Bose Ultra Open Earbuds review: Niche appeal

Earbuds have gotten really, really good over the past few years. But as the true wireless form factor has matured, it feels like the best earbuds have converged toward a couple of increasingly familiar designs: small in-ear buds, with or without stems that stick out. And to relatively casual ears like mine, just about every pair of earbuds sold by any company you’ve ever heard of sounds at least pretty good. Taken together, that all means it can be kind of hard to find things to say in an earbud review that I haven’t said before.

I don’t have that problem with the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds. Introduced in an appropriately strange collaboration with “multifunctional lifestyle brand” Kith, Bose’s latest buds clip onto the outside of your ear to pump in audio without blocking out sound around you. They’re weird in more ways than one, and I think they’re much too expensive for most people. But they’re also kind of great, and if you have really specific needs when it comes to earbuds, they might be just what you’re looking for.

Price and availability

These buds aren’t cheap

The Bose Ultra Open Earbuds are available directly from Bose and from the retailers you’d expect: Amazon, Best Buy, Target, and others. They come in black or silver colorways and cost $299.

What’s good about the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds?

A novel form factor and strong audio

We’ve seen “open” earbuds before. Sets like the Pixel Buds A-Series and Sony LinkBuds are designed so they don’t fully block the wearer’s ear canal, making for a more comfortable fit and letting in ambient sound so you can stay aware of your surroundings.

But the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds take an unusual approach. The Open Earbuds clip onto your outer ear rather than sticking inside your ear like most earbuds. They look like something between a regular earbud and a chunky earring, an association Bose leans into with the metallic finish on the outer edge of the buds. I also think it looks vaguely sci-fi, like what people living in the ’80s might’ve imagined personal audio devices would look like in the far future.

A speaker housing a 12 mm driver is attached by flexible silicone to a “battery barrel” featuring a single physical button; the speaker sits inside your ear’s concha, the battery behind your ear. I was skeptical about the design, but I’m a fan after using the earbuds for hours every day for about a week.

The Open Earbuds are comfortable enough on my ears that I can forget they’re there, and the tension between the two halves is strong enough that they haven’t ever felt like they might come off, even during runs. You might have a different experience there, of course — without any removable bits like ear tips to swap out, there’s no way to customize the fit.

Audio quality is also very good. Given the buds’ unusual shape, I didn’t know what to expect there, but the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds sound a lot like Bose’s other high-end earbuds: the sound is clear and detailed, with a healthy amount of bass. In a quiet space, it’s easy to forget the earbuds are “open.”

But that fact immediately comes to mind when there’s any environmental sound: the Open Earbuds don’t block your ear canal at all, so there’s no isolation or ANC going on. That’s great in any situation where you want to be able to hear what’s around you, like if you’re running outdoors or working a job where you can wear earbuds but still need to talk to people around you. If you want to hear less of your environment, though, you’re out of luck.

What’s bad about the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds?

High price, a dearth of convenience features

The Open Earbuds’ open design is a strength in a lot of ways, but it’s also a pretty big drawback a lot of the time. While many conventional true wireless earbuds offer a transparency mode to selectively let in sound when needed, the Ultra Open Earbuds don’t give you the choice. The only way to hear less of the sound around you is to crank the volume on your media, and even maxed out, the earbuds can’t compete with nearby construction. Bass response starts to fall off past about 80 percent volume, too, which can make music sound a little too sharp at high volumes.

So, as much as I like these earbuds for many use cases — working from home, doing errands, running outdoors — they’re not viable for air travel, the gym, or any other scenario where you don’t want to hear what’s happening around you. These couldn’t be my only earbuds, and $299 is a lot to spend on a second pair I’d only use sometimes.

The sticker price is still harder to swallow when considering that the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds lack features expected in this segment. Missing ANC is a given, but the Open Earbuds also don’t support Bluetooth multipoint, on-ear detection, hands-free voice assistant access, or wireless charging.

The Ultra Open Earbuds do have Bose’s proprietary spatial audio that creates the illusion that sound is coming from in front of you, and the effect is as convincing here as on Bose’s other headsets, but I don’t think it’s a driving reason to buy them. The feature adds a kind of artificial reverb effect that clashes with a lot of media, and battery life takes a serious hit.

And I’m not really impressed with battery life here, even with Immersive Audio turned off. Bose quotes the Open Earbuds as lasting 7.5 hours without spatial audio off or 4.5 hours with it on, and that rings true based on my experience. But the Sony WF-1000XM5, which retail for the same $299, last eight hours with ANC or transparency modes active, and a full 12 hours without those features. The Bose Ultra Open Earbuds are seriously comfortable, and because they don’t block out the outside world, you could easily wear them from when you get up in the morning to when you go to bed — but they wouldn’t last.

Should you buy them?

The Bose Ultra Open Earbuds aren’t for everyone

Given most modern earbuds and headphones offer transparency modes that pipe in external audio on demand, open earbuds are already pretty niche — and $300 open earbuds are very niche.

The Bose Ultra Open Earbuds sound great and are maybe the most comfortable earbuds I’ve ever used, and for the times when I don’t need to isolate myself from the sound around me, they’re fantastic. But because a lot of my earbud use is in places or situations where I don’t want to hear my environment, I wouldn’t be able to get by with only the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds, and I can’t see spending hundreds of dollars on a pair of buds I can only use in certain situations.

If your earbud use is almost entirely in quiet environments where being able to hear what’s going on around you is important, and you don’t care about features like multipoint connectivity or wireless charging, the Ultra Open Earbuds will be great for you. Otherwise, you’ll probably be better off picking a pair of more conventional wireless earbuds with a decent transparency mode.