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Comment by mleonhard | Hacker News Reader

When I receive a call, my Bose SoundSport headphones randomly ring at max volume, with audible clipping. This happens when the iOS ring volume slider is set to the middle and hearing protection is enabled at 75dB. The sound is shockingly loud, especially when listening to an audio book at low volume. There was a multi-year megathread about it on the Bose forums before the company removed the forums entirely.

I chatted with five different Bose Support staff and they all refused to file a bug report. They are happy to send me a third pair with the same problem.

How can we get companies to respect their users?

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> How can we get companies to respect their users?

Stop buying their broken products.

Well, Jabra and Bose are both shipping some arguably “broken” products (though frankly I find “broken” to be a tad flippant of a description.) That does leave some alternatives. How are people buying bluetooth earbuds supposed to know that buying flagship products from some of the most reputable companies in the field would lead them here? Honest question. I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask everyone in the world to try to blast past the reams of SEO and fake reviews to try to find the random users in Reddit and support forums suffering from serious, poorly-documented limitations and awful bugs.

In my mind, something must be systemically wrong here.

Most reputable often just means ones with the largest marketing budget.

> In my mind, something must be systemically wrong here.

It is. Three things are at play here: The power of consumer protection agencies is way too low, the standardization group (=Bluetooth SIG) doesn't give a fuck, and the Bluetooth standard itself is a horrible mess dealing with a lot of historical baggage.

In an ideal world, cases such as "won't operate with a standard-issue Mac" would cause an investigation by a consumer protection agency and the party found to be at fault by violating the specification would have to remedy the issue and/or face substantial fines (obviously, the larger the company the bigger the fines).

> The power of consumer protection agencies is way too low

In the UK, if they advertise them as working with / connecting to a computer, there's no way you aren't getting your money back.

Consumer protections in this country are pretty solid for this sort of thing (thought sadly not the case for new expensive things like cars, new build homes, etc).

I had PC World try to screw me with the old display panel switcheroo on a first gen flat screen Samsung LCD in the 2000s, a £1000, 32" screen which was supposed to have a "new" chevron pattern to the sub-pixels. Store display and review models had it, and it was all over their advertising, mine were plain old squares.

Trading Standards / Citizen's Advice Bureau had them practically begging me to take a replacement mere hours after an outright refusal to replace a TV I'd been using for a year already.

Consumer protection is much better in Europe than in US, that is a problem for USA.

It's not about getting your money back. Consumers are lazy and usually don't care, which is why companies get away with so much bullshit - they just price in the amount of defects and returns instead of taking care to deliver a tested, high quality product.

Would even a single consumer claiming issues open up a company to severe fines, we'd see a lot less bullshit.

Depending on your country and consumer protection laws, you just buy one and if it has a critical bug you walk back to the store and swap it for a different pair.

Stop putting your trust in popular brands. They spent so much money trying to reach you they need to cutback in other areas to hit their target stock prices.

It's completely reasonable that you need to ignore the ads and do serious research. Sometimes that involves asking friends/family/workmates or listening when they complain. The easiest research involves searching the internet. If you expect google to present you with the best product for you as the first three results you will be disappointed. Go to customer reports, read amazon reviews, read reddit reviews, checkout videos / blogs or try the product out first.

It's not called Buy Other Sound Equipment for nothing.

Of all the budget audio companies, I keep buying BOSE ignoring the dumb memes because the companies "audiophiles" tend to recommend aren't much better. They might sound better, but are less comfortable or still break after one year.

Meanwhile all my BOSE IEMs have been the most comfortable I've ever bought, with the best seal compared to anybody else's, and I love my pair of QC II.

Ouch. I'm not sure if this fixes your problem, but on Android I like to enable developer options and disable absolute volume to decouple the phone and speaker/headphone volumes, so I can use the device itself to turn down the peak volume (and hopefully noise floor) no matter how loud of a sound the phone tries to output. This might help ringtones, but probably not sounds generated by the headphones. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be exposed by Apple for iPhones.

> How can we get companies to respect their users?

Stop giving them money unless they provide source and schematics and unlockable bootloaders and put things together with screws rather than glue.

As long as you the public at large keeps taking abuse and keep handing over more cash, they'll keep doing it.

I'm like 50% suspicious that Apple is doing this on purpose to get you to buy Air Pods.

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