Today I received my new Bose Quiet Comfort 35 headphones that I ordered, so I figured that I would do a review on them.

I have been a long time Bose Headphone user. It all started back in 2007. Sofi and I were about to fly out to Scotland to celebrate our wedding anniversary and I had recently received a small amount of inheritance money after the passing of a grand parent. Faced with an 8 hour flight to London (before we flew to Edinburgh) I was thinking man some noise cancelling headphones would be nice for the flight. So Sofi and I ran over to the Bose store at the mall in our area and bought 2 pairs of Bose Quiet Comfort 3 Headphones for our flight.  We quickly charged them until it was time to head to the airport. Previous to this I had never owned any premium headphones before, and I was immediately hooked. They were night and day better than anything I had ever used before. They cut out so much noise from the jet engines that I could actually play my iPod at a lower volume level that I would otherwise which lead to much more comfort when listening to music as well as much more comfort on the flight just having the headphones turned on with nothing playing. At that point I decided that these were the way to go going forward.

Fast forward a couple of years and Sofi knew how much I used my original headphones (I had replaced the earpieces on them a couple of times cause the leather wore out as well as buying a second battery and multiple cables), so she bought me a pair of Quiet Comfort 15 headphones to replace them for Fathers Day. Immediately I noticed the massive improvement in background noise cancellation, and these became my new go to headphones. I saw a couple of new models come out, but found no compelling reason to upgrade as these headphones outperformed anything that I had ever used, and were pretty comfortable (though I would say the QC3 were slightly more comfortable, but at less performance).

Then Apple got rid of their headphone jack on the iPhone 7. At that point I knew that whenever I decided to upgrade my iPhone 6, I would need to upgrade my headphones as well as my QC-15s were no longer going to get the job done. After seeing Apple’s iPhone X announcement I decided that it is time to upgrade my phone, which meant that it is time to upgrade my headphones. I decided to go with the Bose QC-35’s based on how happy I had been with my previous 2 Bose headphones and they looked like a compelling Bluetooth offering.

The first thing I will say is I am aware of the accusations of Bose spying on their users, but the beauty of these headphones is, you don’t need the stupid Bose app anyway so don’t bother downloading it. I turned my Head Phones on and then went to my BlueTooth settings on my iPhone 6 (iOS 10.3.3) and the headphones showed up in the list and I was quickly able to pair them. My phone asked if I wanted the Bose app, but I declined it.

After I had the headphones paired with my phone I tried to pair them with my MacBook Pro. I was able to do so in Sierra under the System Preferences / Bluetooth area. The Bose QC-35 headphones will pair with up to 2 devices at the same time. So I have mine connected to my laptop and phone all at once. However it will only stream audio from 1 device at a time. So if I have music playing on my phone I won’t hear any of the audio from my laptop and Vice Versa. In a perfect world I would love to see it mix the audio streams. Can you imagine how cool it would be to havve some cool song playing quietly in the background of a phone call. It would be like your own sound track to a conversation. The documentation says that they headphones will remember up to 8 devices that it pairs with.

The performance of the headphones is out of this world. They have really advanced the noise cancelling abilities since the QC-15 time frame. They also feel lighter weight when I am wearing them and feel more comfortable. The external noise is super quiet and the headphones work to take phone calls. I could see myself using them in the car just to take phone calls. I probably wouldn’t wear them in the neighborhood when I am out walking the dog though as the noise cancelling is so good I would feel a little bit too unaware of my surroundings.

I am still unsure of battery life since I just got them and I haven’t charged them yet, but Bose claims up to 20 hours on Bluetooth. When you first power them up they tell you what the percentage of battery life there is as well as which devices they are connecting to through the ear piece. They include a wire as well in case you are on an airplane and want to plug into the planes entertainment system. I would say the only knock I have against them so far other than their app (which I avoided) is that the included charger is a USB to micro USB cable. Given my MacBook Pro is all USB C it would be nice if they included a second cable for that option too, but I guess when they headphones were released a year ago, USB C was really just coming onto the scene. All in all I would recommend them, I suspect that I will get many years of use out of these headphones as I have my previous 2 pairs of Bose QuietComfort Headphones.