Bose QC30 ANC Wireless Headphones

These are the most expensive Bose headphones that I've ever purchased. I really really liked the roughly $100 ear buds that were wired and had zero noise cancellation. I think they were the Bose Sound sport. The sound was good for me, they were comfortable and stayed in my ear well, and because they had zero noise cancellation I could just pause music and talk to someone without removing them. That's not to say that in some circumstances I would really like noise cancellation but there are pros and cons to each. I really wanted wireless so I could watch movies on my computer / TV in my bedroom and it's also just more convenient even with my phone. I didn't just want them for working out so 3-5 hours of battery really wasn't enough. These ones have 10 hours or so which is so much better. It's interesting comparing them to my wired 100$ bose buds. The sound quality is better but at the same time it's not as good. You could say I'm overall happy with the sound as I would expect wired to be better. You can spend more money but reality is reality. The noise cancellation is pretty good. I can study in the lounge in my sharehouse and it blocks out most of the chatter and sound from the TV no problem. It helps if I have some music going but even without it blocks background ok. If I turn the noise cancellation off I can hear pretty well but not as well as my old wired buds. If I'm going to have a conversation, I will take these out of my ears to hear better. What I find most annoying and why I don't give these a 4 or 5 rating is that I can't take these jogging. They stay in my ears just fine if I'm not too active but when I'm jogging, the included necklace bounces everywhere and the right earbud with the controls on it will not stay in my ear for more than a few minutes. I've gone out several times with these and had mixed results - it did seem to stay in better on some runs than others but it's basically just frustrating as hell. I have some blu tooth headphones from Plantronics that are designed for running and they do not sound as good but they stay in place very well. They are far superior for running because of this. For the few minutes they stay in, they're really nice and the noise cancellation is wonderful. You have your own little universe of musical bliss. But then it comes loose and then it just falls out. I've tried different sized buds and for me the largest size stays in a bit longer than the medium but it still comes out. I have yet to try the mic out and call someone with these on my iPhone. As it stands now, this is a feature I have no use for. I hope it works well in case that changes for me but I can't comment on it at all right now. *edit* I'm updating the review. I kind of am writing this spur of the moment and had forgot about something that is annoying and should be fixed. I use a flash card app called Anki on my iPhone everyday to study Japanese. The flashcards have audio. When I turn a flashcard over, it will play the audio, and then be silent until I flip a new card. With these headphones, I actually miss the first 1 second of audio about 20 to 25% of the time. Missing the first second of audio may not seem like a big deal but when it's a flashcard, that's basically how long the audio is. I know this is an issue for blue tooth technology because I use the above mentioned Plantronics headphones too sometimes and they have issues as well. However, they handle it better. The audio will literally not play until the headphones are ready to receive the audio. So compared to wired headphones, there will be slight delay between cards sometimes. Not much - but half a second is perceptible. This is preferable to outright missing the audio. Or sometimes it just plays the flashcard muffled.. at about 20% volume. Very strange. I've gotten in the habit of just using wired headphones to study but sometimes these headphones are all I have with me. I hope there's an update to alleviate this if not fix it entirely. *update 12/17/16* I looked into returning them shortly before the 30 days were up but Amazon told me I was ineligible. So I'm updating a few more frustrating things with the headphones. Getting them to properly connect with the device you want them to can be a pain. If you only use them with two devices, or better yet one device, then you may not have an issue with this. Since they automatically connect to the last two previous devices when you turn them on, if you want to use a different device, you will have to find your smart phone with the app to disconnect it from a device. Sometimes it will keep wanting to reconnect with said device but eventually you can get it to quit. In my own case I use these headphones with my iPhone, iPad, and Mac book Pro. If it's connected to the iPhone and iPad, and I want to use the Macbook, I can't just go into bluetooth settings on my macbook and tell it to connect (this works well with my other blue tooth headphones.) I have to either use the app or go power down one of the other devices. Rebooting the headphones won't help since it reconnects with the devices automatically. I'm also having an issue with the software that runs the device... The headphones just stopped working today for no apparent reason and I assumed the battery died. This seemed odd since it had a full charge but I only used it about 4-5 hours on and off. Then when I went to charge it, none of the status lights turned on. I kind of freaked out and got several power cords and whatnot trying to get a light to come on. Eventually I just left it plugged in and 15 minutes tried turning it on. It turned on fine and told me the battery is charged to 100%. No status light. There's no way it's really at 100% but I suppose it turned on at least. *January* The status lights stopped working. I didn't buy the headset intending to make phone calls per se but a friend called me and outright could not hear me with the headset. I was inside and the surroundings were quiet. I tried some test recordings on my iPhone and using speaker phone is a huge improvement over whatever is on this headset. But I may have a faulty headset. I am in Japan. Contacting support at Bose.com they got me in touch with the Japanese Bose who said that they do not offer any assistance for products not purchased in Japan. I don't know when I'm returning to the US. I'm overall really unhappy with this purchase. I don't really complain about products but when you spend as much as I did on these and you're frustrated with them it just hurts.