Sony WF-1000XM4 ANC True Wireless Earbuds (Grade A Refurbished) (Open Box)

In 2024, I went on this "quest" you could say, to try to find some great wireless headphones, went through four different brands that were all on the cheaper side of things. After having issues with most of them, I remembered that in my teenage years I'd been given some decent Sony bluetooth headphones that lasted years and were perfect (I'd still use them to this day if the battery on it weren't completely dead) so I decided to give Sony another shot, which were the fifth and final brand. Here's the good things about these headphones: The sound quality of the headphones are fantastic, as well as the ANC (they really knocked it out of the park with the ANC). I find that they are also very comfortable to wear, I don't constantly "register" them on my head when I'm actively doing stuff, because they fit very well and are quite adjustable. They also feel very premium, and don't seem like they're just going to randomly break apart. As an added touch, I find the included case to be very nice, and they include both charging cables and an auxiliary 3.5mm cable so that you can use these wired if you want. Now that the pros/positives have been stated, its time for the negatives/cons: Unfortunately, while the sound and ANC is fantastic, there were still some things that I don't really like from these headphones and it primarily has to do with the "features": - The gesture/touch controls are far too easily triggered when trying to put on/take off the headphones - The automatic play/pause function that occurs when putting on/taking off the headphones can get inverted very easily (if your audio is paused and you take off your headphones, then it resumes the audio, you put them back on and it pauses the audio - I presume because there's no separate "play" and "pause" function in the BT protocol, just a combined play/pause action) - The automatic power off function (when you take off your headphones and don't put them back on for 10 minutes) seems to work sometimes, and then completely doesn't other times - You can have two devices connected at once, but when enabling this feature the Sony app warns you that this will disable some features/cause other features to not work as well - Firmware updates take a VERY long time to apply. I don't really consider this a major con since its not like firmware updates are being released every day or even every month, but it would still be nice if they could somehow be applied via a cable since I would assume most of the time it takes is due to having to send the update package over Bluetooth which is a fairly slow protocol for sending large data over. However, I do understand that most people are not going to want to use a cable to apply the update and thus a wireless update is much more convenient, I'd just like an alternative option. - A bit of a "nitpick", but the Sony app that you need to install on your phone in order to manage these headphones requires that you sign in with a Sony account. I'm not sure why this is required, I shouldn't need an account to toggle some features on my headphones. Also, since I primarily use these on my PC I'd much more appreciate having a PC app available, as when I want to manage the features I need to disconnect from my PC, grab my phone, connect to my phone, open the app, etc then disconnect from my phone and reconnect to my PC (since allowing multiple connections causes features to be unavailable as per one of my previous points). And most importantly, the battery life is pretty subpar. I'd say you barely get 8 hours of usage out of them, and for some reason you cannot charge and use them wirelessly at the same time. Plugging in the charger forces the headphones to power down and they will not power back on until you unplug them - for some reason *all* of the headphones I tried last year are like this. I cannot stress enough how aggravating this is when you combine the low battery life with the high price tag, and not being able to work around it by just plugging them into power. Now yes, you can plug in the 3.5mm cable to your PC, but the cable isn't long enough to reach my PC and I don't exactly want two cables running down both sides of me just because the battery ran out. If this limitation weren't in place, I could forgive the limited battery life enough to not subtract a full star for it. The only positive here is that unlike most headphones, these ones do not annoy you with constant "low battery" alerts. You get one alert when it first registers that the battery is at a low threshold (it seems like 10% is the threshold), and then the next alert happens when it shuts down due to the battery running out (so that is only two alerts in total). There's about 45 minutes of time between the warning alert, and the final alert. This is something I very much appreciated as I'm not always in a convenient spot to plug in my headphones. That makes them still usable at the final bit of battery, whereas other headphones will alert you every two minutes which effectively subtracts the battery life from those ones. I do wish that the alert voice wouldn't cut off the audio that is playing on my PC, as when I'm in a conference call at work and the alert kicks in, I end up missing whatever someone was trying to tell me for a couple of seconds while the alert plays. On the note of the alerts, another positive thing is that the voice itself is not annoying, and you can configure what language it speaks to you in via the app for those who are multi-lingual or non-English speakers which is fantastic to see. I'd expect these negatives to occur in headphones that are less than $70, but these headphones are ~$200. The battery is the real kicker for me because I work from home and utilize these during my work shift, and can't even make it through two full work shifts without needing to charge them and thus switch to a "backup" pair of headphones. I had cheaper headphones with longer battery life. The good thing I suppose is that since most of these negatives are "software" (aside from the battery capacity), and theoretically could be improved via firmware updates. As to whether that will actually happen, I can't say. So overall, I give it three stars. One star is lost for the software/features being more on the subpar and glitchy side, then another star lost for the battery life. However, since the physical aspects (including sound quality, excluding battery) of the headphones are actually *really* good, I didn't want to subtract any more than two stars. Times like this I wish that there was a way to rate an item exactly in the middle, because that's ideally where I'd rate these. Great on the physical side of things with a couple of exceptions, but needs improvements on the software side (especially for the price tag).