***UPDATE October 24, 2019*** Noise Cancelling headphones 700 - Auto-off feature update

Headphones Archive
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December 6th update:

 

Hey everyone,

 

In case you missed it, the latest update to Bose Music includes the ability to toggle Motion Detection on or off.

 

Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700 - iOS and Android

  • Added the ability to toggle “Motion Detection” ON or OFF. Previously this was not a configurable setting. This setting is separate from the “auto-off timer” in the settings menu.

As this feature has now been released, I am going to unstick this thread.

 

Thank you to everyone who gave us feedback on your desire for this feature. We hope you enjoy it! Please let us know below how it's working for you and if you run into any issues.

 

Wayne M

 

***UPDATED October 24, 2019***

 

Dear Community,

 

We are releasing new firmware for the Noise Cancelling Headphones 700 which includes an increase in the auto-off timer to 1-hour. There are other improvements included in this update which you can read about here.

 

All the best!

 

Your Bose Community team

 

Original post:

 

Dear Community,

 

Thank you for your feedback on our power-saving motion detection feature. We take your input seriously and appreciate learning all the different ways these headphones are used by our customers.

 

We know that many of our Active Noise Cancelling headphone owners often use them to simply block out noise and distractions. For these customers, automatically turning off the product when content is not playing would disrupt their experience. This is why the content-based auto-off feature within the Bose Music app defaults to “Never” on our Noise Cancelling products.

 

Unfortunately, it is not uncommon to forget to turn off your headphones after you take them off. You think it will be a quick pause, but you don’t use your headphones again until the next day. During these times, returning to a depleted battery can be very frustrating. With Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700, we wanted to leverage the onboard accelerometer and gyroscope hardware to address that situation. Now, even when content is paused, we are able to save battery life when the product is not in use and stationary.

 

As you have correctly identified, we set the timer to 10 minutes as our studies indicated this was ample time to resume most listening sessions, while ensuring the product remains responsive to your needs during quick interruptions. Given the feedback on this forum, we have re-evaluated this decision, and will soon be releasing new firmware which increases the timer from 10 minutes to 1 hour. We believe this will improve the experience for many customers who were having an issue with the shorter time while still preserving the battery-saving benefits for the rest of our customers.

 

After this change goes live, we would love to hear from you to understand if this helped resolve your issue or if further improvements are needed.

 

As always, we appreciate your feedback, and thank you for being our customer.

 

Your Bose Community team

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Why not to make this setting configurable?

3
 wrote:

Dear Community,

 

Thank you for your feedback on our power-saving motion detection feature. We take your input seriously and appreciate learning all the different ways these headphones are used by our customers.

 

We know that many of our Active Noise Cancelling headphone owners often use them to simply block out noise and distractions. For these customers, automatically turning off the product when content is not playing would disrupt their experience. This is why the content-based auto-off feature within the Bose Music app defaults to “Never” on our Noise Cancelling products.

 

Unfortunately, it is not uncommon to forget to turn off your headphones after you take them off. You think it will be a quick pause, but you don’t use your headphones again until the next day. During these times, returning to a depleted battery can be very frustrating. With Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700, we wanted to leverage the onboard accelerometer and gyroscope hardware to address that situation. Now, even when content is paused, we are able to save battery life when the product is not in use and stationary.

 

As you have correctly identified, we set the timer to 10 minutes as our studies indicated this was ample time to resume most listening sessions, while ensuring the product remains responsive to your needs during quick interruptions. Given the feedback on this forum, we have re-evaluated this decision, and will soon be releasing new firmware which increases the timer from 10 minutes to 1 hour. We believe this will improve the experience for many customers who were having an issue with the shorter time while still preserving the battery-saving benefits for the rest of our customers.

 

After this change goes live, we would love to hear from you to understand if this helped resolve your issue or if further improvements are needed.

 

As always, we appreciate your feedback, and thank you for being our customer.

 

Your Bose Community team

 

How about increasing the timer to "NEVER" as in the auto off.  Bose, you do realize "10 min to 1 hour" will not suffice.  Why don't you mirror the Auto Off options and put this issue to bed? 

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Thanks for updating us on this issue. It goes in the right direction and I think 1h should be good for most of us but not all and I would still prefer to have full control. Being frustrated because one forget to turn off the headphones is one thing, but being frustrated because of not being allowed to fully control 400$ headphones is another thing. 

5

Thank you for listening, researching and responding to your customers' needs.

 

We all agree with the idea behind protecting battery capacity. It's a nice safety net.

 

That said, the 1 hour timer is a step in the right direction; but, the reality is, people want choice and control over their electronics.  The overwhelming majority of us are adults. We learned a long time ago that if we touch a hot stove, we get burned. Most of us don't touch hot stoves anymore.

 

As with the stove, the headphones are the same. If we accidentally leave them on and the battery drains, that's a lesson learned. Most of us will be more mindful in the future.

 

So, the point is, give us the ability to enable or disable entirely, along with a 10 minute and 1 hour option.  This will allow us the flexibility to customize the way we use, interact with, and enjoy our fantastic Bose headphones.

 

Thank you again for listening to your dedicated customers!

6

Hey Bose, what about people want to sleep 3hours on train and airplane ??

Why not make this an option to turn off in the bose app so that people when they now they wanna sleep long time, can log in and turn it off??? Please dont ruin your product.

7

While I appreciate that Bose is listening to the community feedback, this is a completely unacceptable response.  This decisions should not be made by Bose.  Each user should have the ability to customize their experience.  If Bose is so hell-bent on having this feature, and not giving the user the ability to control this function, then a whooooooooole lot of us will be hell-bent on not buying this product....including my girlfriend and I who WERE very interested in buying the 700's.   Bad move, Bose....bad.

 

 

8

As someone who had been involved in many sleep studies, I can assure you that nobody lies perfectly still and motionless for more than 1 hour.  I think that, combined with environmental movement, is probably sufficient to keep 99.5% of our headphones powered on while resting, meditating, sleeping, etc.

 

I, too, want full control, but maybe we should give Bose the benefit of the doubt, and try the headphones with the update.

 

I think we might be surprised.

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1. "will soon be releasing new firmware" - does that mean 1 week, 1 month or end of year timeline to add the fix? Nothing is more frustating than a committed action item with no deadline. Currently in the process of returning the 700s, but may hold if this is an imminent fix. Otherwise I'm returning these and trying another brand, or waiting to buy until the new feature is released.

 

2. 🙂 A move to 1 hour is much better than 10 minutes! However, why don't you make it possible to adjust? I can adjust the auto-off for music to Never as well as other features. I can set to 11 levels of ANC. Why can't you adjust this setting to Never for people who don't want it, and 10 minutes to people who chronically leave their electronics on? This is still a $400 headphones investment, that doesn't even have an EQ yet like many similarly priced competitors...

 

"Unfortunately, it is not uncommon to forget to turn off your headphones after you take them off. You think it will be a quick pause, but you don’t use your headphones again until the next day. During these times, returning to a depleted battery can be very frustrating. With Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700, we wanted to leverage the onboard accelerometer and gyroscope hardware to address that situation. Now, even when content is paused, we are able to save battery life when the product is not in use and stationary."

 

3. Reading this paragraph above is frustrating - I read it as "we put in this cool accelerometer/gyroscope for this feature, and our engineers are too attached to it to let it go" and "we know you better than you know you - you will constantly leave these sitting on a table to deplete power". We know why the feature exists - on face value, I thought it was a good feature when I bought them. In practice, if my options are between (1) letting it deplete by my own accord, or (2) be woken up on a train or plane by a silly power down noise when I'm already having a harder time than normal falling asleep, I'll opt for (1) every time personally (and my other heavy traveling consumers may agree). You sound blinded by your own cool tech and engineers who sit in an office all day instead of stepping into the shoes of a large portion of consumers who buy ANC headphones.

 

TLDR When will the update hit?

10

Dear Anne aka Bose,

Thank you for the response. As much as I would like to get back to you on how this goes, I have already returned my headphones. Besides them turning off when I didn’t want them to they also had decided to tell me randomly how much battery time I had left, twice in a row when I hadn’t touched anything on the headset. To me it was a software glitch. I realize many companies let the public fix these issues as to why there are firmware updates, versions, etc. I know, I’ve worked at HP Laserjet Division, Intel to name a few. However, in this day of social media companies need to be more mindful themselves. Word spreads very quickly so there is not the lag time there used to be to “fix issues” of firmware updates, software glitches, problems, etc. The headphone, earbud, audio industry is set to be one of the next big things going forward as people try to be hands free from their phones, cars, and for exercising etc. and your company is starting to have much competition and Bose will not stay on top if you don’t get “with the program” soon! To have this big of an oops on a pair of $399 headphones and with no response for 2 months to your customers is bad enough, (not to mention your phone tech support doesn’t seem to know anything about this) but with no end date there really is no excuse. I’ve worked with software engineers for many years and realize this isn’t an instant fix and it takes time to figure out and impliment. However, it is better to give a longer out date and deliver sooner, than dead silence (crickets) and no answers. My 2 cents. 

 

I can only hope for the people that have these headphones that 1 hour’s time will be efficient when meditating or trying to nap or sleep and that they slightly move to keep these headphones “on”. I think the engineers could have left this feature out and everyone would be quite happy with programming their own destiny for Auto-Off. I also realize it was a new thing they thought they should try. I have to agree with some of the other replies, we are all grown up now and we can learn on our own if we make a mistake and leave them on and drain the battery or be responsible adults and use the Auto-Off feature or just turn them off. We really don’t need someone else randomly controlling our devices for us. Please do thank the hard working people behind the scenes. If things improve I would be willing to look at getting these again as I have not replaced them yet. I don’t make rash decisions and there are other options coming soon. IFA just ended with new headsets being released by some of your competitors in Sept and Oct and then CES will be next in Jan. 2020 which is not far off. I really did like these headphones. Please keep us posted and get these people an “end date”! All the best 🙂