Auto-Shut-Off Headphones

TLDR:

• When I take off my Bose headphones and set them down, they stay on, and I forget about it, and they drain the battery to zero, and the next time I need them, they are dead.
• When I take off my Apple Airpods Max and set them down, they turn off, so the battery tends to stay charged, and they are ready to use when I need them.

Blah blah:

I’ve got a pair of Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones. I may have gotten them from a weird marketing campaign 😂. They are pretty nice. I think Bose made the “noise canceling” thing a thing, and I’m not turning my nose up at near-$400 headphones.

But I’ll critique them a little! There are three buttons on them. Two of them are unlabelled, and one of them has a little Bluetooth icon. I can not remember what the other two do. I guess one of them (both of them?) turn the headphones on? But then how do you turn them off? Press one of them? Hold one of them down? Why are there two? What are the other functions?

I’m sure all that stuff is learnable, but I’ve had these things for years, and I still don’t know.

I’ll contrast that experience with the Apple Airpods Max we all got at work one holiday. Same price range (expensive). My experience with them has been a bit mixed. At first, I couldn’t keep them connected to the source I wanted them to be. Like I’d be in the middle of a Zoom call and they’d disconnect from my computer and connect to my phone instead, which was annoying enough to shelve them for a while. I tried a while later and they seemed to have stopped doing that, and now I’m back to using them every day.

This brings me to my comparison point.

When I’m done using the Airpods Max, I take them off and set them down. When I do that, apparently, they automatically shut off. I charge them every once in a while (via cable. I do wish they had a stand you could put them on that would charge them without plugging anything in). Every time I pick up my Airpods Max to use them, they work.

But every time I pick up my Bose headphones, they are dead. I have this behavior where when I’m done using headphones I just take them off and set them down. When I do this, the Bose headphones stay on until the battery dies. Gah.

I thought about this while listening to a review of the incredibly weird Dyzon Zone headphones. For $1,000, at least I’m glad they have the auto-shut-off feature.