My Bose headphones are miles more comfortable and more effective at active noice cancellation than the best Apple Beats. Will that change? Maybe. I mean...I hope so. It's hard having only Bose and Sony credibly competing in the wireless over-the-ear ANC space. It would be really nice to be able to get away from the crap bluetooth scourge like AirPods kinda sorta started doing with their W and H series chips.

But Apple Beats are poor quality to begin with, it's just got Dre's name associated to it to make them expensive.

Most major brands are better than beats by a long shot.

However, most brands are beginning to cheap out IMO. I had a pair of sennheiser headphones back in like ~2005, they lasted like 11 years before the cups started to fall apart. I replaced them with a new pair of sennheiser which lasted ~12 months before they began to fall apart... Not only that, the old sennheiser was SUPER comfy, the new ones hurt my ears after a while... Replaced the new sennheiser with another model, fall apart in ~12 months...

Now I'm just using some Asus gaming headphones, quality is not Bose level but its good enough, and the cups have lasted longer than the last 2 pair of sennheiser I've had.

That’s one of the nice things with eg Beyerdynamic - even if you somehow managed to break them, you probably could just weld them back.

I have the same experience with the sennheiser and then a set of Bose QCs, they both fell apart within a year. However my beats studios are now coming up on two and a half years and they aren't showing any damage. I know which ones I'd buy again if I had too.

Sennheiser's and B&O's offerings are good as well. They just don't have the same marketing power behind them as Sony.

Yamaha just announced their first ANC products, in both cans and buds formats if I recall. Don't know how they will stack up.

>patent on noise cancelling expired

Looks like Bose has multiple patents for noise cancelling technology. Did a major one expire?

The most important patents, like this one : https://patents.google.com/patent/US4455675A/en

Have expired for a long while. It just took some time for serious competition, like the Sony MDR-1000X and its descendants, to come out.

Those patents are really old actually. Noise cancelling was unknown to the general public prior to the first quietcomfort headphones from Bose but it had been in use for decades before in Bose aviation headsets.

Well they are still the leaders but the patents that are now expired give good-enough of an experience for most regular users.