Bose is indeed an iconic company. That said, as a long-time bose user their products are deteriorating in obvious ways. As a heavy traveller (pre-crisis) my first pair of quietcomfort headphones were fantastic. They were so far ahead of anything else I had ever owned that when in a jetlagged state a sadly left them behind when departing a plane I had no hesitation in immediately buying another. These lasted a quarter of the time I had the original pair before the pads became uncomfortable, split and I replaced them. Still a pretty good pair of headphones but the second time the pads fell apart I decided that it was time to relegate these headphones to "backup" status and upgrade to wireless.
I decided to get a bose pair even though I had reservations. They were ok - the sound quality was not as good as either of the previous wired pairs, but I figured that was the price you pay for the convenience of bluetooth wireless. They worked well until like my first pair I left them on a plane.
OK no more bose - I bought a pair of Sennheisers. For the first month these were fantastic and half the cost of bose. I liked them so much when my wife wanted headphones I bought her an identical pair. Then one day they just decided they would no longer pair with my bluetooth devices. No idea why, no way of fixing them and when I looked online lots of other people have had the same problem and end up sending them back to Sennheiser and getting a replacement pair. I can't be bothered to do this so I go back to bose.
My latest pair of bose QC headphones are by far the worst. The audio quality is worse than any previous pair of bose headphones I've owned, and the microphone is so poorly placed that I've given up using them for calls - whenever I did this in the past I ended up spending half the call explaining to the other person that I didn't need to speak up - I was already talking unreasonably loudly it was just that the microphone didn't work properly.
Headphones seem to be going through the "tornado" phase right now where demand is soaring and quality is plummetting. The way for Bose to distinguish itself would be to go back to making good noise-cancelling headphones (which it used to do very well) but I think it is most likely they will follow the race to the bottom and get crushed by larger competitors.
As a long-time fan of Bose headphones at the moment I won't be sad to see them disappear.