TLDRI'm obsessed with ANC headphones, I own several high-end pairs including Bose, Sony and Apple. The Bose Ultras aren't worth the money. They operate like they were designed by a committee and no one tried actually using them for a week to see if they have design flaws (which they have a LOT of). I bought these because my QuietComfort-45 are my favourite headphones so far, so I thought the Ultras would be great, but the Ultras are trash compared to the QC45s. I wouldn't recommend buying the Ultras to anyone unless they were on sale for at least 80% off. Seriously, that's how flawed they are. 1 out of 5 stars because they're worth 1/5 of their full price...PROS- Top notch noise cancelling. Where my Sony XM4 was 5/5, the Ultra is 4.5/5 indoors and 4/5 outdoors.- Pretty comfortable. Good weight, good squeeze level, good earpad cushions. Where the QuietComfort-45 is 5/5, the QC-Ultra is 4/5, XM4 is 3.5/5 (comfortable at first but the cushions collapse after 6 months) and the Airpods Max is 2/5 (very heavy, way too much squeeze).CONS- Terrible controls. You change the ANC mode by pressing and holding the Play/Pause button for two seconds. Imagine someone's trying to talk to you from the next room and you want to switch the ANC mode. You hold down the button for two seconds, then it triggers and says "aware!", and then you get to hear them. It's way too long. It makes the passthrough mode useless because you'll always end up just pulling off the headphones so you can hear without waiting. That's IF you only use Quiet and Aware mode, you almost certainly want to set up an Outdoor mode so you can use the Wind Block feature. Now you have to toggle two modes, press and hold twice to get to Aware mode. It's unusable.- Terrible automation. The headphones have a sleep mode and YOU CAN'T DISABLE IT. You can disable the auto-shutoff, but the headphones go into sleep mode after a few minutes no matter what. Sleep mode disconnects bluetooth. You set the headphones down on your desk for just a few minutes, then you put them back on and you have to wait a couple seconds for them to wake up, then another couple seconds for them to reconnect by bluetooth, then you still don't hear anything for a second because you're hearing the bluetooth-reconnection sound effects for two different devices reconnecting. It's incredibly frustrating. You would think you could disable sleep mode in the settings, but you can't.- Bose still doesn't know how to cancel out wind-noise, you hear the wind. They added a "Wind Block" toggle and it makes the wind less noisy but degrades the regular active noise cancelling (ANC).- Mediocre audio passthrough (aka transparency mode, aka Aware Mode). The audio passthrough sounds unnatural, quiet sounds like laptop fans get magnified. It works, but it's not great. Where the Airpods Max transparency mode is 5/5 these would be 3/5, the QC45 and XM4 would be 4/5.- I don't like the continuous adjustment. I like headbands that click, so I can find the adjustment I like and be able to quickly put it back after taking the headphones out of my bag. This is a personal preference.- Earcups turn outwards too easily. I like being able to take my headphones off my neck and put them back on my head with one-hand, for example, when I'm holding a coffee in my other hand. I can do that really easily with my QC-45 but with these the earcup you're not holding always fold outwards. As a result, you need two hands free to put them on.MEH- Good sound quality (as expected for this price).- Good microphone (the XM4 is better).- Good touch-control volume. I hate touch controls, they don't work when you're wearing gloves and are easy to trigger accidentally when adjusting the headphones position on your head. Touch controls are the main reason I don't buy the Sony XM5, because I HATED the touch controls on my XM4s. That being said, the touch-control volume on the QC Ultra works pretty well and I rarely trigger it by accident.