Ableton and Recordbox through WINE without significant tinkering.
Maybe the general rule should be like, if something isn’t in the users control and the user doesn’t want it anymore or can no longer function despite not being damaged, then the company should take back the hardware and refund the user.
So the company still have two options, either refund or open-source the systems needed for the device so that the user or third-party can continue supporting it.
All cars period should have their service software freely available. I shouldn't need to hunt down software on a Russian torrent site to help someone figure out why their ABS light is on.
This should be in the law imho. No hardware or software should have its support abandonned unless the spec / schematics / parts list and/or source code is released in a public repo.
It's not like consumer electronics contain top secret tech like EUV machines. All supply chain for firmware / software of 99.99% devices is very boring, contains absolutely nothing secret and the only reason why it's "difficult" is because IP owners was not bothered.
Once single EU / US legislation introduced that force manufacturers into opening end-of-life products all IP right owners will either immediately make it possible or go out of business.
Since everyone will be forced to do the same no one will gain any advantages.
I’m more thinking of patents and licensed third-party technology and firmware. There are standard tech stacks controlled by industry associations that you simply can’t open source because the association would sue you and kick you out.
These associations do not just exist in vacuum. They have licenses like this because law allow it and it's beneficial to them. Once there are regulation that demand something else they'll just follow the law.
Also it's not like every single bit of firmware / software must be open sourced - it's could very much be trade off where devices just need to be unlocked for modification and documentation made available.
If the publish the API for the server, as well as allow the device to specify the API hostname to connect to, that's all I need. We can write our own server implementation fairly easily, and this saves us the hassle of having to reverse-engineer the API, plus makes setup much easier if we can just tell the device where to connect.
I wish more manufacturers would unlock their devices for local use when they don't want to support them any more. Or maybe even, hear me out, before support ends! Maybe we could even vote with our wallets and buy open stuff instead of walled gardens.
Exactly. Open source is great and all, but all 99% of these devices need is simply a way to configure them to connect to a different server, when the manufacturer inevitably turns their own server down (usually) bricking devices.
The open source community will happily reverse-engineer the protocol and clean-room develop their own server code.
> 99% of these devices need is simply a way to configure them to connect to a different server, when the manufacturer inevitably turns their own server down (usually) bricking devices.
The same can be said about a lot of games, and should be the case with them as well. Big MMOs for example. See the plethora of WoW private servers as an example of how it can be done.
I think the stop killing games initiative in the EU was pushing for it but not sure how far they've gotten, but like with hardware, once a game studio no longer wants to run the servers for their game, they should be forced to turn it over to the community so the players can continue playing long after the studio is gone.
Bose's brand is built on audio quality. There is close to little negative impact open sourcing the API (server) in this case will bring to their brand.
For a game, open sourcing the server generally means anyone can basically mess it up and with the internet make it available to everyone to see. Then the responsibility is on the developer to protect their "brand".
The plethora of WoW private servers is not a good example. These are from individuals, or groups of people who willfully reverse engineered it on their own. This is different from a company expressly permissing and implicitly giving a grant on allowing a similar product to exist - the difference is that one gives credibility, which the other does not.
That's exactly what the "NoLongerEvil" Nest thermostat server did[0]. They just injected their own CA bundle and modified the /etc/hosts file to "free" the devices.
This could fail if too many players start to abandon/open source their products at the same time. It could lead to an overload.
Plus, I purchased my product thinking it will last forever. Sudden announcements for EOL is a terrible trend. Laws should regulate having proper disclosures that a product is promised to be serviced for x number of years at minimum, and/or mandate manufacturers themselves provide updates to allow the product to work independently of them.
I do not get why not more companies are doing this! Also it pays so much into your brand perception etc.; also you will always have all ecological folks on your side because of "not producing new stuff".
This is the cheapest and best way to get the most out of your investment after it entered end-of-life.
I suspect it's because the technical staff have already been let go or replaced with outsourced maintenance-only staffing firms, which means the non-technical leadership doesn't know whether the source code would contain damaging information.
The reason I've heard for games which I assume is similar here, is that there's licensed code used which the developer can not release because they don't own it (someone else does)
i’d love for this to be required by law. i’m probably not thinking of some great reason why that might be a bad idea, but it seems like an effective way to reduce e-waste.
No, the law must mandate that. You either provide active support, or if you end it you must open-source all tools necessary to perform maintenance. It's one of those things that has to be mandated by law to provide a uniform floor on all companies and manufacturers, like food safety laws, fire codes, or accessibility for the physically disabled.
This is not open sourcing any actual software or hardware it is “open-sourcing the API documentation for its SoundTouch smart speakers”. You might be able to point them at an alternative back-end¹ if you want the cloud features, but that will need to be written from scratch rather than being forked from code provided by Sonos.
> When cloud support ends, an update to the SoundTouch app will add local controls to retain as much functionality as possible without cloud services
This is a far bigger move than releasing API information, IMO bigger than if they had actually open sourced the software & hardware, from the point of view of most end users - they can keep using the local features without needing anyone else to maintain a version.
--------
[1] TFA doesn't state that this will be possible, but opening the API makes no sense if it isn't.
According to this comment[1] by an OSS developer working on reverse engineering the device, the documentation released doesn't allow them to implement an alternative backend. If I understand the purpose of the interfaces correctly from skimming the reverse engineering effort github[2], the API released documents the HTTP interface between the phone app and the speakers, which has been available for years, and covers functionality that isn't going away. The interface between the speaker and the cloud services that are shutting down is still undocumented.
Looking over the API docs seems to confirm what the comment you referenced and the poster I linked here is saying. I'm seeing calls to virtually press buttons on the speaker, set the input source, to query the presets, and some zone-relayed calls, but nothing about actually playing audio from network sources.
For the call re: presets I see:
> Description: Presets are a core part of the SoundTouch ecosystem. A preset is used to set and recall a specific music stream supported by the SoundTouch speaker
There's a GET method that returns information about presets. Presumably you'd use a POST or PUT method to manage the presents. To that end, under POST, it says:
> POST: N/A
It looks like this API basically allows you to control it like an dumb speaker. That's not nothing, but it's not much either.
There doesn't seem to be anything in the API about controlling how the speak communicates with a back end service.
Edit:
Having some time to read over your [2] and the link to [0] it looks like getting root on the speaker w/ physical access is ridiculously easy. Booting the unit w/ a FAT32 USB drive attached with a file named "remote_services" in an otherwise empty root directory opens up an ssh server and the root user has no password.
The comments on [0] have some interesting tidbits in them, too.
These speakers look like they might be fun to play with and once Bose kills the back end people may unload them cheap.
Ah, that makes sense as well. Not sure why I fixated on what the speaker might call out to, and didn't think of what might want/need to control the speaker.
One thing nobody is touching on: since it's not actually open source, when this thing is found to have dozens of security holes (or any bugs), they are not going to be patched.
No, they published schematics and full BIOS source code.
But it was not libre, they held the copyright to the source code. So to get around this, competing companies wrote a spec from the source code and then had another team which never saw the code implement a new BIOS from the spec.
Bose, though, makes a more nuanced distinction in their announcement, which is linked to in the article
> Open-source options for the community | We’re making our technical specifications available so that independent developers can create their own SoundTouch-compatible tools and features.
Bose never claims they're making the speakers open-source, it's lazy reporting by The Verge. They're just making it a little easier for the community to build stuff if they want.
While actually releasing the source code for the speakers would be best, there might be some legitimate business concerns. To me this is a step in the right direction, and their official announcement accurately represented that.
The question on my mind is will the SoundTouch app continue to be supported on new mobile
OS versions ?
Is it the same app that caters for other speakers too ? If it is, and Bose continue to include their old speakers on the functionality of the app, then I can hardly see how this is a true EoL. They’re really continuing to support the speakers in their app, at least.
They're discontinuing support for SoundTouch Speakers. The SoundTouch App controls SoundTouch Speakers. Put two and two together...
From their announcement:
What will no longer work:
• Presets (preset buttons on the product and in the app)
• Browsing or playing music services directly from the SoundTouch app
Important note: Your system will no longer receive security and software updates.
Please make sure to always use your system on a secure, private network.
Considering that new speakers don't use SoundTouch, I wonder too. I hope that they keep the app running for a while. This kit is expensive and it can't have a short life time!
They're not really "open-sourcing" anything in the sense that I would think about it. As far as I can tell they're doing two things:
* Removing cloud-server dependency from the app.
* Publishing API documentation for the speaker.
I actually think this is worth noting not so much in a "well aktshully it's not open source!" kind of way, but as a good lesson for other manufacturers - because this is meaningfully good without needing to do any of the things manufacturers hate:
* They didn't have to publish any Super Secret First or Third Party Proprietary IP.
* They didn't have to release any signing keys or firmware tools.
* They get to remove essentially all maintenance costs and relegate everything to a "community."
But yet people are happy! Manufacturers should take note that they don't have to do much to make customers much happier with their products at end of life.
This might sound crazy to some people, but I think this is much better than ongoing support. Removal of reliance on cloud alone is a massive feature that gets me interested in buying one of these (I don't currently own one). And the fact it has an API I can hit myself? Awesome!!!
Good for them. Makes me more likely to consider buying a Bose in future, not just because I know it won't be bricked, but also for the environmental impact of this. Kudos.
If only their sound signature was a bit better... they went all in on engineering tricks to make things small and cheap to produce, but it shows in their sound quality. Their QC headphones are the best in noise cancellation, and the sound quality is good enough that they're my pair of wireless headphones.
A long while ago i heard something (that might have been a urban myth) about Bose putting useless weight into their headphones to make them appear more "substantially professional". Is that a myth or they have pivoted towards actual quality since early days?
There used to be a whole culture of bose kind of being a-holes. (Like 20 years ago.) I used to work at CNET back then and there was a kind of "yeah bose is ok" kind of vibe but it was always tinged with "but they want to sue you if you say mean things" whether they did or not.
As far as I know now, things have changed substantially. I would assume this includes engineering quality and honesty.
This bricking avoidance seems like another note in that positive direction.
My understanding of modern Bose kit based on RTINGS reviews is that it's fairly competitive in its price range. Still a touch pricey for what you get, but not bad by any means—like 2nd/3rd best, and occasionally punching above its weight for their midrange offerings. They seem to be #1 for comfort (headphones) though.
I don't own any, I've just read reviews from when I was in the market for new headphones and earbuds.
I believe that's always been a thing. A long time ago I read this teardown article [1] of real vs counterfeit Beats headphones. And even the counterfeit versions had metal weight added to make it feel like the real Beats headphones!
Those were Beats, not Bose, and it was true. IMO Bose does a great job of being both consumer friendly and high quality. There are others with higher fidelity for the same price (Shure, Sennheiser) but you often lose the comfort and portability Bose offers.
You are right, my memory only includes the original report and not the follow-up that determined it was bunk. Sadly it is too far past my post so I cannot edit it. Apologies for persisting bad info
Their aviation headsets are infamous for being heavy and the latest generation of the A30s haven't changed much except it's much lighter because they swapped out some metal parts for plastic.
When I bought my Bose QC ten years ago, I tried a lot of brands and found Bose to have the most pleasant sound, very clear/neutral. I guess it’s personal taste.
I used to have an unexplained resistance to buy Bose products. After the hinge of my Sony mx-1000 headphones broke in to two places, I gave in and got a Bose qc. Man, the build quality was insanely good. The sound was really good. And it’s really comfortable to wear. I had changed my view.
This is going to read like I'm shilling but: I was so impressed with Bose QC headphones that i stocked up and gave out 7 pairs to my closest friends and family this year for christmas
Thee noise cancellation was unmatched several years ago. I picked up mine because we were spending hours in the data center. Suddenly we could work and take calls in that hell. I still have those, but the AirPods have taken their place on flights. It’s just less to bring with me.
Hopefully, someone from Bose sees these comments. There is a serious segment of the pro and prosumer audio market that values open-source, interoperability, long service life, and is willing to pay a bit more for it.
I hope Bose continues to do this for future products and is rewarded financially for it.
I have my fathers Sonos soundbar and a pair of speakers at home that I bought for him as Christmas gifts years ago. I still can't believe they knowingly released an app that bricked older devices.
I have to try and get them working again. The only solution I've heard of is to get an old version of the Sonos app APK, a dedicated old single purpose Android phone to acts as a bridge between your speakers and phone and connect that way.
I have 2012 Sonos hardware. You can still get the original Sonos S1 controller, which works with old stuff. It's pretty annoying that all the new stuff is S2 (and that app is better supported), but it's not as hard as you're describing it. You can get it off Google Play and just use it.
The quality of the software, and the fact that it isn't really updated, is another thing, but the actual software availability is there.
I recently posted a comment [0] critical of Bose for needing an app, and it's nice to see that Bose decided to take a much better approach to end-of-life.
This should be standard practice. Some companies have terrible policies around bricking their products.
When my kid was born, I bought a brand-new Snoo. After six months, I wanted to sell it since we no longer needed it. That's when I discovered stories of people whose used Snoos had been bricked by the company. For such an expensive product, that is such a waste. If I'd known about this beforehand, I never would have made the purchase in the first place.
This library provides a clean, Pythonic interface to control SoundTouch speakers over your local network, ensuring your speakers remain fully functional even after cloud services end.
Lyrion Music Server (LMS) is a streaming audio server supported by the LMS community and formerly supported by Logitech, developed in particular to support their Squeezebox [discontinued in 2012] range of digital audio receivers.. [LMS] also works with networked music players, such as the Roku SoundBridge M1001, Chumby, O2 Joggler, RPi and the SqueezeAMP open source hardware player.
Yeah that's quite fair, the article is not very accurate.
It sounds like there are two main pieces to me:
1. Removal of cloud dependency
2. Making usable the API (and providing documentation)
With a minor 3rd piece:
3. The official app will be updated to support the "offline" mode without losing as many features as possible now that the cloud service is going away.
All very laudable things IMHO. I'm actually going to buy one of these
Those APIs have already existed. So it is probable that they already had a documentation.
Sanitizing an existing documentation for public release might take notable time and effort if there are 100s of endpoints. But I would assume that is not the case with an API for a speaker.
The soundtouch web api which is what was "open sourced" was already an existing thing for a long time. You just had to access it from the bose developer portal I think. I don't think anything actually happened here. I'm so surprised that HN is excited about this story because nothing seems to have been released.
Firstly, the source code is probably being used on newer devices, so Bose would not like sharing their proprietary solutions which might contain thirds party code they cannot share.
Secondly, these devices are basically one step above embedded. It's highly unlikely you can load and run anything custom on them.
Since they are opening up the API, you can keep using them for what they were made for, which is at least a solid basic liberty
I admit that I expected more. They really did the minimum, as in, anything less should have been illegal. It is praiseworthy, but it is unfortunate that it is.
Seeing that, I expected the ability to build and run a custom firmware, like with an Android device with its bootloader unlocked. But it is not that, and they didn't open source their app either.
What they did is that they removed dependence on their servers, and opened their device to be controlled by third party apps. That is, they let users use their device past its end of life, including when the first party app will stop being maintained, but not to the point of letting user add features.
In understand why they would do that, they don't want users to backport features only available on their latest models that are sold at a premium, therefore competing against themselves. After all, the value in smart speakers is not the sound producing device, which I think is a problem that has been solved more than a decade ago at the consumer level, it is all about software features.
Yeah, it's kinda sad how much applause this is garnering when publishing API specs should be bare minimum for any smart device, never mind EoL concerns.
Don't let perfect be the the enemy of good. I fully agree with you on what the bare minimum should be, but the reality is that our definition of bare minimum is currently a fantasy. Any steps taken toward our vision is good and should be applauded IMHO. Especially when it's a major player like Bose that hopefully sets a positive precedent and gets other manufacturers to realize this is not only possible but leads to applause and hopefully more sales.
Evolution v. Revolution. I'd prefer the latter, but realistically the former is the more likely to succeed short of people like us getting control of regulatory bodies and forcing it.
Unless you want to actually develop ON the device (and build binaries etc...), this completely allows you to use the device and connect it to whatever, so I don't know what more we should expect.
Open sourcing the server code would make getting your own instance of it way easier, and maybe opening the app code so people should change the controls?
As others have said already, they are just un-obscuring the server API and restoring local control to your speakers when they discontinue the service. There is nothing noble about this, it is almost least they could do. I walked away from a large investment in Sonos gear over forcing legacy equipment into the cloud, this sort of thing is why.
> We’re making our technical specifications available so that independent developers can create their own SoundTouch-compatible tools and features. The documentation is available here: SoundTouch API Documentation (https://assets.bosecreative.com/m/496577402d128874/original/...).
AFAIK, the soundtouch web API was already accessible via some bose developer portal. It doesn't seem like they are open sourcing anything. This API just allows you to make basic requests to do things like change volume on the speaker.
To support the smart features of the SoundTouch speakers, we would the soundtouch user management service. Speakers connect to this very frequently and its where refresh tokens for music services and presets are stored. The speaker firmware itself has lots of source code, including the bit to handle music services and playback. There is an abstraction layer for music service APIs. There is a process on the speaker that reaches out to a music service registry, which is an index of bose music service adapters. Each of these adapters essentially proxies a music service like tunein, spotify, and even the "stream a custom station" feature.
If bose open-sourced the speaker firmware, we could make a firmware build which talks to a 3rd party user management service, and reaches out to a 3rd party music service registry. Then we could add and maintain music service playback for the community. But there is no open sourcing of any actual code here and this soundtouch web api cannot change the URLs on the existing firmware of the user management service or the music service registry.
So to my eye this story seems misleading and just some PR nonsense. It's a little frustrating reading all of the "great job, Bose!" comments here like anything was actually done... Disclaimer: I used to work at Bose.
One time I got a free Harman Kardon bluetooth speaker from Microsoft (the Invoke from 2017). They were $100* but went on sale for $50 and I snagged one.
Then Microsoft discontinued Cortana for it, but they didn't kill the speaker. They released firmware that turned it into a perfectly good bluetooth speaker (which I still use today.) And they sent me a $50 gift card* to buy something else from Microsoft. Good will! I was a big fan of Microsoft hardware. Shame about the software...
* Apparently $200 initially but they had some steep sales because Cortana as a voice assistant wasn't reviewing well. Reviews are a bit negative on the sound quality. Probably true enough at $200, but for $0-50, I think it's actually really good sound quality.
I was the engineering lead on that product, and built a SW platform from scratch for it (Microsoft provided an SDK to Cortana which they developed in parallel.)
The internal build could actually run Cortana, Alexa and Google Assistant simultaneously and you could e.g. set an alarm with one of them and query it with another, and they could interrupt each other based on priority. Obviously nobody wanted that feature, but it was hella cool that it worked. Oh, and you could make Skype calls from across the room, and the microphone array lived up to Skype's tough certification requirements which took weeks of testing in Microsoft's anechoic chamber for the DSP/algorithm team to fine tune.
I tried to push for open-sourcing the platform but it was tricky because 1) the director of engineering in Harman didn't know what open source meant and for a hardware focused business to understand the value was a hard sell, 2) it used a HW module that came with a SW stack I mostly got rid off but a few parts were remaining that would need to be replaced which would require additional resources, 3) I was burned out at that point and had limited energy left to fight the good fight. Really too bad, it could have been a cool voice agent development platform, and I honestly think it would have sold in large volumes as a developer-friendly device.
Glad you like it, sorry about the remaining Bluetooth bugs nobody got around to fix, since it basically flopped instantly.
While laudable, the release of the documentation is completely useless. The protocol is rather simple and was completely reverse engineered already many years ago. In fact it’s already integrated into several open-source home management tools e.g. Home Assistant.
The rest api was taken apart years ago for my old Sonos. They had originally promised to add AirPlay support later said, “Just kidding. Why don’t you brick it instead.” At that point I was finished with closed ecosystems for audio. At least someone made an AirPlay agent that lives on the home server. That speaker has survived many years too.
I actually found a nice SoundTouch 20 discarded on the curb, a couple months ago.
I assumed it was probably discarded due to the frequent situation here, of student who is moving away, and who doesn't want the hassle or expense of moving things that don't fit in their luggage.
Now I wonder whether it was discarded because the owner heard it was being bricked, so not worth moving with them.
(Don't worry, I'm a curb Jawa master. I carried it home, realized it was IoT that required an icky closed app thing to use it, and so gave it to an MIT student. I just emailed them the URL of this good news. Possible bummer for the previous owner, though.)
The one thing I’d love to have is repairable Bose headphones. I’ve used different ones but Bose with proper EQ settings are extremely good. The comfort levels on those is exceptional. In my entire life I’ve never seen headphones this comfortable. But once the battery wears out getting it repaired seems to include soldering. Should’ve been easily swappable. Also their Bluetooth can be finicky. One more area that needs improvement.
Repairing the QC 35 was not difficult. It’s just a shame it requires soldering on a new battery pack. Even the drivers are replaceable with that little tool. A few years ago I gave mine an affordable overhaul with a new battery and replaced the earmuffs. Right as rain now.
I don't understand why consumer goods can't use 18650 cells to make devices long-term viable instead of soon-to-be e-waste. There are fewer and fewer devices I'm willing to buy because interchangeable batteries seem to be going away.
Devices want to be portable. the competition for weight and size is very high. It's ironic how as usage of phones increased considerably with social apps, people seem to not have a problem with thicker iPhones for larger battery. The current iPhone 17 Pro is a chonk that would probably have been considered bulky and backwards 10 years ago.
The trends decide the standard. Many EVs use 18650 but I can see that for competition and weight reduction they may switch to a more proprietary standard like blade batteries in BYD for competition. It all depends on where the competition is going with it.
For earwear, I would say that portability and weight is a big area for competition.
Yeah, I couldn't even get the damn thing to work reliably when it was new. Oh but you can rest assured that it had no problem exfiltrating all that precious data of mine about what I was doing, and any other things they could suck out of my Android phone. No way in hell will I EVER buy another Sonos product.
we've got a pair of Sonos One speakers airplay(2?) connected to our Apple TV (recent generation): the sound is excellent but connection over airplay regularly is dropped, which might be Apple's doing, since they may well favor device testing with homepods. it drives some here to anger...it is a pisser because the sound quality is great.
I noticed Sonos speakers are featured in some upscale cars now, Audi for example.
Putting software in long lived components — screens, speakers, whatever — is shortsighted as the industrial short term and barely engineered mindset.
Maybe in an era where software can be carefully engineered to a point of actual completion it will make sense, but for now it’s mostly stupid.
Open sourcing potential ongoing support and tinkering is good, but it doesn’t get the core problem that it wad probably never the right thing to put the smarts in the speakers in the first place.
Interesting article - most products are treated as “delivered” the moment they ship. A project manager hands over, success is declared, and the organisation moves on. But physical products with embedded software don’t stop being systems just because the project ends — they keep accumulating risk, cost, and user impact right through to end-of-life.
What usually gets missed is that end-of-life is still part of the project, even if it sits years downstream. When software support is withdrawn without a transition path, the hardware doesn’t just lose features — it loses trust. That’s not a technical failure, it’s a lifecycle planning failure.
Open-sourcing at sunset is interesting because it’s one of the few mechanisms that acknowledges this gap. It doesn’t help most users directly, but it at least hands control back instead of silently bricking capability.
I’m curious whether we’ll start seeing project managers and product teams treat “exit conditions” as a first-class deliverable — with explicit decisions about data, firmware, APIs, and ownership once commercial support ends — rather than treating end-of-life as someone else’s problem.
Why would anyone want a smart speaker, when every speaker acts as one when hooked to the sound output of a phone, wirelessly or wired?
I'll admit, I don't want or use 'smart' anything, and am currently trying to disable smart devices that were already present in my home from the previous owner.
I have a speaker in the lounge and kitchen. Wr want to be able to listen to the same thing whichever room we’re in. Or perhaps we don’t.
Being able to say “play this stream in room 1,3,6 and this in room 4 and nothing in room 2,5,7” is a valuable feature for people who don’t live alone in a studio flat.
The hardware on the soundtouch 10/20/30 series was always surprisingly over engineered with heavy magnets, decent power supplies, and good enclosures but let down by a sluggish app and flaky mDNS implementation.
With this, they just became the best value proposition on the used market. Flashing these with a minimal distro running snapclient (for multiroom audio) and shairport-sync (AirPlay 2) makes them infinitely better than they were on stock firmware. eBay prices are probably going to double by tomorrow morning.
Happy to see this happening. You know what would make me even happier? Having open source alternatives available to use as soon as I buy the device, not only after it's discontinued
If the software gains traction in a public git repo this could be a good purchase for someone wanting a cost effective, great sounding, customisable, retro styled speaker.
Oh cool! I got a set of SoundTouch speakers years ago because they supported simultaneous Bluetooth playback as well as synced cloud service playback. This was in 2018 so options were more limited then. Since it became clear Bose was shutting them down I've moved over to Wiims[1] for managing playback (the SoundTouch app was always kind of odd and hard to manage) - but allowing local control is really nice. Currently you need to hit a button to enable playing from AUX on the soundtouches - they won't stay on the "dumb speaker" mode unless music is playing. Hopefully after this I'll be able to set them up as permanent speakers driven by the wiims.
It's sad how surprised the author and all of us are. Has it really become the norm to create crap that you pay for, that just stops working one day and becomes e-waste? If that ever happens to me, that's a company I'm never giving money to again, ever.
Why are these devices connecting to the Internet at all? Aren't they supposed to be connected to phones and TVs via cable or bluetooth? I would never allow any "smart" anything device to speak to the Internet in the first place.
Nice. This reminds me of Logitech who open sourced LMS (Logitech Media Server) when they discontinued their multiroom product (known as Squeezebox before they bought it).
Still a fantastic multi-room setup to this day... I run a server as well as a client from a Raspberry Pi.
After my last Sonos, I gave up on smart speakers. Recently I discovered Squeezelite-ESP32 / piCorePlayer and I'm not going back. I'm free to choose my own speakers (and people sell great 2nd hand dumb speakers for nothing!), I can stream, sync, etc - and they integrate great with Home Assistant. No more proprietary protocol for me, thank you...
Reword a public announcement [1], slap on a misleading title, put it behind a cookie banner and paywall and boom - Journalism! "Bose is releasing documentation for EOL smart speaker HTTP API" would be more apt. Not even Bose is claiming that anything has been open-sourced in their statement. Titling the section "Open-source options for the community" is as close as they come to that.
Still, props to Bose for actively helping to keep their old devices usable.
On a related note, I'm eternally grateful for the conversion to open source of the Squeezebox platform (now known as Lyrion Music Server) and SageTV. I use both of these every day.
Hear hear. I'm also a daily LMS/squeezebox user, across many years.
In fact, given the full-throated open source nature of that platform (you can even build your own player with a raspberry pi[1]), I doubt I'll ever need to use anything else for the rest of my life for playing music in my home, even as my devices die and need replacement over time.
... which does make me wonder: that's great for me, but I can definitely see it as a deterrent for companies to do similar. If they want to make a competing future product, they'll be competing against an open-sourced version of their past selves, too.
I got my first Bose headphone in 2008 or so. It was a treat for myself as a poor university student after a paycheque. I loved the headphone and one day it broke down after several years of heavy abuse. I called their customer service for repairs and how much it would cost. Rather than recommending me to just buy a new one, the customer support agent asked questions about the model, what the issue was, and offered a replacement.
I've loved their product and support ever since. Glad to see this happening as well. Kudos.
This is amazing, and I hope this sets a precedent for other companies. Stuff like this would definitely sway my buying decision, if I know when a product becomes EOL I can tinker with it.
Well done Bose! This puts you higher on the list for my next purchase.
I don't understand why so many comments here are negative. This is a nice move, and Bose should be thanked and encouraged to do similar moves again. It's a step in the right direction!
This is an amazing idea - whoever came up with it, should get a promotion. I'd not be surprised that if this continues, Bose could be what e.g.: ThinkPad became and will have a steady customer and fan base
The arguments in this thread about sound quality crack me up. Reminds me of when a famous mix engineer was in a best buy and the guy said 'These sound just like it did in the studio!' He said, no it doesn't. We used NS10s.
Really glad to hear this, I've been so close to throwing out my SoundTouch 20, which makes me sad because it looks great and sounds better than my Google Nest speaker (placement issue? hard to say).
Great move Bose! I hope this trend continues - it's really nice to see a vibrant market for used/vintage electronic products in some categories (e.g. old iPods) rather than them just contributing to more e-waste.
Now users like me can't configure their devices (because the login is mandatory for using anything in the app). Some users report they aren't even able to use it with a VPN.
The over-reliance on closed source apps with mandatory logins for configuring devices you own must come to an end.
This is where EU needs to put its weight and at least in Europe - if you sell something but not willing to support - open source client, server and device all sorts of software.
I think it would be a good idea to tax companies significatnly when bricking their devices, it's creating e-waste. Open sourcing them like this would be a way for them to avoid fines.
From a quick glance it looks like you are just able to do high level playback controls, similar to what you'd do using their on-device UI. Perhaps that's enough?
The speakers have a telnet interface and DLNA support, but no documentation and I was not able to make it work with MiniDLNA in a couple of hours of trying.
I mean, suppose a CD player only used proprietary CDs. If the company dropped support and opened it to every other CD brand, would you complain that you can't load cassettes? Or burn ISOs with it?
it's sad that this is not the default behaviour. hopefully the stop killing games movement will put something similar into law with potentially further-reaching side-effects eventually. Because frankly, sunsetting products like this should be common sense, not the exception it currently is.
This is a great PR move for Bose in a market that doesn't care about name brands like it used to. Maybe they can win some customers back and be considered cool again.
On the one hand it’s great Bose is doing this — on the other it sucks that this is so remarkable. Having stuff you bought that does not actually need the cloud continue to work should be the default.
Good for them! I own two sets of noise-cancelling Bose headphones and a (dumb) speaker, and they've all been pretty solid, and for half the price of equivalent Apple headphones.
I'm still using stereo speakers even though the local store seems to only sell single units. They have bluetooth but I don't see why they would need to be "smarter" than this.
ianal and kudos to Bose for their relatively graceful hardware depreciation approach and releasing their API documentation; the license for said documentation does not appear to be easily recognized as "open source" by using a standard GPL, MIT, Apache, etc license.
Has anyone read the API documentation EULA and can comment on if it really meets some recognizable standard for "open source?"
Direct link to the announcement (from the article):
https://www.bose.com/soundtouch-end-of-life
SoundTouch API Documentation (pdf) linked from the announcement:
https://assets.bosecreative.com/m/496577402d128874/original/...
This is how "end of support" should be handled. Instead of turning devices into e-waste, open-source them and let the community extend their life. Kudos to Bose for setting a good example.
More companies should follow this approach - especially as right-to-repair becomes a bigger issue.
Bose should not receive praise for this move. Bose only took this action after community backlash. In an older version of their end-of-life announcement, most functionality of the speaker systems would have removed and transformed the devices into dumb-speakers/amps.
Good that they changed their statement and took the right action. Even better for the community for stepping up and 'forcing' Bose to do so.
Sources: https://web.archive.org/web/20251201051242/https://www.bose.... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/bose-soundtouch-home...
> Bose should not receive praise for this move. Bose only took this action after community backlash.
They received the backlash, they responded to it by properly addressing the criticism and doing the right thing. It should be praised. Especially since it wasn't some PR-centric damage control, but an actual direct address of the specific points their original approach was criticized for.
Compare Bose's response to that of Sonos (another large techy audio brand). Sonos had an absolutely massive backlash recently (within the past few years iirc) in regards to deprecating software support for their older speakers that I'd read about everywhere (including HN) for months and months.
Afaik, it didn't lead to Sonos doing the right thing in the end (unlike the scenario at hand here), despite the online outrage being way more widespread than in the Bose's case.
Agreed. When someone does something, hears the complaints, and changes, it's charitable to bin them as someone who made a mistake and wants to improve.
Not every company deserves this charity, but the social media default nowadays is to deny that charity to everyone, and to go scorched-earth.
Even if they don't want to improve, and just do it reluctantly, it's best to reward them for doing something good, because otherwise they'll have no incentive to do something good in the future.
Sonos gets backlash every few years and they don’t change. It’s almost as if consumers are shit at boycotting companies.
Which does make Boses move even more impressive when you think about how it wouldn’t have affected their business to do nothing.
A few years back Sonos was going to EoL and brick a huge humber of their "legacy" devices and that those devices would prevent new ones from getting updated. After backlash they reversed their decision and all devices remained functional: https://www.businessinsider.com/sonos-device-support-ceo-apo...
However, I wouldn't expect anything from Sonos at this point in time.
And before that it was the “recycle mode” that actually bricked the hardware thus contributing to e-waste: https://www.whathifi.com/news/sonos-explains-why-recycle-mod...
Sonos did revert that decision after mounting public pressure too. However they keep pull these kinds of stunts and then later apologising for it.
My point is: are you actually changing if you keep making the same mistakes and then only saying “sorry” after you get caught?
If Bose shows the same pattern of behaviour the I’d lump them into the same category as Sonos. But thus far they do seem slightly more ethical.
Personally though, I think the whole “smart speaker” industry is crooked. But some are definitely more crooked than others.
I don’t understand what you mean when you say the whole smart speaker industry is crooked.
Every company that makes smart speakers is crooked? Or, the making and selling of smart speakers is inherently unethical?
Not the OP, but IMO as soon as a company becomes successful, the leadership becomes focused on making money and not making a good product.
Sometimes making a decent product is part of making money, but that's never a motivation in itself. We have enough examples showing that if it makes more money to enshittify (and usually it does), then they will gladly enshittify.
I wouldn't say it's just the smart speaker industry.
And some people have been advocating for Apple to do something similar with old iPhones and tablets for a decade, and there’s no sign. Their privilege but not great for the world.
Would you elaborate? Because my understanding is that Apple has offered outstanding support for older devices in terms of iOS support for quite old devices.
Apple don't give people the tools/keys/etc to load new OS (etc) onto a device once it's no longer supported.
So, at best the device can just be used with the latest version of the software Apple allows until it's a security nightmare and better off no longer used.
Instead, if Apple gave people the ability to load something (prob a Linux) onto those old devices, then those old devices could be used usefully for quite a few more years.
> Apple has offered outstanding support for older devices in terms of iOS support for quite old devices
Did they gave instructions on how to unblock bootloaders. released the source code and drivers under an open source license?
Whilst the support might be "outstanding" - the discussion is what happens once devices are no longer supported.
You can't release all the documentation just because the entire phone isn't supported. Many of the components come from other suppliers and aren't obsolete, and you can't just reveal all your suppliers' IP.
You could if you had a tiny bit of respect for your customers and obtained the necessary licenses to do so.
I don't think anyone has ever accused, say, Qualcomm of having respect for their customers. Much less someone else's customers.
They don't have to - just give an option to unlock the device when it's EOL.
It's not a security problem, since they don't support it anylonger anyways!
They could even make it so, that iOS itself refuses to boot if the device is unlocked. That way you can't accidentally have an iOS running that's compromised in some way.
But you can still boot Linux or Android or whatever you want to do to it.
No functrionality is lost when a phone no longer receives iOS updates. All of the existing functionality continues.
Access to new features is not available, and app developers may no longer support updates to their applications.
But AFAIK, Apple apps (maps, music, phone, iMessage etc) on iPhones no longer receiving iOS updates continue to work.
Apps that connect to a service over the Internet (maps, music iMessage) could stop working if Apple changes the APIs that those apps use. This is even more likely to happen to third party apps.
You won't get updates to the trusted root CAs, which means you won't be able to visit sites with certificates signed by CAs created or renewed after support is dropped. And your browser will continue trusting CAs that have had their trust revoked.
And as web standards evolve there will be websites that use features and APIs that your browser doesn't support and may break in subtle, or not so subtle ways. And there is no way for you to install a more up to date browser.
And then of course, you won't fixes for any new security vulnerabilities that are found.
So yeah, it's not as bad as getting bricked, but it as also worse than continuing to work as it always has, but with no new features.
Yeah, it’s good to see a sensible response to community pressure here. While I take the point that they only conceded after pressure, at least they did concede. I’ve upgraded their brand in my mind from “planned obsolescence e-waste villain” to “cares about PR and will do the right thing while being watched”. I think the only truly trustworthy companies regarding end of support handling in consumer tech are those whose brand is explicitly tied to openness / repairablity ala home assistant, framework laptops, etc…
Sadly those tend to be niche companies already focused on power users, but any other firms should be considered guilty until proven innocent of enshittification (forced bricking, closed source, subscription creep, privacy violations and data brokering).
> Bose should not receive praise for this move.
Remind me of any other vendor in recent history that end of lifed a hardware product and then open sourced it whether they got backlash or not. Because I can’t think of a single one.
So yes, Bose absolutely deserves praise.
Google refunded all Stadia purchases, both hardware and software, after they discontinued the platform/product. Then they added functionality (the ability to operate the controller as a generic Bluetooth controller) afterward to keep the hardware from becoming e-waste.
Cheaper than the class action which would've followed given Stadia's relatively short life.
Short by anything but Google standards :P
Logitech are my go-to example of a company that does the right thing and deserves recognition for it. They kept their squeezebox.com servers going for a decade after they discontinued their Squeezebox hardware audio players. At the same time, they funded a maintainer to keep improving the open source server software that users can self-host on multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, macOS, Raspberry Pi). Two years ago, they finally shut down the squeezebox.com servers that they were running but the server software is still being actively maintained: https://lyrion.org/
I recall there is also an open source and hardware speaker but not 100% sure it's from Logitech.
Teufel Mynd is the open source speaker https://blog.teufelaudio.com/visionary-mynds-insights-on-teu...
Arguably HP open-sourced webOS, but they did also got backlash because they killed that entire product line without warning.
They killed the product line almost immediately after release. And they fired basically everyone they acquired from palm.
It was a real shitty move.
It is a pretty sad story, and one that has been rather well told:
https://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm-webos-hp-insi...
https://www.philmckinney.com/i-convinced-hps-board-to-buy-pa...
I worked at HP as an intern during the saga. I even got to attend a training by the Palm team... Which wasn't great.
My impression just from that training is that WebOs was extremely mismanaged. The training was billed as a "how to write apps for WebOs" and it instead was an hour long meander by the Palm employee about how different the company culture is and how hard it became to do anything.
I had the distinct impression they didn't even know that the training was supposed to be before being assigned to do it.
I think that's indicative of everything. HP had this product that they were trying to shoehorn into the most bizarre places. At it's core it was a mobile Linux os which used html/css/JavaScript as the main user experience engine. And HP was trying to put that on printers and rack mount displays. The one place they didn't seem to care putting it was the mobile devices it was designed to target. They simply half assed the launch of a product.
Except the title is wrong; Bose didn't open source anything.
Pebble?
Don't punish the behavior you want to see. Would we rather they defaulted there? Sure. But it's arguably an even better signal to see that they're willing to listen to their customers even when there is no direct financial incentive for them.
Their financial incentive is negative. They were hoping to force everyone to buy new speakers, driving sales. But if the community is able to get open source firmware to run spotifyd on them, there is a non-zero (not everyone, but it's non-zero) amount of people that will just not buy new speakers from them.
If they can make this OS story go viral, then they stand to have a lot of customers defect from their competitors even people who would never really care about open source.
Could easily be net positive.
It's not negative, though, or at least they don't think so. The fact that they are doing this OSS release means that they believe any loss of new sales would be dwarfed by a loss of goodwill if they'd bricked the old devices.
Certainly goodwill is harder to quantify.
> Their financial incentive is negative. They were hoping to force...
Maybe?
People stuck with Bose bricks might show a preference for non-Bose replacements.
People who thought Bose speakers would stay useful longer might prefer Bose, or be willing to pay for a more expensive Bose speaker model.
(Yes, I agree that some PHB's at Bose were almost certainly imagining that their customers would be forced to re-purchase Bose speakers. I'm questioning the validity of their initial assumptions.)
From talking to friends and family, so n=10-ish, non-computer people have not realized that sticking computers in things means they die on computer lifetimes, not appliance lifetimes. No more switches that last for the life of the house; no more speakers that your kids can do modest maintenance to and keep using.
And, if I, a non-Bose customer, hear that Bose open sourced a previous version of their speaker, which gives me some confidence that a present purchase might be somewhat future-proofed, then I am more likely to buy a new Bose product vs a competitor who does not provide sources.
I've got a simple formula in life for when people do things beneficial to me: I praise them for it and encourage them to keep it going. If someone does things antagonistic to my interests, and then corrects course in reaction to objection, they can be sure they're going to be rewarded. This has worked for me.
If your belief is that some other tactic works, then I can see why you'd do that. For my part, carrot + stick has always worked better than stick + more stick.
It works on dogs, children, and adults, the inability to praise the good because they did something bad prior feels like more of the online black/white moralism that used to characterise Twitter dogpiles.
Bose: does something bad. People: complain. Bose: undoes what they did and does something slightly better. You: complain.
I'm not sure I get the logic here.
Slowly but steadily I'm comprehending why companies are getting tired of some people. No matter what companies do, people will always complain. Don't get me wrong, there's always room for more improvement, but a slight complement for their slight improvement won't hurt anyone + a change in tone from complaining to suggesting improvements would be a nice bonus.
Well they still did it, thus praise (though less effusive than if they had just done it initially).
Why should Bose not get credit for this? If you are saying that people should treat them the same regardless of whether they listen to their consumers or not, then why would they ever bother listening to the consumers?
Also remember that there is no believer like a convert. A community helping guide a company towards open source culture could make for a very strong ally.
Then again I know nothing about Bose’s open source culture so take it with a grain of salt.
And?
When presented with information that you're acting in bad faith, if you choose to change: that is praiseworthy.
It's very brave to take that in, and not worry about "brand damage" or "appearing weak". It's brave to even challenge yourself when someone tells you you're wrong. It's entirely admirable.
It's the default human behaviour to double-down.
> transformed the devices into dumb-speakers/amps
Isn't that still gonna happen now?
From [1]:
What will no longer work:
• Presets (preset buttons on the product and in the app)
Of course Bluetooth and AirPlay continues to work, but isn't that what a "dumb speaker" is?
[1] https://www.bose.com/soundtouch-end-of-life
Bose's original plan was to remove all WiFi-dependent functionality (no AirPlay and no Spotify Connect)-- while they wouldn't quite be "dumb speakers" at that point (since Bluetooth would've still worked), it would've turned them into pretty much just overcomplicated Bluetooth speakers.
> Isn't that still gonna happen now?
No, if you read farther down the announcement, they also say this:
> Open-source options for the community
> We’re making our technical specifications available so that independent developers can create their own SoundTouch-compatible tools and features. The documentation is available here: https://assets.bosecreative.com/m/496577402d128874/original/...
So, they're going to strip the "smart" functionality from the app that Bose provides, but they're letting people continue to use it if they want to.
Ugh, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
I believe that if someone (or some company) changes their ways we should accept that and not condemn them forever.
Honestly. Bro needs to chill. Big companies don't really do anything unless they recieve backlash. That's just how it works.
Is the world a better place before or after Bose decided to change course?
There is no winning or redemption after getting cancelled it so seems.
This def needs to be celebrated and rewarded. I am more likely to purchase Bose now.
Exactly this.
"Bose blows" is a popular comment amongst the audiophile community but, to me, it seems like they don't blow at all[0]. In fact quite the opposite: this is a fantastic example for other companies to follow. Top marks, Bose!
[0] What is actually true is that they are opinionated about sound reproduction in ways that a bunch of people don't agree with but which in the right context are often effective and enjoyable to listen to.
> "Bose blows" is a popular comment amongst the audiophile community but, to me, it seems like they don't blow at all[0]
That comment is not wrong, you are imo just not making an important distinction that the criteria on which audiophiles judge Bose as “blowing” (which is almost purely the sound profile + a few other smaller things like physical comfort/connectivity/price/etc.) vs. what you judge it on (which is more in the long-term technical user/community product support, idk how to describe that area much better) are almost entirely disjoint.
It is perfectly fine and valid for an audio product to “blow” from an opinionated audiophile perspective, while being exceptionally great from the long-term product/user/community product support perspective.
I heavily agree with you btw, Bose should be heavily lauded for making a decision to open-up their speaker firmware after it reaches the official end of support deadline. The fact that this is an exceptional practice is imo, a little bit sad, because I believe that it should be way more common.
Build quality of Bose products is good in my opinion. The headphones are alright but so are Sony, Plantronics and Apple. I love the sound of Airpods Pro in particular even if they don't want to stay in my ears [1] and the pairing experience even with the iPhone isn't what I expect of >$100 headphones in 2016.
If you want really good stereo or 5.1 sound there is no substitute for big speakers that can move a lot of air.
[1] maybe it is that gene polymorphism that makes my ears overflow with wax and has my doctor warning they will plug up one of these days
Agreed on pretty much all points. There is no "ultimate audio equipment piece" that is just perfect in all aspects, and the choice criteria are spread across both user preferences and specific use-cases as well.
I love the new airpods pro for my daily commute (subway, not a car; just clarifying before I get hammered down in replies for driving and using airpods at the same time), doubly so given their compactness+heavily improved ANC.
For home, I love my open-back Beyerdynamic DT1990Pro pair, due to the audio profile + insanely good physical comfort when worn for prolonged periods of time.
For gatherings with friends for when I need a somewhat-portable bluetooth speaker (that also happen to look good when sitting on a bookshelf outside of active use), I have a TE-OB4.
If I had a larger living space, I would consider getting a pair of high-quality speakers again too.
But there is not a single "this is it" piece of audio equipment that would just replace everything, so you gotta pick and choose your poison.
Build quality is trash consumer with a hefty markup. The older CD player era equipment has the cheapest CD mechanisms I've ever seen for the era. The audio pathway is the same hybrids that everyone else uses. Bose is 100% mass marketing. I'm old enough to remember the endless ads in the back of magazines.
Until the rest of the market caught up, Bose's noise cancelling algorithms were top notch. As soon as Apple entered the fray a bunch of money was thrown at the problem, the bar was raised, and now good quality noise cancelling is the norm.
But for awhile Bose's headphones had the best noise cancelling out there.
Their old ads were super irritating though, and many people (such as you and me!) are still irritated about them decades later.
> Until the rest of the market caught up, Bose's noise cancelling algorithms were top notch. As soon as Apple entered the fray a bunch of money was thrown at the problem, the bar was raised, and now good quality noise cancelling is the norm.
A minor nitpick: while Apple entering the ANC arena certainly set fire under the existing mainstream brands to improve their ANC headphones, imo Bose started facing serious competition on that front even before Apple moved in.
I remember Sony releasing their MDR-1000X par being the first crack in the wall. I specifically remember this, because I picked up those headphones in favor of Bose options at the time.
P.S. Yes, the naming scheme on Sony's side is atrocious, because MDR-1000X is the first gen of their very popular WH-1000XM line of ANC headphones that people treat as a flagship ANC headphone pair (with the most recent one being WH-1000XM6).
I had forgotten about Sony. They were indeed going back and forth with Bose on who could make the highest quality ANC.
I actually had a pair of Sennheiser noise cancelling headphones and they had a really good BT implementation, super low latency and the ANC was really good. Sadly they developed a persistent hiss in one earpiece.
Bose is fine for what it is, but it is overpriced for what it is. IMO the main point the audiophiles make is that you can get a superior product for the same cost.
If you haven't tried foam replacement tips, they make a world of difference for me. I couldn't use the airpods (non-pro) at all. I could barely use the silicon tipped pros. But when I put a foam tip on them it not only blocks out ambient sound better, they stay in place. Unfortunately the foam wears out rather quickly and I replace them around three times a year.
Sedna CrystalEarFit worked the best for me on older AirPods. Pure foam tips have a noticeably different sound profile.
On the newest ones, the tips have a foam core inside them.
The audiophile community usually are people with more money than ears, their opinion on the quality of particular brands is easy to discard, it is usually correlated more with expense than actual measured performance.
Came here to say exactly this. I consider myself an audiophile (the sane kind) and, if I want “that sound” and have time, I use my HiFi, but if I want to enjoy music and just relax, I use my Bose headphones with whatever thing I have close.
I like how they color sound, and how they use psychoacoustics to do what they do.
Audiophiles using music to listen their systems are missing the point.
> The fact that this is an exceptional practice is imo, a little bit sad, because I believe that it should be way more common.
If we gave tax breaks for open sourcing EOL products, we'd see a lot more of it. Code escrow companies might not like it, though.
"Bose blows" is typically in regards to their price/performance, and especially with how they marketed themselves throughout the 90s and early 2000s.
Bose used to advertise that they were the best sounding speaker out there, while also running advertisements that made claims which violated the laws of physics.
For the same price as a Bose system you could get something much higher quality. Bose was selling at luxury prices w/o luxury quality. They got away with it because compared to the cheap garbage most people listened to, Bose's stuff was nicer. Their quality was mid to upper mid tier, and the build quality was generally good.
But people got irritated by a decade ads saying a tiny speaker is more powerful than a proper speaker setup.
Now days Bose makes good quality noise cancelling headphones (and I suspect they made more revenue selling NC headphones during the open office and then COVID era than they ever did selling speakers in the 90s!) and they brand car stereo systems.
Their noise cancelling headphones are good, even if the ear pads wear our way too fast.
Pretty much no one has a home hi-fi setup anymore, everyone just has a sound bar. I do have a hi-fi music setup, people are rather shocked when they come over that I even bothered. I got it for $2k on Craigslist years ago, the setup cost someone a small fortune when they were brand new. IMHO buying new hi-fi gear is pointless, Speakers made in 2005 sound just as good as speakers made in 2025, the laws of physics haven't changed any!
> "Bose blows" is a popular comment amongst the audiophile community
I have a 15 years old Bose system. Is it audio-transparent ? Absolutely not, its frequency response is well documented. But the sound is very pleasing, it's reliable and nearly invisble in my living room.
I'm not an audiophile though, just a music lover.
We have some really old Bose speakers my brothers and I bought 30+ years ago at my Moms place. Just listened to them over the recent holidays. Not ann audiofile but they sounded pretty good even now.
In a previous life, I was the platform architect for the Bluetooth headphones at Bowers & Wilkins. We, naturally, did tons of competitive analysis, and I tend to agree Bose blows sound quality-wise, but their active noise cancelling is hands-down the best in the biz, and they have the weight and comfort extremely dialed-in.
Glad to see them setting a great example here instead of letting these speakers become expensive paperweights.
Seems to me like an executive saw klipsch failures and saw an opening to kill two birds with one stone.
One, to show their support for audiophiles who supported them.
Two, make superior products to klipsch that - ummm - actually state the real ranges of the speakers and use real copper windings instead of “painted” copper.
Alternatively: Bose now provides highs! No lows.
Well, Bose has a long history of continually hyping whatever they're selling as the complete & utter pinnacle of sound reproduction technology, whether or not that's actually the case. Before the internet it was through their print media ads, starting with their Direct/Reflecting home speaker tech, continued through the 800 series PA speakers, Acoustic Wave tabletop radio, etc. Not to say there were not benefits, but that the choices they made -- single driver size, requiring certain room boundaries/geometry for optimal sound, need for active EQ/processing to get full-range response before the tech was really there to do so optimally -- did not always equal great trouble-free sound as advertised.
That said their implementation of noise-cancelling headphones/earbuds was a legit game-changer. And good on them for open-sourcing these speakers!
not an audiophile but is it possible to tease out those aspects of sound reproduction if the software is open source?
My comment about sound reproduction was more a point on Bose's longstanding philosophy in building speakers than in anything about this specific software but, to answer your question... quite possibly. Bose intentionally colour the sound and apply, at the very least, EQ and some sort of active processing to it to get what they believe is the best out of the speakers and enclosures they use.
And I'm couching this all in very neutral terms, not because I have an axe to grind with them, but because I don't want to get into a flame war with the kind of audiophiles who hate Bose.
FWIW the Bose products I've heard and used all sounded pretty good. At the end of the day they're designed for people to enjoy music within a particular target context, not necessarily to be the most accurate at reproducing the recording exactly.
(I'll say this as well: reproducing the recording exactly isn't necessarily what you want to get something to sound good. A lot of albums from the loudness war era benefit significantly from rolling off some of the higher frequencies, where clipping occurs, for example. So I have one amplifier that includes - gasp, shock, horror - tone controls that I sometimes use and, on another system where the amp doesn't have tone controls, I've hooked up a [true] stereo graphic equalizer. You also have to take the listening environment into account and when you do that some element of processing the sound before it comes out of the speakers can also prove to be beneficial. Anyway, I shall now go and brace myself for some righteous abuse from the purists.)
i always heard "no high, no lows, must be bose"
The audiophile community is so far up it's own ass it doesn't see a distinction between bose and a piezoelectric buzzer.
Just to mention: Teufel has been even moving further with their fully open hardware design of MYND [0]. Hope others will follow.
[0] https://teufel.de/mynd-107002004
I bought one just this week because of this. They really went above and beyond:
- mechanical CAD, schematic and PCB files: https://docs.teufel.de/download/MYND/Open_Source_Hardware_Fi...
- firmware: https://github.com/teufelaudio/mynd-firmware
- Bluetooth API documentation: https://cdn.teufelaudio.com/image/upload/v1748589486/product...
- battery repair/replacement guide: https://cdn.teufelaudio.com/products/MYND/pdf/Teufel_MYND_RM...
I believe that they designed the mechanical parts to be 3D-printable as well.
This is really cool! I'd be curious if one could 3D print different resonance chambers to get different desired sounds from the speaker.
They do have very basic EQ but for sure you have enough documentation to modify the speaker itself if you'd like.
Ironically this makes me want to buy this discontinued model, not anything currently supported by Bose.
A better way to say that is "This will boost the second-hand value of older Bose speakers".
Budget-aware folks will buy these second-hand, neophiles will buy new, confident that long term solutions will exist even after "long term support" is over.
Heck, even knowing there's a second-hand market makes me more likely to buy Bose new.
Many companies miss how important this is, too: they get caught up in "but if they buy it second-hand, they're not buying our new stuff!". When people buy the stuff second-hand, though, they become Bose fans — that means when the second-hand Bose stuff dies, they're more likely to replace it with new Bose stuff. That's particularly true with audio equipment, where people become attached not only to how something works but how it sounds. If they like Bose's rather particular audio signature, they'll keep buying more.
Between that and the good-will they're getting from this move, this is making a ton of life-long Bose fans out of a lot of audio geeks. And if there's a community well-known for creating religions out of their hardware preferences...
Another thing companies miss is that the second-value is priced in to the price. If I know I can resell a thing for some value, that makes it more valuable than if I can't resell it all, and I can pay more for it. Contrary to what the companies think, they were in fact compensated for the after market value, and it's even better then they hoped, because that compensation occurred at time of first sale rather than some random time years later.
The most amusing anti-example of this was the Switch generation: $60 for a cartridge, or $60 for a digital license. Guess which is actually more valuable? Guess which you were more likely to find discounted, even if only by a marginal amount, by some store desperate to move stock out of the way?
By contrast, I'm not worried about the fact I can't resell my copy of Game X I got on Steam when I only paid $5 for it in the first place.
Indeed, and also people buying second-hand are pretty unlikely to buy brand new if they aren't able to find the second-hand item (or use it). It's similar to piracy in that respect, that some people who pirate might have actually bought it, but the majority likely would not have anyway so can't just say "1,000 people pirated our thing, therefore we lost 1,000 sales". The cynic in me thinks they know that and just use it as a convenient way to over-inflate the damage piracy is doing to them, but that's a separate topic
On the other hand, lots of people buying audio gear new DO take the second-hand market into account, and will spend more on the initial purchase if they think the product will retain its value.
It makes me want to buy both! Old to tinker with, new to support the move.
Bose products seem like they are most popular with older, non-technical people who see it as a luxury brand. This is the same reaction that I would have with this news because I like modifying hardware/firmware, but I was never in the market to buy Bose products in the first place. My parents on the other hand have at least 3 wave radios in the house.
Agree. This is huge. Definitely makes me want to buy more Bose products for my house.
Not huge, they didn't open source any code
Bose hardware quality is rather low and, and their sound quality is sub-par, while forcing you to pay the Bose brand tax, riding the corpse of Amar around for profit.
I'd avoid, even if they happened to do this.
My experience is the opposite: Bose hardware and sound quality seems excellent to me.
This may be subjective. Bose might sound good to some people's ears and less good to other people's ears.
I don't know about Bose. But sound quality in general is absolutely objectively measurable.
> But sound quality in general is absolutely objectively measurable.
Sound quality is not the same as music quality.
To be more specific, Sound Reproduction Fidelity is not the same as Pleasant Music
To be even more specific, Signal Reproduction is not the same as "Pleasant Sounds*
The goal of music is not always high fidelity of reproduction; if it were, over-driven valve amps would never have been a thing.
The only thing objective in this context is signal reproduction, which is not the highest concern for music production.
> To be more specific, Sound Reproduction Fidelity is not the same as Pleasant Music
If a speaker reproduces some music with 100% accuracy and the result is unpleasant, doesn’t that just mean the original music—as created by the artist—is unpleasant?
Where possible, I’d prefer a speaker that respects the artist’s decisions instead of inserting itself into the creative process.
Unless you are listening through the same studio monitors in the same room or headphones as the mixing engineer, it will never be the same.
IMHO, people place too much importance on "accuracy". While accuracy might be objectively measured, it means nothing when it comes to individual taste.
There’s a whole field of research on this (look up Floyd Toole) - while any one individual can have skewed taste, on aggregate people prefer speakers that are as close to neutral as possible.
Signal reproduction matters quite a bit more for music production than it does for music listening and enjoyment. That's why producers and engineers look for 'monitors', rather than hi-fi speakers.
Hi-fi speakers, tube amps, and other accessories generally "degrade" the sound with added harmonics and natural smile EQs. That's what makes them sound more pleasing.
(I'm not disagreeing with you, just adding more color.)
You can certainly measure it, but the catch is that there is not always a single "correct" value. So just because you can measure what the speakers are outputting and then adjust it, it doesn't mean there is one correct output value.
A good example of this is a target curve, often used in room calibration. Dirac has a good explanation: https://www.dirac.com/resources/target-curve
(highly recommend Dirac room correction, by the way)
There's arguably a subjective quality to sound enjoyment, though. The fidelity of reproduction can be measured, but I'd argue there's personal preference in the types of artifacts generated by inaccuracies in reproduction.
There's really two camps - "I like what I hears" and "this is as close to in-studio monitors as you can get".
There's an argument for both, but frankly, if studio monitor setups don't sound "as good" why bother?
you can absolutely quantify certain metrics, and you can even generalize what "good" is by surveying listener preference but that isn't the same thing as any one individual's subjective preference.
People keep bringing dead Bose bluetooth speakers to our repair café. These are a lot more expensive than the competitors. Bose has a reputation so people think they’ll last longer, but they don’t, they’ll fail just out of warranty just like cheaper brands. They also don’t sound meaningfully better. And they’re not at all engineered to be repaired. I’d avoid.
I personally prefer corded headphones and mains powered speakers, but if I were to buy a small wireless speaker I would buy a cheaper brand and ideally second hand, because this category of devices are basically consumables.
Bose in general (there are many models...) is not what I'd call high-fidelity. It doesn't mean you can't enjoy your music or your movies with it. Just don't buy this if you care about transparency, otherwise it's usually a pleasing hearing experience. Their PA line is IMO overpriced and sacrifices too much to the design and weight.
I've been playing with the idea for a bit, can you give me an order of magnitude for "entry-level HiFi"? Even if that's an oxymoron, how many zeroes does it take to get an experience that's noticeably superior to, say, default car speakers or built-in Smart TV speakers?
It's like buying a gun or a car, there are all kinds of offers and all kinds of prices. You should be able to find great offers with amp+speakers under 1k€, including VAT. Probably even less with 2.0 or 2.1 systems.
It doesn't usually take much, because very few cars or TVs come with powered subwoofers or 6x9s or quality tweeters. Second hand amps, receivers, etc. are usually a good deal, entry-level speakers are pretty cheap new though.
Better than smart TV speakers? That's a low bar.
A $40 Bluetooth box from any big name brand is better than the speakers in a smart TV.
Similar experience, even after picking up the new airpod pro 3's (the hearing aid stuff i great for my ailing ears) I still prefer, when I'm sitting at my desk working while listening to music, the quietcomfort 2 earbuds. The noise cancellation is hands down better than apple's an it's a more comfortable fit.
Typical so called audiophile stance here. I have numerous headphones (including high ends ones) and always been happy with my Bose. Sound is great and gently enhanced for listening enjoyment, whatever snobs could say about it, and the hardware is really nice. My Bose SoundSport earbuds are the best fit I ever had in 30+ years of wearing earbuds and my QC35 never failed on me. That move from them adds to all the great things I can say about this brand.
If you're talking about their headphones, I agree they _feel_ cheaply-made, but they are by no means low-quality. When you make headphones with premium materials, they get heavy, and that makes them uncomfortable/painful to wear. Speaking from prior experience. It's an incredibly delicate balancing act. Bose optimizes for comfort, which is important for e.g. long plane rides.
I'm an audiophile and very happy with one of their portable speakers. I wouldn't buy Bose monitors, though
Please suggest better alternatives
If you were going to consider Bose, you should at least take a look at Sennheiser. They are similar in a “can’t really go too wrong” sense. Nice build quality, generally pretty flat and analytical usually.
They are such a standard response that presumably a real audiophile will come along to point out that their favorite model is much better, than a particular well known Sennheiser model, but as far as one can say in brand terms they are solid.
Sennheiser sold out to a Chinese factory, and recently even stopped producing their flagship stuff in-house. They're even shutting their "cheap" Irish factory down (where modern HD650s and HD660Ss were made).
All the Chinese-made Sennheiser stuff has awful QA.
I loathe analytical sound. It destroys all listening pleasure for me. Give me nice warm coloured midtones and I'm happy!
Sure. What exactly are you looking for?
Also, there are multiple forums and subreddits you can ask this question on. You will get more answers than you would from me and the rest of HN.
Beyerdynamic DT1990s run circles around consumer-grade stuff.
Beyerdynamic announced earlier last year they're finally exiting pro and flagship tier stuff, and selling out to a Chinese equity firm.
Their build quality is exceptional, and they're built like tanks. The only problem, imo, is the Beyer house sound is very shouty and fatiguing, especially with the "990" versions of the product line over the years.
Disclaimer: I owned a Beyer DT880/600ohm (the neutral one of the 770/880/990 siblings), paired with an amp that could properly handle it. Its one of the few headphones I sold and did not retain in my collection, it deserved someone that could love it. The new Tesla-based drivers are better (such as that 1990), but still retain that Beyer sound.
Oh man. I missed that announcement somehow.
Where'd you see they're exiting pro/flagship tier stuff? Everything I can find says they're continuing to hand-make their higher-end stuff in Germany. One such source: https://www.whathifi.com/headphones/100-year-old-headphone-b...
I can't stand Beyerdynamic audio and don't understand why anyone recommends it. It has an awful treble peak you can't stop noticing once you hear it, and you can't drive their headphones without an amp.
I recommend HiFiMan Sundara/Ananda if they fit your head and there aren't any CPU fans in your room.
I don't.
Hifiman QA is exceptionally bad, and they tend to not stand by their warranty, and their US repair facility is just some dude's house.
The threads on /r/headphones over Hifiman shafting them are numerous.
Disclaimer: I too had a Hifiman pair, they sounded great, but their physical design just didn't hold up to daily use, no matter how much I babied them.
Some of their high priced noise cancelling headphones have excellent quality. I purchased the QC-25 ages ago, and when it stopped working I reached out to support, this was beyond their 3y warranty, provided serial number and they sent me a new QC-35 no questions asked replacement unit.
I am very happy with my QC-35 headphones. They are probably 5y+ now and they go with me everywhere. I think it is unfair to state their hw quality is low. It is much better than low.
In current dynamic world product quality of a company 'today' vs '5y+ ago' may drastically change. Sadly, usually to the bad side
Bose's QC/QC Ultra lines continue to receive praise for comfort, durability, sound quality, noise cancellation, etc. They make pretty great consumer quality headphones.
Until quite recently, they were widely one of if not the most recommended wireless headphones. The new Sennheiser's that come with a USB-C dongle might have finally stepped past what Bose has been delivering, but at a higher price.
I had the new QC Ultra and gave it away. The sound was mediocre at best and you can't turn NC off - a dealbreaker for me (no, passthru is not the same as off). Hope it helps someone make my mistake aa they are quite pricey.
Now if I could change the firmware to turn NC off, that would be something entirely different...
My wife normally isn’t one to splurge but after her Bose headphones died, we tried a couple other brands, returned them, and went with the QC-35 II despite them being more expensive. The “comfort” part is key, she’s on the spectrum and has a hard time with headphones irritating her, and these are hands down the most comfortable.
We also like the Bose soundbar as it has a mode that makes dialogue more intelligible on our TV.
I love my QCII earbuds, comfort and noise cancellation blow the airpodpro3's out of the water. But sadly the new hearing aid features of the airpodpros are very handy to me, so I have both. I wear the QC2's when I'm at home alone, and the app3s when I'm out and about and expect to have to have some conversations. My ears aren't so bad yet that I need hearing aids, but they are bad enough that I'm forced to lean in more than I used to. Aging is the worst.
This this also good marketing, if other companies I currently buy speakers from follow their footsteps I'll keep supporting them, but I might otherwise just move towards Bose in the future. I wish Apple would do this for their ultra legacy stuff, Microsoft does it for their legacy stuff. Not sure if we'll ever get a fully open sourced legacy version of Windows (ignoring the source code leak) but it would be cool to one day see the Windows XP source code on GitHub.
It would be an unwise business move. The moment that is done, Linux/WINE will be able to run the bulk of the software that keeps a substantial number of people locked into Windows. Most people don't need the newest version of their software to stay productive.
If society progresses as envisaged, people will always want newer and better technology. Living standards should improve for all, as the older technology is purchased second-hand by those who cannot afford the latest versions, and/or repaired as desired.
When a businesses chooses to drop support for a product entirely (hardware or spares no longer produced, and software no longer updated), they've presumably already made the business decision to drop the product for sale. If the product were still in demand and the existing devices still function, dropping product support could effectively render the devices useless or destined for landfill.
This often happens when: online services are dropped, devices cannot be repaired, or worse, software cannot be simply updated for security and compatibility reasons etc.
If manufacturers want existing users with working technology to upgrade, they should design compelling improved products, not force a load of e-waste and bricked devices. There's little reason for a manufacturer to quickly drop support without following this model of open sourcing, unless they know they are forcing existing customers to an unnecessary upgrade.
Manufacturers should support their products, innovate, or let them go over time. The "market" (consumer choice) should dictate when a product is obsolete. We own our products and should have the rights to maintain them. They should be paying us and taxed for damaging the environment for dropping support early and/or without open-sourcing.
> newer and better technology
Most newer technology hasn't seemed better in a while. It's almost impossible to find a phone with a removable battery, or one that's easily fixable, and has a headphone jack. My galaxy S3 was all of those things. USB3 is good though.
The meaning of better isn't universal unfortunately. My iPhone is considerably better than my Treo 650 which had those features. I wouldn't go back.
Those who are willing to move have already moved.
I myself would be more inclined to move if I had an option to run Adobe suite, Excel, TouchDesigner, Ableton and Recordbox through WINE without significant tinkering.
Idk enough about Ableton but theres definitely a few open source and proprietary alternatives that run on Linux. Try proton instead of Wine.
Yeah, I only use Windows when I am given a Windows system to do work.
Exactly, I wish EU enforced this.
Maybe the general rule should be like, if something isn’t in the users control and the user doesn’t want it anymore or can no longer function despite not being damaged, then the company should take back the hardware and refund the user.
So the company still have two options, either refund or open-source the systems needed for the device so that the user or third-party can continue supporting it.
This is the way! (And should be the law, maybe enforced by mandalorians taking greedy CEOs!)
Yup. All the "bricked" cars should have their service software opened. All the old iPads that have perfectly good hardware.
...
Planet is burning and the zillionaires have enough zillions already so I vouch for the Mando too.
All cars period should have their service software freely available. I shouldn't need to hunt down software on a Russian torrent site to help someone figure out why their ABS light is on.
This should be in the law imho. No hardware or software should have its support abandonned unless the spec / schematics / parts list and/or source code is released in a public repo.
I agree, but there can be IP rights involved that make this difficult.
It's not like consumer electronics contain top secret tech like EUV machines. All supply chain for firmware / software of 99.99% devices is very boring, contains absolutely nothing secret and the only reason why it's "difficult" is because IP owners was not bothered.
Once single EU / US legislation introduced that force manufacturers into opening end-of-life products all IP right owners will either immediately make it possible or go out of business.
Since everyone will be forced to do the same no one will gain any advantages.
I’m more thinking of patents and licensed third-party technology and firmware. There are standard tech stacks controlled by industry associations that you simply can’t open source because the association would sue you and kick you out.
These associations do not just exist in vacuum. They have licenses like this because law allow it and it's beneficial to them. Once there are regulation that demand something else they'll just follow the law.
Also it's not like every single bit of firmware / software must be open sourced - it's could very much be trade off where devices just need to be unlocked for modification and documentation made available.
They're just publishing API documentation. No source code of the device got published.
At least people can create their own implementation of the API tho.
If the publish the API for the server, as well as allow the device to specify the API hostname to connect to, that's all I need. We can write our own server implementation fairly easily, and this saves us the hassle of having to reverse-engineer the API, plus makes setup much easier if we can just tell the device where to connect.
I wish more manufacturers would unlock their devices for local use when they don't want to support them any more. Or maybe even, hear me out, before support ends! Maybe we could even vote with our wallets and buy open stuff instead of walled gardens.
They did not publish enough API docs to write an alternative backend.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/01/bose-open-sources-it...
Exactly. Open source is great and all, but all 99% of these devices need is simply a way to configure them to connect to a different server, when the manufacturer inevitably turns their own server down (usually) bricking devices.
The open source community will happily reverse-engineer the protocol and clean-room develop their own server code.
> 99% of these devices need is simply a way to configure them to connect to a different server, when the manufacturer inevitably turns their own server down (usually) bricking devices.
The same can be said about a lot of games, and should be the case with them as well. Big MMOs for example. See the plethora of WoW private servers as an example of how it can be done.
I think the stop killing games initiative in the EU was pushing for it but not sure how far they've gotten, but like with hardware, once a game studio no longer wants to run the servers for their game, they should be forced to turn it over to the community so the players can continue playing long after the studio is gone.
This is not applicable to games.
Bose's brand is built on audio quality. There is close to little negative impact open sourcing the API (server) in this case will bring to their brand.
For a game, open sourcing the server generally means anyone can basically mess it up and with the internet make it available to everyone to see. Then the responsibility is on the developer to protect their "brand".
The plethora of WoW private servers is not a good example. These are from individuals, or groups of people who willfully reverse engineered it on their own. This is different from a company expressly permissing and implicitly giving a grant on allowing a similar product to exist - the difference is that one gives credibility, which the other does not.
That's exactly what the "NoLongerEvil" Nest thermostat server did[0]. They just injected their own CA bundle and modified the /etc/hosts file to "free" the devices.
[0] discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45813343
Sure but that should be an up front conversation. "OK, how do we make sure as few of these turn into bricks?"
If IP rights make doing the right thing too onerous, we can always reduce IP rights powers in this specific situation.
Or across the board, since they are absurdly powerful right now. Nintendo could not legally keep you from hacking a console before the DMCA.
If they know they have to do it up front the ip rights issue disappears.
I’m all for that, but also the product might not exist if they can’t use third-party protected IP for it.
I wish there was a law that forced them to do that
This should be added into write-to-repair laws.
This could fail if too many players start to abandon/open source their products at the same time. It could lead to an overload.
Plus, I purchased my product thinking it will last forever. Sudden announcements for EOL is a terrible trend. Laws should regulate having proper disclosures that a product is promised to be serviced for x number of years at minimum, and/or mandate manufacturers themselves provide updates to allow the product to work independently of them.
++1
I do not get why not more companies are doing this! Also it pays so much into your brand perception etc.; also you will always have all ecological folks on your side because of "not producing new stuff".
This is the cheapest and best way to get the most out of your investment after it entered end-of-life.
I suspect it's because the technical staff have already been let go or replaced with outsourced maintenance-only staffing firms, which means the non-technical leadership doesn't know whether the source code would contain damaging information.
The reason I've heard for games which I assume is similar here, is that there's licensed code used which the developer can not release because they don't own it (someone else does)
I wish meta would do the same for its portal devices. The devices are solid hardware. They removed a ton of app support that needed cloud services.
I loved their camera tracking and picture frame along with their speaker quality.
Looking at you, Sonos.
Or they could have offered local control from launch and not had this issue.
i’d love for this to be required by law. i’m probably not thinking of some great reason why that might be a bad idea, but it seems like an effective way to reduce e-waste.
> More companies should follow this approach
No, the law must mandate that. You either provide active support, or if you end it you must open-source all tools necessary to perform maintenance. It's one of those things that has to be mandated by law to provide a uniform floor on all companies and manufacturers, like food safety laws, fire codes, or accessibility for the physically disabled.
This comment strikes me as absurd. How exactly would you propose that something like that be done?
Yes! This! If only my Sonos speakers were open-sourced....
It's definitely laudable. But does raise the question... why was the API not open in the first place.
It actually was. Everyone in this thread has completely missed the fact that nothing has been opened at all. (see other threads for details)
This is not open sourcing any actual software or hardware it is “open-sourcing the API documentation for its SoundTouch smart speakers”. You might be able to point them at an alternative back-end¹ if you want the cloud features, but that will need to be written from scratch rather than being forked from code provided by Sonos.
> When cloud support ends, an update to the SoundTouch app will add local controls to retain as much functionality as possible without cloud services
This is a far bigger move than releasing API information, IMO bigger than if they had actually open sourced the software & hardware, from the point of view of most end users - they can keep using the local features without needing anyone else to maintain a version.
--------
[1] TFA doesn't state that this will be possible, but opening the API makes no sense if it isn't.
According to this comment[1] by an OSS developer working on reverse engineering the device, the documentation released doesn't allow them to implement an alternative backend. If I understand the purpose of the interfaces correctly from skimming the reverse engineering effort github[2], the API released documents the HTTP interface between the phone app and the speakers, which has been available for years, and covers functionality that isn't going away. The interface between the speaker and the cloud services that are shutting down is still undocumented.
[1]https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/01/bose-open-sources-it...
[2]https://github.com/deborahgu/soundcork
A comment here also says this is the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46544001
Looking over the API docs seems to confirm what the comment you referenced and the poster I linked here is saying. I'm seeing calls to virtually press buttons on the speaker, set the input source, to query the presets, and some zone-relayed calls, but nothing about actually playing audio from network sources.
For the call re: presets I see:
> Description: Presets are a core part of the SoundTouch ecosystem. A preset is used to set and recall a specific music stream supported by the SoundTouch speaker
There's a GET method that returns information about presets. Presumably you'd use a POST or PUT method to manage the presents. To that end, under POST, it says:
> POST: N/A
It looks like this API basically allows you to control it like an dumb speaker. That's not nothing, but it's not much either.
There doesn't seem to be anything in the API about controlling how the speak communicates with a back end service.
Edit:
Having some time to read over your [2] and the link to [0] it looks like getting root on the speaker w/ physical access is ridiculously easy. Booting the unit w/ a FAT32 USB drive attached with a file named "remote_services" in an otherwise empty root directory opens up an ssh server and the root user has no password.
The comments on [0] have some interesting tidbits in them, too.
These speakers look like they might be fun to play with and once Bose kills the back end people may unload them cheap.
[0] https://flarn2006.blogspot.com/2014/09/hacking-bose-soundtou...
Ah, that makes sense as well. Not sure why I fixated on what the speaker might call out to, and didn't think of what might want/need to control the speaker.
One thing nobody is touching on: since it's not actually open source, when this thing is found to have dozens of security holes (or any bugs), they are not going to be patched.
( Their announcement: https://www.bose.com/soundtouch-end-of-life The API doc: https://assets.bosecreative.com/m/496577402d128874/original/... )
Also, when the likes of Spotify change their APIs, the integration will likely stop working too.
Ho no, XML.
IBM's opening of desktop PC standards also contributed a lot to computing.
Sometimes, an open API is all you need.
It was reverse engineered, not opened by IBM
No, they published schematics and full BIOS source code.
But it was not libre, they held the copyright to the source code. So to get around this, competing companies wrote a spec from the source code and then had another team which never saw the code implement a new BIOS from the spec.
That's exactly what blackbox reverse engineering is.
Yeah but writing that backend app will be much much easier now
It’s a very nice thing to do, but from what I have read it is very much not open sourcing anything.
Maybe that distinction is too arcane for general technology audiences, but I don’t really think it is?
The Verge's headline is misleading
> Bose is open-sourcing its old smart speakers
Bose, though, makes a more nuanced distinction in their announcement, which is linked to in the article
> Open-source options for the community | We’re making our technical specifications available so that independent developers can create their own SoundTouch-compatible tools and features.
Bose never claims they're making the speakers open-source, it's lazy reporting by The Verge. They're just making it a little easier for the community to build stuff if they want.
While actually releasing the source code for the speakers would be best, there might be some legitimate business concerns. To me this is a step in the right direction, and their official announcement accurately represented that.
The question on my mind is will the SoundTouch app continue to be supported on new mobile OS versions ?
Is it the same app that caters for other speakers too ? If it is, and Bose continue to include their old speakers on the functionality of the app, then I can hardly see how this is a true EoL. They’re really continuing to support the speakers in their app, at least.
They're discontinuing support for SoundTouch Speakers. The SoundTouch App controls SoundTouch Speakers. Put two and two together...
From their announcement:
Considering that new speakers don't use SoundTouch, I wonder too. I hope that they keep the app running for a while. This kit is expensive and it can't have a short life time!
They are claiming open source, without doing it.
Reality: users are still getting a feature cut with an update.
They're not really "open-sourcing" anything in the sense that I would think about it. As far as I can tell they're doing two things:
* Removing cloud-server dependency from the app.
* Publishing API documentation for the speaker.
I actually think this is worth noting not so much in a "well aktshully it's not open source!" kind of way, but as a good lesson for other manufacturers - because this is meaningfully good without needing to do any of the things manufacturers hate:
* They didn't have to publish any Super Secret First or Third Party Proprietary IP.
* They didn't have to release any signing keys or firmware tools.
* They get to remove essentially all maintenance costs and relegate everything to a "community."
But yet people are happy! Manufacturers should take note that they don't have to do much to make customers much happier with their products at end of life.
This might sound crazy to some people, but I think this is much better than ongoing support. Removal of reliance on cloud alone is a massive feature that gets me interested in buying one of these (I don't currently own one). And the fact it has an API I can hit myself? Awesome!!!
Not crazy. I would be much more willing to buy a device, in general, if it was advertised as NOT cloud-dependent rather than cloud-dependent.
Good for them. Makes me more likely to consider buying a Bose in future, not just because I know it won't be bricked, but also for the environmental impact of this. Kudos.
If I'm understanding it right, any new speaker you can buy from them will still be dependent of some cloud service.
On that case, no, that wouldn't make me consider buying them. Because the one I can buy lacks exactly the feature that would make me consider it.
I am assuming that the GP was referring to buying these exact speakers second-hand, given how they spoke of the environmental impact.
If only their sound signature was a bit better... they went all in on engineering tricks to make things small and cheap to produce, but it shows in their sound quality. Their QC headphones are the best in noise cancellation, and the sound quality is good enough that they're my pair of wireless headphones.
I know sound signature is a matter of personal taste, but FWIW, Bose QCs track the Harman curve pretty well.
E.g.: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/b...
Yep, their QCs are good enough and the rest of the package makes up for it. It's their speakers of which I am still not impressed.
A long while ago i heard something (that might have been a urban myth) about Bose putting useless weight into their headphones to make them appear more "substantially professional". Is that a myth or they have pivoted towards actual quality since early days?
You’re probably thinking of Beats. But even then, it turns out that the original story was wrong because they were knock-off Beats.
https://www.core77.com/posts/38311/Teardown-Reveals-Beats-He...
There used to be a whole culture of bose kind of being a-holes. (Like 20 years ago.) I used to work at CNET back then and there was a kind of "yeah bose is ok" kind of vibe but it was always tinged with "but they want to sue you if you say mean things" whether they did or not.
As far as I know now, things have changed substantially. I would assume this includes engineering quality and honesty.
This bricking avoidance seems like another note in that positive direction.
My understanding of modern Bose kit based on RTINGS reviews is that it's fairly competitive in its price range. Still a touch pricey for what you get, but not bad by any means—like 2nd/3rd best, and occasionally punching above its weight for their midrange offerings. They seem to be #1 for comfort (headphones) though.
I don't own any, I've just read reviews from when I was in the market for new headphones and earbuds.
Their headphones are remarkably comfortable
I have a pair of Bose QC35s and a set of AirPod Pros. More often than not, for a late night YouTube binge in bed, I’m reaching for the QC35s.
I believe that's always been a thing. A long time ago I read this teardown article [1] of real vs counterfeit Beats headphones. And even the counterfeit versions had metal weight added to make it feel like the real Beats headphones!
[1] https://blog.bolt.io/our-beats-were-counterfeit/
Those were Beats, not Bose, and it was true. IMO Bose does a great job of being both consumer friendly and high quality. There are others with higher fidelity for the same price (Shure, Sennheiser) but you often lose the comfort and portability Bose offers.
Can you give the source for that? The one posted shows the claim was debunked by the fact that they were not really Beats.
https://www.core77.com/posts/38311/Teardown-Reveals-Beats-He...
That was Beats. Pre acquisition IIRC, it was years ago.
Can you give the source for that? The one posted shows the claim was debunked by the fact that they were not really Beats.
You are right, my memory only includes the original report and not the follow-up that determined it was bunk. Sadly it is too far past my post so I cannot edit it. Apologies for persisting bad info
Their aviation headsets are infamous for being heavy and the latest generation of the A30s haven't changed much except it's much lighter because they swapped out some metal parts for plastic.
When I bought my Bose QC ten years ago, I tried a lot of brands and found Bose to have the most pleasant sound, very clear/neutral. I guess it’s personal taste.
no highs — no lows — just Bose
I used to have an unexplained resistance to buy Bose products. After the hinge of my Sony mx-1000 headphones broke in to two places, I gave in and got a Bose qc. Man, the build quality was insanely good. The sound was really good. And it’s really comfortable to wear. I had changed my view.
This is going to read like I'm shilling but: I was so impressed with Bose QC headphones that i stocked up and gave out 7 pairs to my closest friends and family this year for christmas
Thee noise cancellation was unmatched several years ago. I picked up mine because we were spending hours in the data center. Suddenly we could work and take calls in that hell. I still have those, but the AirPods have taken their place on flights. It’s just less to bring with me.
Hopefully, someone from Bose sees these comments. There is a serious segment of the pro and prosumer audio market that values open-source, interoperability, long service life, and is willing to pay a bit more for it.
I hope Bose continues to do this for future products and is rewarded financially for it.
Hey Sonos, this is how you handle old products, and this is why most of us wont touch your hardware ever again.
I have my fathers Sonos soundbar and a pair of speakers at home that I bought for him as Christmas gifts years ago. I still can't believe they knowingly released an app that bricked older devices.
I have to try and get them working again. The only solution I've heard of is to get an old version of the Sonos app APK, a dedicated old single purpose Android phone to acts as a bridge between your speakers and phone and connect that way.
Stay away from Sonos.
I have 2012 Sonos hardware. You can still get the original Sonos S1 controller, which works with old stuff. It's pretty annoying that all the new stuff is S2 (and that app is better supported), but it's not as hard as you're describing it. You can get it off Google Play and just use it.
The quality of the software, and the fact that it isn't really updated, is another thing, but the actual software availability is there.
_Some_ of the software is there. They randomly intentionally broke the desktop apps for S1 devices.
I recently posted a comment [0] critical of Bose for needing an app, and it's nice to see that Bose decided to take a much better approach to end-of-life.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45373200
Does it though? I'm using my QC on my phone without any app, just BT. Sure I can't adjust all settings but enough to be usable.
Also FWIW first step for QC35 support on https://gadgetbridge.org/gadgets/headphones/bose/?h=bose which is IMHO the way to go.
This should be standard practice. Some companies have terrible policies around bricking their products.
When my kid was born, I bought a brand-new Snoo. After six months, I wanted to sell it since we no longer needed it. That's when I discovered stories of people whose used Snoos had been bricked by the company. For such an expensive product, that is such a waste. If I'd known about this beforehand, I never would have made the purchase in the first place.
Thanks Bose for opencycling Bose hardware into OSS audio ecosystems that could support multiple vendors.
https://github.com/captivus/bose-soundtouch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyrion_Music_ServerI've just created a TypeScript version of the same API as the Python interface. https://github.com/cssinate/bose-soundtouch
> opencycling
Is that a word? Seems interesting but never read it before.
If more vendors follow the lead of Logitech and Bose, opencycling would be a subset of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upcycling
Providing API specs is not open-sourcing them. Where's the source code?
Yeah that's quite fair, the article is not very accurate.
It sounds like there are two main pieces to me:
1. Removal of cloud dependency
2. Making usable the API (and providing documentation)
With a minor 3rd piece:
3. The official app will be updated to support the "offline" mode without losing as many features as possible now that the cloud service is going away.
All very laudable things IMHO. I'm actually going to buy one of these
yes. especially when you consider that point 2 requires some amount of investment (writing the api docs, ensuring no ip leaks, etc.)
Those APIs have already existed. So it is probable that they already had a documentation.
Sanitizing an existing documentation for public release might take notable time and effort if there are 100s of endpoints. But I would assume that is not the case with an API for a speaker.
Source code to what?
This is making them controllable.
The headline may be inaccurate, but I'm not clear on what source code you'd even want. To the firmware do you mean?
A documented API seems like the most useful option here.
The title of the article is misleading. The API documentation is indeed useful but I wouldn't call publishing the API documentation open source.
The soundtouch web api which is what was "open sourced" was already an existing thing for a long time. You just had to access it from the bose developer portal I think. I don't think anything actually happened here. I'm so surprised that HN is excited about this story because nothing seems to have been released.
There are several things they could open source: the firmware, the server, the app.
I assumed they meant the firmware, and was quite surprised they would do that...
Maybe Bose doesn’t have all the rights necessary to open source their code, eg because they rely on libraries.
Firstly, the source code is probably being used on newer devices, so Bose would not like sharing their proprietary solutions which might contain thirds party code they cannot share.
Secondly, these devices are basically one step above embedded. It's highly unlikely you can load and run anything custom on them.
Since they are opening up the API, you can keep using them for what they were made for, which is at least a solid basic liberty
I admit that I expected more. They really did the minimum, as in, anything less should have been illegal. It is praiseworthy, but it is unfortunate that it is.
Seeing that, I expected the ability to build and run a custom firmware, like with an Android device with its bootloader unlocked. But it is not that, and they didn't open source their app either.
What they did is that they removed dependence on their servers, and opened their device to be controlled by third party apps. That is, they let users use their device past its end of life, including when the first party app will stop being maintained, but not to the point of letting user add features.
In understand why they would do that, they don't want users to backport features only available on their latest models that are sold at a premium, therefore competing against themselves. After all, the value in smart speakers is not the sound producing device, which I think is a problem that has been solved more than a decade ago at the consumer level, it is all about software features.
Agree that the 'Open Source' is misapplied in this instance. I do applaud Bose for providing a graceful EoL to their product and consumers.
Yeah, it's kinda sad how much applause this is garnering when publishing API specs should be bare minimum for any smart device, never mind EoL concerns.
Don't let perfect be the the enemy of good. I fully agree with you on what the bare minimum should be, but the reality is that our definition of bare minimum is currently a fantasy. Any steps taken toward our vision is good and should be applauded IMHO. Especially when it's a major player like Bose that hopefully sets a positive precedent and gets other manufacturers to realize this is not only possible but leads to applause and hopefully more sales.
Evolution v. Revolution. I'd prefer the latter, but realistically the former is the more likely to succeed short of people like us getting control of regulatory bodies and forcing it.
what more do you actually need?
Unless you want to actually develop ON the device (and build binaries etc...), this completely allows you to use the device and connect it to whatever, so I don't know what more we should expect.
No one else is doing this, so yeay applause
Open sourcing the server code would make getting your own instance of it way easier, and maybe opening the app code so people should change the controls?
As others have said already, they are just un-obscuring the server API and restoring local control to your speakers when they discontinue the service. There is nothing noble about this, it is almost least they could do. I walked away from a large investment in Sonos gear over forcing legacy equipment into the cloud, this sort of thing is why.
It's the speaker API, not the server API
From https://www.bose.com/soundtouch-end-of-life:
> Open-source options for the community
> We’re making our technical specifications available so that independent developers can create their own SoundTouch-compatible tools and features. The documentation is available here: SoundTouch API Documentation (https://assets.bosecreative.com/m/496577402d128874/original/...).
AFAIK, the soundtouch web API was already accessible via some bose developer portal. It doesn't seem like they are open sourcing anything. This API just allows you to make basic requests to do things like change volume on the speaker.
To support the smart features of the SoundTouch speakers, we would the soundtouch user management service. Speakers connect to this very frequently and its where refresh tokens for music services and presets are stored. The speaker firmware itself has lots of source code, including the bit to handle music services and playback. There is an abstraction layer for music service APIs. There is a process on the speaker that reaches out to a music service registry, which is an index of bose music service adapters. Each of these adapters essentially proxies a music service like tunein, spotify, and even the "stream a custom station" feature.
If bose open-sourced the speaker firmware, we could make a firmware build which talks to a 3rd party user management service, and reaches out to a 3rd party music service registry. Then we could add and maintain music service playback for the community. But there is no open sourcing of any actual code here and this soundtouch web api cannot change the URLs on the existing firmware of the user management service or the music service registry.
So to my eye this story seems misleading and just some PR nonsense. It's a little frustrating reading all of the "great job, Bose!" comments here like anything was actually done... Disclaimer: I used to work at Bose.
Very nice!
One time I got a free Harman Kardon bluetooth speaker from Microsoft (the Invoke from 2017). They were $100* but went on sale for $50 and I snagged one.
Then Microsoft discontinued Cortana for it, but they didn't kill the speaker. They released firmware that turned it into a perfectly good bluetooth speaker (which I still use today.) And they sent me a $50 gift card* to buy something else from Microsoft. Good will! I was a big fan of Microsoft hardware. Shame about the software...
* Apparently $200 initially but they had some steep sales because Cortana as a voice assistant wasn't reviewing well. Reviews are a bit negative on the sound quality. Probably true enough at $200, but for $0-50, I think it's actually really good sound quality.
* https://news.harman.com/releases/releases-20200730
Cool to see the Invoke getting mentioned!
I was the engineering lead on that product, and built a SW platform from scratch for it (Microsoft provided an SDK to Cortana which they developed in parallel.)
The internal build could actually run Cortana, Alexa and Google Assistant simultaneously and you could e.g. set an alarm with one of them and query it with another, and they could interrupt each other based on priority. Obviously nobody wanted that feature, but it was hella cool that it worked. Oh, and you could make Skype calls from across the room, and the microphone array lived up to Skype's tough certification requirements which took weeks of testing in Microsoft's anechoic chamber for the DSP/algorithm team to fine tune.
I tried to push for open-sourcing the platform but it was tricky because 1) the director of engineering in Harman didn't know what open source meant and for a hardware focused business to understand the value was a hard sell, 2) it used a HW module that came with a SW stack I mostly got rid off but a few parts were remaining that would need to be replaced which would require additional resources, 3) I was burned out at that point and had limited energy left to fight the good fight. Really too bad, it could have been a cool voice agent development platform, and I honestly think it would have sold in large volumes as a developer-friendly device.
Glad you like it, sorry about the remaining Bluetooth bugs nobody got around to fix, since it basically flopped instantly.
While laudable, the release of the documentation is completely useless. The protocol is rather simple and was completely reverse engineered already many years ago. In fact it’s already integrated into several open-source home management tools e.g. Home Assistant.
https://github.com/CharlesBlonde/libsoundtouch
It was already released under the Bose developer portal. I don't see anything new here.
The rest api was taken apart years ago for my old Sonos. They had originally promised to add AirPlay support later said, “Just kidding. Why don’t you brick it instead.” At that point I was finished with closed ecosystems for audio. At least someone made an AirPlay agent that lives on the home server. That speaker has survived many years too.
I'm in the market for speakers and Bose definitely has rose higher on my list
I actually found a nice SoundTouch 20 discarded on the curb, a couple months ago.
I assumed it was probably discarded due to the frequent situation here, of student who is moving away, and who doesn't want the hassle or expense of moving things that don't fit in their luggage.
Now I wonder whether it was discarded because the owner heard it was being bricked, so not worth moving with them.
(Don't worry, I'm a curb Jawa master. I carried it home, realized it was IoT that required an icky closed app thing to use it, and so gave it to an MIT student. I just emailed them the URL of this good news. Possible bummer for the previous owner, though.)
The one thing I’d love to have is repairable Bose headphones. I’ve used different ones but Bose with proper EQ settings are extremely good. The comfort levels on those is exceptional. In my entire life I’ve never seen headphones this comfortable. But once the battery wears out getting it repaired seems to include soldering. Should’ve been easily swappable. Also their Bluetooth can be finicky. One more area that needs improvement.
Repairing the QC 35 was not difficult. It’s just a shame it requires soldering on a new battery pack. Even the drivers are replaceable with that little tool. A few years ago I gave mine an affordable overhaul with a new battery and replaced the earmuffs. Right as rain now.
I don't understand why consumer goods can't use 18650 cells to make devices long-term viable instead of soon-to-be e-waste. There are fewer and fewer devices I'm willing to buy because interchangeable batteries seem to be going away.
Devices want to be portable. the competition for weight and size is very high. It's ironic how as usage of phones increased considerably with social apps, people seem to not have a problem with thicker iPhones for larger battery. The current iPhone 17 Pro is a chonk that would probably have been considered bulky and backwards 10 years ago.
The trends decide the standard. Many EVs use 18650 but I can see that for competition and weight reduction they may switch to a more proprietary standard like blade batteries in BYD for competition. It all depends on where the competition is going with it.
For earwear, I would say that portability and weight is a big area for competition.
This makes me more likely to buy Bose.
Why would I buy something that a vendor intends to kill off in an attempt to make me buy again?
love it, but I'm surprised after the experiences I had with Bose in the past
Respect to Bose for taking a better stance on this. I still remember Sonos implementing "Recycle Mode" that they thankfully backtracked on.
Backtracked or not I won't ever buy Sonos because of that move.
Yeah, I couldn't even get the damn thing to work reliably when it was new. Oh but you can rest assured that it had no problem exfiltrating all that precious data of mine about what I was doing, and any other things they could suck out of my Android phone. No way in hell will I EVER buy another Sonos product.
we've got a pair of Sonos One speakers airplay(2?) connected to our Apple TV (recent generation): the sound is excellent but connection over airplay regularly is dropped, which might be Apple's doing, since they may well favor device testing with homepods. it drives some here to anger...it is a pisser because the sound quality is great.
I noticed Sonos speakers are featured in some upscale cars now, Audi for example.
Putting software in long lived components — screens, speakers, whatever — is shortsighted as the industrial short term and barely engineered mindset.
Maybe in an era where software can be carefully engineered to a point of actual completion it will make sense, but for now it’s mostly stupid.
Open sourcing potential ongoing support and tinkering is good, but it doesn’t get the core problem that it wad probably never the right thing to put the smarts in the speakers in the first place.
Unrelated to Bose's open hardware: The project Gadgetbridge has headsets and earplugs from various brands, but almost no Bose. https://gadgetbridge.org/gadgets/headphones/bose/ The community show interest, but still nothing. https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge/issues?stat...
Interesting article - most products are treated as “delivered” the moment they ship. A project manager hands over, success is declared, and the organisation moves on. But physical products with embedded software don’t stop being systems just because the project ends — they keep accumulating risk, cost, and user impact right through to end-of-life.
What usually gets missed is that end-of-life is still part of the project, even if it sits years downstream. When software support is withdrawn without a transition path, the hardware doesn’t just lose features — it loses trust. That’s not a technical failure, it’s a lifecycle planning failure.
Open-sourcing at sunset is interesting because it’s one of the few mechanisms that acknowledges this gap. It doesn’t help most users directly, but it at least hands control back instead of silently bricking capability.
I’m curious whether we’ll start seeing project managers and product teams treat “exit conditions” as a first-class deliverable — with explicit decisions about data, firmware, APIs, and ownership once commercial support ends — rather than treating end-of-life as someone else’s problem.
Why would anyone want a smart speaker, when every speaker acts as one when hooked to the sound output of a phone, wirelessly or wired?
I'll admit, I don't want or use 'smart' anything, and am currently trying to disable smart devices that were already present in my home from the previous owner.
I have a speaker in the lounge and kitchen. Wr want to be able to listen to the same thing whichever room we’re in. Or perhaps we don’t.
Being able to say “play this stream in room 1,3,6 and this in room 4 and nothing in room 2,5,7” is a valuable feature for people who don’t live alone in a studio flat.
Fun fact: Bose is 51% owned by MIT (non voting shares) https://news.mit.edu/2011/bose-gift
The hardware on the soundtouch 10/20/30 series was always surprisingly over engineered with heavy magnets, decent power supplies, and good enclosures but let down by a sluggish app and flaky mDNS implementation.
With this, they just became the best value proposition on the used market. Flashing these with a minimal distro running snapclient (for multiroom audio) and shairport-sync (AirPlay 2) makes them infinitely better than they were on stock firmware. eBay prices are probably going to double by tomorrow morning.
I have used a ST10 as my tv speaker for years and despite being mono it has such a clear and full sound. Spectacular little box.
They hardware always been and continues to be finessed. Worth the extra premium imho.
Except they didn't open source anything. They just published a simple API spec to allow play/pause/next button support over http.
Happy to see this happening. You know what would make me even happier? Having open source alternatives available to use as soon as I buy the device, not only after it's discontinued
If the software gains traction in a public git repo this could be a good purchase for someone wanting a cost effective, great sounding, customisable, retro styled speaker.
The folks on /r/bose were complaining loudly about this. I'm glad that Bose heard them and is allowing SoundTouch app development to continue!
You know, it's human to err sometimes, and since corporations apparently are people too, so can they err, this was written.
Sometimes companies fuck up, what's really refreshing is to see a company backpedal on a shit choice, and decide to do better. Nicely done Bose!
Oh cool! I got a set of SoundTouch speakers years ago because they supported simultaneous Bluetooth playback as well as synced cloud service playback. This was in 2018 so options were more limited then. Since it became clear Bose was shutting them down I've moved over to Wiims[1] for managing playback (the SoundTouch app was always kind of odd and hard to manage) - but allowing local control is really nice. Currently you need to hit a button to enable playing from AUX on the soundtouches - they won't stay on the "dumb speaker" mode unless music is playing. Hopefully after this I'll be able to set them up as permanent speakers driven by the wiims.
[1] https://www.wiimhome.com/
It's sad how surprised the author and all of us are. Has it really become the norm to create crap that you pay for, that just stops working one day and becomes e-waste? If that ever happens to me, that's a company I'm never giving money to again, ever.
Why are these devices connecting to the Internet at all? Aren't they supposed to be connected to phones and TVs via cable or bluetooth? I would never allow any "smart" anything device to speak to the Internet in the first place.
You used to be able to walk over to a speaker and with 1 button click play music from a preset on a music service like Tunein or spotify.
Now will need to fiddle with your phone to connect with bluetooth or something.
They can play Spotify and radio over the internet.
Just a separate post in case people found this helpful. Here are some APIs available so you can build your own apps:
- Python: https://github.com/captivus/bose-soundtouch - TypeScript: https://github.com/cssinate/bose-soundtouch
Nice. This reminds me of Logitech who open sourced LMS (Logitech Media Server) when they discontinued their multiroom product (known as Squeezebox before they bought it).
Still a fantastic multi-room setup to this day... I run a server as well as a client from a Raspberry Pi.
After my last Sonos, I gave up on smart speakers. Recently I discovered Squeezelite-ESP32 / piCorePlayer and I'm not going back. I'm free to choose my own speakers (and people sell great 2nd hand dumb speakers for nothing!), I can stream, sync, etc - and they integrate great with Home Assistant. No more proprietary protocol for me, thank you...
Reword a public announcement [1], slap on a misleading title, put it behind a cookie banner and paywall and boom - Journalism! "Bose is releasing documentation for EOL smart speaker HTTP API" would be more apt. Not even Bose is claiming that anything has been open-sourced in their statement. Titling the section "Open-source options for the community" is as close as they come to that.
Still, props to Bose for actively helping to keep their old devices usable.
[1] https://www.bose.com/soundtouch-end-of-life
On a related note, I'm eternally grateful for the conversion to open source of the Squeezebox platform (now known as Lyrion Music Server) and SageTV. I use both of these every day.
Hear hear. I'm also a daily LMS/squeezebox user, across many years.
In fact, given the full-throated open source nature of that platform (you can even build your own player with a raspberry pi[1]), I doubt I'll ever need to use anything else for the rest of my life for playing music in my home, even as my devices die and need replacement over time.
... which does make me wonder: that's great for me, but I can definitely see it as a deterrent for companies to do similar. If they want to make a competing future product, they'll be competing against an open-sourced version of their past selves, too.
[1] https://www.picoreplayer.org/
I got my first Bose headphone in 2008 or so. It was a treat for myself as a poor university student after a paycheque. I loved the headphone and one day it broke down after several years of heavy abuse. I called their customer service for repairs and how much it would cost. Rather than recommending me to just buy a new one, the customer support agent asked questions about the model, what the issue was, and offered a replacement.
I've loved their product and support ever since. Glad to see this happening as well. Kudos.
This is amazing, and I hope this sets a precedent for other companies. Stuff like this would definitely sway my buying decision, if I know when a product becomes EOL I can tinker with it.
Well done Bose! This puts you higher on the list for my next purchase.
I don't understand why so many comments here are negative. This is a nice move, and Bose should be thanked and encouraged to do similar moves again. It's a step in the right direction!
This is an amazing idea - whoever came up with it, should get a promotion. I'd not be surprised that if this continues, Bose could be what e.g.: ThinkPad became and will have a steady customer and fan base
The arguments in this thread about sound quality crack me up. Reminds me of when a famous mix engineer was in a best buy and the guy said 'These sound just like it did in the studio!' He said, no it doesn't. We used NS10s.
Really glad to hear this, I've been so close to throwing out my SoundTouch 20, which makes me sad because it looks great and sounds better than my Google Nest speaker (placement issue? hard to say).
Has anyone found or started related github repos?
I am not a big fan of Bose for personal reasons, but they get my respect for this action.
Something Sonos could learn from perhaps (sorry - I have an interest here).
Great move Bose! I hope this trend continues - it's really nice to see a vibrant market for used/vintage electronic products in some categories (e.g. old iPods) rather than them just contributing to more e-waste.
Meanwhile they "bricked" the login in their app for some countries arbitrarily: https://www.reddit.com/r/bose/s/ijKcvl09FW
Now users like me can't configure their devices (because the login is mandatory for using anything in the app). Some users report they aren't even able to use it with a VPN.
The over-reliance on closed source apps with mandatory logins for configuring devices you own must come to an end.
This is where EU needs to put its weight and at least in Europe - if you sell something but not willing to support - open source client, server and device all sorts of software.
I think it would be a good idea to tax companies significatnly when bricking their devices, it's creating e-waste. Open sourcing them like this would be a way for them to avoid fines.
Legends. Open source, create a community of hackers around your products, everyone is happy.
I really hope Logitech is paying attention, because when Harmony finally dies, I'm not sure how I'm going to replace it.
The released documentation:
https://assets.bosecreative.com/m/496577402d128874/original/...
From a quick glance it looks like you are just able to do high level playback controls, similar to what you'd do using their on-device UI. Perhaps that's enough?
The speakers have a telnet interface and DLNA support, but no documentation and I was not able to make it work with MiniDLNA in a couple of hours of trying.
I mean, suppose a CD player only used proprietary CDs. If the company dropped support and opened it to every other CD brand, would you complain that you can't load cassettes? Or burn ISOs with it?
I wish Apple did this with the older iPhone models that can't even connect to cellular networks anymore.
Sadly this is not the norm, but this is a great step in the right direction.
it's sad that this is not the default behaviour. hopefully the stop killing games movement will put something similar into law with potentially further-reaching side-effects eventually. Because frankly, sunsetting products like this should be common sense, not the exception it currently is.
Some good news
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Take that Sonos!
That's very good, props to Bose.
and suddenly Bose is on the list of consumer products I will consider for my home. Good job!
How do I upvote 3 times
Great move Bose
Shame on you, Google. You disabled my Nest thermostat and Nest Secure alarm — I will never buy your products again.
API Documentation https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/2025....
Bose official announcement https://www.bose.com/soundtouch-end-of-life
Ooh, I might consider actually buying Bose products now. Way to go!
Finally someone!
this should be required by law
This is a great PR move for Bose in a market that doesn't care about name brands like it used to. Maybe they can win some customers back and be considered cool again.
On the one hand it’s great Bose is doing this — on the other it sucks that this is so remarkable. Having stuff you bought that does not actually need the cloud continue to work should be the default.
"Smart" things get old quickly...
I think I bought one of these ten years ago.
My parents' sound system is from the mid 90s
The headline is somewhat questionable, but that's not Bose's fault.
Good job Bose!
I'm glad this has happened, but I'm be gladder if this was a legal requirement.
Good for them! I own two sets of noise-cancelling Bose headphones and a (dumb) speaker, and they've all been pretty solid, and for half the price of equivalent Apple headphones.
I'm still using stereo speakers even though the local store seems to only sell single units. They have bluetooth but I don't see why they would need to be "smarter" than this.
ianal and kudos to Bose for their relatively graceful hardware depreciation approach and releasing their API documentation; the license for said documentation does not appear to be easily recognized as "open source" by using a standard GPL, MIT, Apache, etc license.
Has anyone read the API documentation EULA and can comment on if it really meets some recognizable standard for "open source?"
https://archive.ph/Fzrqe