I recently purchased a WH1000xm2, thinking of it as an investment for continuing education. As a college student, the noise cancelling has been great for busy cafes and libraries with deep thrumming AC systems. For the most part, the headphones are more than satisfactory for creating a bubble of focus in a variety of circumstances.

That said, I have a huge gripe about one 'feature' (bug?) of the headsets.

The headphones shut off completely after five minutes if no bluetooth or physical cable connection is established. This makes a lot of sense coming from the perspective of preserving battery life: nobody wants to accidentally drain the headphones when they weren't using it.

However, it's hugely dysfunctional to users like me who might want the noise-cancelling feature more than the music-playing feature. I have to either pull out a clunky cable unconnected on one end, or connect to my phone via bluetooth and let the connection needlessly drain my phone battery. The 30 hour headphone battery is very impressive. Unfortunately, my poor phone will not last standby for 30 hours with bluetooth on. On certain days, the bluetooth connection has been the biggest source of battery drain on my phone.

I feel like it doesn't have to be this way.

One of the great features about this headset is the programmability. Certain settings can be changed on via the app, and from what I can tell, the onboard memory on the headphones will store that information even when disconnected from the phone. So why not create a setting for auto-shutoff? Let the user assume the level of potential battery waste. Glaringly, a certain manufacturer of quiet and comfortable noise cancelling headphones has a very similar feature to the one described above for their newest cans.^

From what I can gather, this problem was unsolvable on the MDR 1000x, because it had no smartphone connection ability. This model does, and it seems almost silly to not include this feature. I mean, if Sony can accommodate the (literally) dozens of people who need their music to be produced from an outdoor stage at their back right, why can’t Sony accommodate countless students like me who want some silence no strings (physical or bluetoothy) attached?

This isn't a deal-breaker. But I feel like it is an option that many people would appreciate, and would add so much more value to the product.

^Bose QC35's have auto-off timer options in the app, configurable to 5m, 20m, 40m, 1h, 3h, or never.