AirPods, AirPods, AirPods. They’re great, and they’re everywhere. And quite a lot of people are insistent that they want a pair of noise-cancelling earbuds that aren’t Apple. But everywhere they look, they seem to be talked about and recommended ad nauseum.
Instead of jamming your fingers in your ears to keep from hearing the incessant references to AirPods, stick a pair of Bose QuietComfort Earbuds in your ears. They’re on sale right now for $30 off, and they work just as well as the AirPods Pro, without sucking you into the Apple ecosystem.
customizable noise blocking
Active noise cancelation (ANC), which uses software to detect and then cancel out incoming sound waves. Those are the layman’s terms for a complicated piece of engineering. On subway rides and airliner flights, I use them to block out the oppressive whoosh of train tracks and jet engines, and it turns them into soft white noise.
There are three selectable modes, which the Bose have in common with most ANC headphones and earbuds. Quiet Mode means ANC is turned on, and it’s—you guessed it—the mode that blocks the most ambient sound.
Aware Mode is Bose’s terminology for a transparency mode that amplifies ambient noises slightly, so you can listen to your music or podcast while still being able to hear people around you if they speak, much more easily than if you had passive, low-tech earbuds jammed in your ear canals.
And then lastly, there’s Custom Mode, which lets you specify which noises are blocked by the ANC, based on your environment. For instance, you could just set it to block wind noises if you’re in a particularly noisy environment but don’t want the full, omnipresent power of Quiet Mode. You can create one or two Custom Modes to save within the Bose app.
You can also turn ANC and Aware Mode off to preserve battery life, if you like. In this setting, they’re just passive earbuds that will block some noise since, you know, you’ve got something jammed in your ear canals, but you won’t get the full noise-cancelling power of ANC. Battery life, by the way, varies based on your settings but can last for as long as 8 1/2 hours of play time.
You’ve got your choice of color, as all four are available for the same deal. There’s black, Chilled Lilac (a light purple), Twilight Blue (probably not named after the book series, although…), and White Smoke.
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