just a PSA: if you buy Bose headphones, they will degrade in the nastiest way possible after a few years of use. The ear cups will squish out of shape and the cups and pads will leave gross headphone flakes all over everything. Yes, even if you paid $449 for them. They all do this, reliably, in a way I haven't seen from any other manufacturer, even those that charge half what Bose does.
a bunch of folks mentioned that the earpads are available and easily replacable, which is good (and good advice if you've got a pair that are flaking). but most other high-end headphones don't have regular replacement of earpads as a requirement because they're made out of stuff that doesn't crumble away and turn into gross little tacky plastic flakes after a year or two of semi-regular skin contact.
and you know what's not available, not replacable, and made of the same material? the headband cushion. those take a bit longer since they're not clamped against your ears but they'll start flaking too!!
i don't know how the hell they managed this. any other brand of headphone in the "$150 and up" market segment has maybe a 10-25% chance of coming in for recycling with cushion flaking after a long time of use, but with Bose headphones the incidence is more like 80%.
i've been working in e-waste for a decade and it's been like this the entire time. there's two pairs of "Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700" (did they fire their marketing team?) in that bin and they're both starting to flake and they can't be older than June 2019, when they were announced at an MSRP of $399.
Edit: now that I'm thinking hard about which otherwise perfectly good headphones I throw out a lot, there is one other brand: Beats (by Doctor Dre). Those flake with about the same incidence and don't have first-party cushions available.
