Bose CEO Lila Snyder on the fight for high-quality audio

Summary

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Episode: Bose CEO Lila Snyder on the Fight for High-Quality Audio
Date: August 10, 2026
Guest: Lila Snyder, CEO of Bose

Episode Overview

This episode delves into Bose’s dramatic transformation under CEO Lila Snyder—covering the company’s move into luxury audio brands (McIntosh, Sonus Faber), its push into B2B technology licensing, and how Bose navigates the rapidly evolving landscape of AI wearables and audio technology. Nilay and Lila dissect the persistent challenges of audio quality vs. convenience, branding across tiers, and how Bose is rearchitecting itself for a future where sound is both everywhere and increasingly commodified.

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Key Themes & Discussion Points

1. Bose’s Ongoing Transformation

• Multi-Brand Expansion:
  Bose has shifted from a single-brand premium audio company to a multi-brand group, including the luxury audio brands McIntosh and Sonus Faber (04:16–10:50).
• B2B & Licensing:
  Bose now not only sells products directly to consumers, but also licenses audio technology for integration into third-party brands and devices (e.g., Skullcandy headphones, Epson projectors, XReal VR glasses, and Sena motorcycle helmets) (04:16–07:32).

“For 60 years it was all Bose and we're now a multi brand company ... that made us brought us two things from one brand to multi brands, but also into the luxury audio space.”
—Lila Snyder, 04:54

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2. Audio Tech: A New Product and Business Model

• Central Engineering + Audio Tech Division:
  Bose’s engineering is increasingly centralized, providing modular “ingredient” technologies (like noise cancelling, spatial audio, and speech clarity) to both Bose and third-party products (06:03–08:08).
• Brand Licensing:
  The Bose brand is only used selectively alongside technology licensing—it’s never just a sticker (08:08–09:47).

“First and foremost, we're selling technology and the technology is the key. And then in some cases, we're also selling the brand ... but you'll never get the logo without the tech, if that makes sense.”
—Lila Snyder, 08:14

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3. Luxury Audio: Acquisitions & Philosophy

• Brand Protection:
  McIntosh and Sonus Faber remain fully independent in sound signature and positioning (“no Bose-ification”), with dedicated luxury audio engineering teams (10:17–16:47).
• Market Opportunity:
  Bose sees significant “white space” for true luxury in audio, akin to luxury in cars, hospitality, or fashion—a market underrepresented compared to the passion for music (10:25–12:55).
• Product Value:
  In luxury, beyond sound, design and craftsmanship matter—a McIntosh amp is "a little bit of art" (16:47).

“You can't make cheaper Macintosh products. That's not good for that brand.”
—Nilay Patel, 10:10

“All of our luxury products, whether it's Macintosh or Sonus Faber, are handmade. They are crafted one by one for you, the customer. And there's something incredibly special about that.”
—Lila Snyder, 12:35

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4. Structuring for Complexity and Innovation

• Hybrid Org Chart:
  Bose now operates globally, with half its 2,500 employees as engineers and a matrix of global functions (engineering, marketing, supply chain) supporting four business units: Bose, McIntosh, Sonus Faber, and Audio Tech (25:52–26:44).
• R&D Shift:
  Modularizing technology (“AI units” and core algorithms) increases speed and efficiency for both Bose and licensed partners (22:48–25:39).

“Everything Bose does is what we would describe as at the intelligent edge. And as you know, it's a pretty hostile environment.”
—Lila Snyder, 32:55

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5. Audio in the Age of AI, Voice, and Wearables

• Ecosystem Tension:
  Giants like Apple, Samsung, and Google lock down Bluetooth/audio platform features to favor their own headphones, framing a future where AI wearables are central (35:02–36:02).
• Bose’s Strategy:
  Bose sees opportunity both in making competitive own-branded products and supplying technology to emerging wearable-driven use cases (e.g., smart glasses, pins, rings) (36:02–39:20).
• Form Factor Pluralism:
  Bets on plural form factors: “I think there will be multiple types of devices that consumers will choose based on their own personal preferences.”
  —Lila Snyder, 37:18

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6. The Eternal Battle: Quality vs. Convenience

• Nilay’s Lament:
  “Every single time the tech companies come to music, convenience wins and quality suffers ... The market picks convenience.” (44:32)
• Lila’s Response:
  There’s a counter-trend—luxury and “moments of clarity” are in demand, while Bose aims to deliver the best possible experience at any level (44:36–46:57).

“There’s just so much music discovery because it’s everywhere ... if you help people listen to that as best you can, they will get an appreciation for what better sound sounds like. And over time they will graduate...”
—Lila Snyder, 46:25

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7. Next-Gen Use Cases: Hearing Aids, AI, and Edge Computing

• Hearing Aids as a Test Case:
  Bose’s technological advances—like noise-cancelling hearing aids with extreme battery efficiency—showcase how AI audio can scale into challenging new categories (50:39–53:33).
• Barriers to US Adoption:
  Price, coverage, and stigma still hobble over-the-counter hearing aids, but Lila is bullish on continued market evolution (54:29).

“Noise canceling has always been the dream of hearing aids ... and that up until now has been impossible to do ... for us, solving that problem was both about hardware ... and the platform that we built to enable that at a low enough compute level.”
—Lila Snyder, 52:22

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8. The Modular Audio Future: Risks and Culture

• Commodification Risks:
  Nilay challenges whether Bose's modular, licensed tech could “flatten” audio products into sameness.
  Lila argues real-world constraints, design choices, and diverse end uses keep differentiation alive (30:01–32:55).

"If all of your audio first products come from the same technology base ... do you lose the ability to innovate at the product level?"
—Nilay Patel, 32:33

"The product is so much bigger than just those ingredients ... You have limited computer, you have limited power, you're always making trade offs ..."
—Lila Snyder, 32:55

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9. Manufacturing, Supply Chain, and Geopolitics

• Diversification:
  Bose has expanded manufacturing beyond China to other Asian nations and North America; McIntosh products are all made in the US (59:29–59:51).
• Tariffs & Reshoring:
  Decisions on regional manufacturing hinge on both costs and expertise—Bose remains prepared for supply chain “curveballs” (58:26–60:04).

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10. Smart Home, Streaming, and Service Models

• More Devices = More Software:
  As audio products become networked computers, Bose weighs the costs and customer appetite for subscriptions—deciding instead to build lifecycle costs into the product price (63:03).
• Integration Layer:
  Bose’s acquisition of Stream Unlimited cements the company’s role in the orchestration layer between streaming apps and hardware (63:03–64:56).

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11. Branding, Logos, and Participation in the AI Ecosystem

• Logo Policy:
  Logo and brand presence on physical products (never “logo-only” licensing) remain a cornerstone—even as hardware becomes a mere endpoint in an AI ecosystem (08:08–09:47; 66:00–66:34).

“I get the feeling these logos are about to get bigger and start lighting up ...”
—Nilay Patel, 66:30

“We’re not going to make them that big.”
—Lila Snyder, 66:34

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12. Bose Studios: Brand as Content Platform

• Content Initiatives:
  Bose Studios bridges music fans and up-and-coming creators, serving as more than a label—it's a platform for culture, brand connection, and supporting emerging talent (66:48–69:01).

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Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

• On Bose’s traditional focus:
  “You can't make cheaper Macintosh products. That's not good for that brand.”
  —Nilay Patel, 10:10

• On luxury audio’s appeal:
  “All of our luxury products, whether it's Macintosh or Sonus Faber, are handmade. They are crafted one by one for you, the customer.”
  —Lila Snyder, 12:35

• On technology licensing:
  “You’ll never get the [Bose] logo without the tech, if that makes sense.”
  —Lila Snyder, 08:23

• On R&D modularization:
  “Everything Bose does is what we would describe as at the intelligent edge. And as you know, it's a pretty hostile environment.”
  —Lila Snyder, 32:55

• On audio quality vs. convenience:
  “Every single time the tech companies come to music, convenience wins and quality suffers … The market picks convenience.”
  —Nilay Patel, 44:32

• On culture and innovation:
  “What we're good at is a lot of companies are good at really big AI. Right? What we're good at is taking really complex algorithms and then figuring out how to shrink them down... we talk about it at Bose as tiny AI.”
  —Lila Snyder, 56:56

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Noteworthy Segments & Timestamps

• Bose’s transformation, new business model — 04:00–08:08
• Luxury audio acquisitions & philosophy — 10:10–16:47
• Challenges and opportunities in B2B Audio Tech — 22:48–30:56
• Challenges of audio commodification and differentiation — 30:01–34:13
• AI wearables and the struggle for platform leverage — 35:02–39:20
• Audio quality in a convenience-first world — 44:32–47:51
• Hearing aids, AI, and accessibility — 50:39–54:29
• Manufacturing strategy and supply chain changes — 59:29–60:04
• Smart home, streaming, and the orchestration layer — 63:03–64:56
• Bose Studios and content as brand platform — 66:48–69:01

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Final Thoughts

Nilay and Lila’s conversation gives a sweeping look at Bose’s evolution into a nimble, tech-forward, and multi-brand powerhouse—balancing a reverence for audio quality, a rapidly growing technology licensing business, and the complexity of operating in a world where AI, voice, and new form factors are reshaping listening. Amidst commodification fears and platform wars, Bose aims to protect its brand, evolve its tech, and foster a culture of excellence—staying fierce in pursuit of great sound in every context.

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For audio nerds, music lovers, and industry watchers, this episode offers a candid glimpse into how a top-tier legacy brand adapts—and pushes back—in an era of relentless change.

Transcript

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[Nilay Patel]

we secure the world's AI future by securing the world's AI leaders AI is being adopted faster than companies can secure it. Sensitive data is moving across AI models and attackers are using AI to strike with unprecedented speed and precision. That's why CrowdStrike built the Agentix cybersecurity platform for the AI era to secure AI and to stop breaches. So you can embrace AI with confidence, not compromise. CrowdStrike we secure AI, we stop breaches hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I. Patel, editor in Chief of the Verge and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Lila Snyder, who is the CEO of Bose. You almost certainly know Bose. It's one of the most famous brands in all of consumer tech. The company started 60 years ago selling speakers to consumers and the company's focus on research and development has led it to be a leader in both car audio and of course, noise canceling headphones. Lila was last on the show about four years ago and since then she's dramatically re architected the company. The focus on research is still there, but she sold off Bose Professional, acquired the high end luxury audio brands Macintosh Labs and Sonus Faber, and perhaps most importantly started licensing all of that core Bose technology to other companies. That means that while you can still go buy a Bose soundbar or Bose headphones, their company is also turning into a B2B business and you can now get Bose technology in Skullcandy headphones and Epson projectors, among many other products? This is pure decoder bait. A big change in the business comes with a big change in structure. Becoming a software company in addition to a product company comes with a whole new set of challenges. And Lyra and I talked quite a bit about how it's all working out. I also wanted to know if this is all a reaction to the potential rise of AI wearables, products that might end up looking a lot like headphones and which need all kinds of audio processing to enable voice input. Is Bose just trying to sell tech to a range of new companies that might disrupt headphones entirely? Or does Lila have a plan for a headphones market which was already once disrupted by phone vendors like Apple and Samsung making their own products like AirPods and Galaxy Buds work better with their phones than the competition? We got pretty deep on this and Lila was open about the challenges and the opportunities here. As decoder listeners know, I'm a giant audio nerd, so I loved every minute of this conversation. I hope you do too. Okay, Bose CEO Lila Snyder, here we go. Lila Snyder, you're the CEO of Bose. Welcome back to Decoder.

[Lila Snyder]

Thank you so much.

[Nilay Patel]

I am really excited to talk to you. It's been four years since you were last on the show, which seems entirely too long.

[Lila Snyder]

It's crazy.

[Nilay Patel]

A lot of things have happened. Bose has bought some companies, you sold some divisions. The idea of what headphones are is largely the same in one important way, but maybe going to be very different in another important way. How are you thinking about Bose today?

[Lila Snyder]

We are having a lot of fun in what I would describe as our second chapter of the transformation of Bose since I joined. And so as you said, in some ways many things are the same. We're still making amazing products for our customers. We're still excited about bringing that new technology forward in both our consumer business and our automotive business. But I would say two things fundamentally have changed as we've thought about growth for Bose for the future. For 60 years it was all Bose and we're now a multi brand company. So as you said, we've made a couple of acquisitions. One of those was of the Macintosh brand. So a legendary 75 year old audiophile brand that we absolutely love. And also Sonus Faber, which is an Italian craftsmanship heritage brand that's also been around for over 40 years. And so that made us brought us two things from one brand to multi brands, but also into the luxury audio space. Second change for us is we've Always been an amazing products company where we develop technology through research and a lot of development cycles. And all of that technology went into Bose products. And today what's different is we're still doing that. And we've added a technology business we call audio tech, where we're taking that technology and starting to put it into other places. And the big insight for us was sound is really important. It's getting more important, we think, given everything that's going on in the world around us. And there are so many products, devices that are out there that are using sound, whether that's audio or voice or even noise canceling, where those things are incredibly relevant, but they're not products that Bose would make. They're not targeted at our customer set. But we really have a strong belief in bringing great audio to as many places as we can.

[Nilay Patel]

The last time we talked, you were in the middle of the becoming a more functional company. In particular, you had said you had the last step was the engineering organization, which is really the heart of Bose. And it had been very divisional, very organized into products. You were centralizing that having an audio tech division that sells core technology feels like a very natural offshoot of that.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

We're going to have a big central engineering team. It's going to feed into our products and other products and then you can abstract that a little bit and sell it to other people who are the customers for the audio tech division.

[Lila Snyder]

So it's a B2B2C business, if you will. So our customers are large companies that are putting products into the market. So I'll give you a couple of examples. We've partnered with Motorola on a series of products from earbuds to making the phone itself sound better. So a Motorola is a good example. We partner with xreal. They're making pretty awesome VR XR glasses. Right. So that's an experience where sound really matters a lot. So we've had a lot of fun partnering with them. And you're starting to see Bose technology show up in a lot of different verticals, from mobile to compute to other people's headphones and audio products, for sure. But we just released with a partner called Sena, Motorcycle Helmet Communications device. And we're excited about all the places we're bringing our technology. And it's actually creating a broader aperture for how we think about invention and research at Bose as well, which is really exciting.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I want to come to that because that seems like a big change. And the reason I asked about customers is that having a new set of customers really changes the focus of the company. A lot of us are familiar with audio brands in particular, partnering with device makers, partnering with automakers, and maybe it's just a logo. I think you have been very proud that Bose has not been just a logo in many places, but for a lot of people it's just a logo. What's the difference between, okay, there's xreal glasses powered by Bose with a Bose logo on the side, and selling the technology without the Bose logo, or does the Bose logo always come with it

[Lila Snyder]

when you said this is new for Bose? In a way, yes, but in a way it's exactly what we've been doing in automotive for over 40 years. And so we do have a model for doing this inside the company. And it's just broadening that thinking into new spaces. First and foremost, we're selling technology and the technology is the key. And then in some cases, we're also selling the brand. So you might get technology in a product without a sound by Bose or powered by Bose logo on it, or you might get the logo as well, but you'll never get the logo without the tech, if that makes sense. Some of our partners are interested in the brand, some are not. Sometimes we're interested in having our brand connected to their, to their brand, and sometimes we're not. And so that's part of the discussion we have with each of our customers about whether it makes sense for them and for us. And so, you know, when you see it, know that it's been really thoughtful, but it's also attached to a lot of great technology that's inside that product.

[Nilay Patel]

Tell me about those conversations. Is it cheaper to take the brand? Is it more expensive to take the brand? This is one of those places where Bose has maybe a bigger, more famous brand than maybe some of the customers. How are you thinking about that and how does the cost change?

[Lila Snyder]

As you would expect, the technology has, has a licensing fee to it and so does the brand we, we've invested years in. Our brand we're incredibly proud of is, I think, one of the most iconic brands in the world, full stop, and certainly within the audio space. And so we are incredibly careful about where we put the brand. And it certainly isn't free. When you put it on a product

[Nilay Patel]

right next to that is Macintosh. As you know, I grew up just a total stereo nerd, just reading the magazines, dreaming about having blue meters in my house someday. Still working on it when we get there. I did have a Jeep with a Macintosh sound system several years ago. The blue meters Were it was a very fake Android app that ran on a very slow Android infotainment system. But I still loved it.

[Lila Snyder]

Okay.

[Nilay Patel]

That's a brand that has a real halo. You can't make cheaper Macintosh products. That's not good for that brand.

[Lila Snyder]

No way.

[Nilay Patel]

You need to stay way up there. How are you thinking about that relationship to Bose, which is much more of a premium mass market brand?

[Lila Snyder]

We think of them as two completely separate brands. And then, you know, think about Sonus Faber as yet another third brand, all of which are targeting really passionate fans of those brands for what they stand for. So when we thought about the getting into the luxury space and acquiring those two brands, we spent a lot of time saying, what is it that we're going to do internally to protect the brands?

[Olivia Lanes]

Right.

[Lila Snyder]

That we do not want to Bosefy anything that that is happening in those brands. And so we've set it up as a separate business unit. We have a luxury audio business unit that houses those two brands. We are very careful, as you said, we have no intention of bringing products down market. We believe both markets are exciting. We've been in that premium audio space for a long time. And when we looked at what we're calling luxury audio, we had two really important insights, I think. One is that as we're doing our own technology work, there's a lot of really exciting technology we develop that just isn't right for a premium audio product. It's right for something that sits at a higher level and we just didn't have anywhere to put it. And that was true on the consumer product side and it's certainly true on the automotive side where we felt like we were bumping up against what you could put in a premium product. And the ceiling of what we wanted to do was much higher. So the first reason we're excited about it is it sort of unleashes the creativity of our engineers to think about what you could do at those higher price points with just a different type of customer, a different type of experience. So we were excited on the technology side, equally excited, I think, about this idea of luxury. If you look at the luxury market writ large across all categories, what you find is that audio is really underrepresented compared to the role luxury plays in automotive or hospitality and travel or fashion leather goods. And when we really sat back and thought about it, given how much music is a passion point for people, it didn't make sense to us. We think there's a huge opportunity to attract new customers to the category. If the experience feels More like a luxury experience. And so, you know, when you think about those products, it's certainly about how they sound, but you went right to it. It's the iconic design, it's the artistry, it's the craftsmanship. All of our luxury products, whether it's Macintosh or Sonus Faber, are handmade. They are crafted one by one for you, the customer. And there's something incredibly special about that.

[Nilay Patel]

These weren't your decisions, so I feel like I can be a little bit rude about them. When I saw Macintosh was licensing to Stellantis to be in Jeeps, I thought, this company has to be desperate for money, right? Like, that's not actually a match. And it was fun that I had a Jeep with blue meters in it. It was great. But I thought to myself, this is a total mismatch, and they should be in Maybachs or whatever. It is, whatever luxury sector that you want to be in, because that's the brand. Was this just opportunistic for you, that this was a company that needed the help, that was in trouble, that you could go and you could push your products up market without having to take the Bose brand there? Or is there some other opportunity that presented itself to you?

[Lila Snyder]

We weren't actually shopping for brands first. The first thing was strategically, we saw the opportunity in luxury space. We saw an opportunity to create something new around luxury audio, and we were really excited about that. And so once we had made this strategic decision to go there, we had a lot of conversation about buy a brand or create a brand. But the reality is, in luxury, at those price points, history and heritage is part of what you're buying. And so we sort of intuitively knew we wanted to find a brand or brands that really had that strong history that we felt like we could build on top of. We thought those were both brands that had incredibly passionate fans, and we saw opportunity for us to take them to a new level. And so that was how we ended up acquiring the Macintosh Group.

[Nilay Patel]

When you brought in their engineering organization, they have a lot of technology. How integrated has that become over time, or are you leaving them alone?

[Lila Snyder]

So we've brought it into our engineering organization, but we've also kept a lot of the aspects a little bit separate. So probably the best example of that is Bose has a Bose sound. Everybody knows that. You buy a Bose product, you buy one the headphones, I'm wearing the speaker. In your house, your car, there is a sound signature to brands that consumers expect. And so that comes from the engineers, right? The engineers are tuning products to sound like they should. And so we're very careful on the engineering side to protect the sound signature of Macintosh. What we don't want is for you to hear a Macintosh product or a Sonus Faber product and imagine that it sounds different. So that's one. And initially, like you do with, I think any acquisition, you want to be careful to protect what you bought. So we've integrated it. Yes. But we have a separate team that is doing the engineering for luxury and we're slowly kind of adding Bose technology to it where it makes sense. So there are things, for example, on the Bose side where we can be incredibly helpful in terms of, you know, the software aspects, the connectivity, those sorts of things. Those are things that we do really well and they're not the most important part of those products, but they have to work. And so there are aspects that we've started to add into the products and you'll see more of that over time.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm really curious about that luxury aspect. The knock on high end audio for years, and I'm not saying this is Macintosh, but the knock on high end audio for years is it's the same stuff all dressed up fancy. And literally there are headphones that are famous for having weights in them to feel heavier even though they're commodity parts inside. This is one of those places where you could just say we're just going to make more expensive versions of the same thing. And some buyers are totally price insensitive and that they will always just buy the most expensive thing. Then there's, we're going to make it worth it, right? We're going to make it worth 10x the price of whatever Bluetooth speakers are at Best Buy. Where are you falling on that? Because it's very tempting, especially in luxury, to just make it expensive.

[Lila Snyder]

The value comes from the sound. You know, if you visit us at Bose, you should come visit us at Bose in Framingham and you listen to a Macintosh system, a Sonus Faber system. They're incredible. They're not anything like what you would get at at Best Buy in a premium product from Bose or anyone else. And that's incredibly special. Part of that is the technology itself. Part of that is that it is more analog. So it has a different sound signature to it. It's got a lot more power behind it because that's what certainly Macintosh is known for and that's what you need to power a Sonus Faber set of speakers. You're also paying for design. You're paying in a way. It's a Little bit of art. We just launched a new integrated amplifier, the MA2375 for Macintosh. I'm so excited about it. It's sort of got that retro look with the vacuum tubes. It is just such a. It is a design piece. I want to sit it, you know, on my desk. I want it to be, you know, I want it to be a part of the decor. You would say the same thing on the Sonus Faber side. It's like buying an incredible piece of Italian furniture that has been handmade with natural materials and just feels like art. That also sounds beautiful. So there's more to the value proposition in the luxury space. It's true in the premium space too. Design really matters. Color matters. Feel, touch, feel, comfort. All those things matter. In addition to the sound. I think it's just even that much more elevated in the luxury space.

[Nilay Patel]

We're going to pause here for a short break. We'll be right back.

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[Nilay Patel]

Welcome back. I'm talking with Bose CEO Lila Snyder about how the company is trying to reach a lot of competing customers at once. I'm really curious about all the different sets of new customers you're describing. Right. There's the B2B business, which is growing in audio tech. Then there's luxury customers who are. They have a lot of money, but they're fickle and particularly in high end av. And I'm a high end AV nerd through and through. Convincing people it's worth it because they can hear it has always been the hardest problem. Yeah, and maybe the most fun problem because you can convince a lot of people they're hearing a lot of things that aren't there. Right. You can sell expensive cables at 100 times the price. The regular cables, even if they don't do anything different this is a lot of new customers for Bose. Do you think the B2B business is going to distract your core technology roadmap? How are you holding that all together?

[Lila Snyder]

It is more complexity for sure. It is a broader mission and I think we're ready for it. So when I was here last time, we were in the middle of the transformation that I would say was solidifying the foundation of Bose, and now we're building on top of that. So we've built an amazing marketing and brand infrastructure that we're now using to power three brands instead of one. But a lot of that capability can be put in the direction of all three. So the key is real clarity about who the customer is, which we've done a lot of work on the Bose brand for sure, and we talk about the music lover for Bose, but we've done the same work for Macintosh and the same work for Sonus Faber, so that we are 1000% clear who the customer is and how we want to talk to that customer. So on the kind of products side of our company, I think really clear about what the mission is for each one of those brands. On the technology side, interestingly, as we become more of a B2B technology company, it's actually creating advantages back to the Bose brand and our luxury business as well. And what I mean by that is it's caused us to completely rethink the way that we do research and we develop our tech. So when in the past, if you think about Bose developing products, we were developing purpose built technology for a pair of headphones or a car audio system. And I think last time we talked about the tech franchises, we care a lot about noise cancellation. We care about immersive, lifelike audio and we care about this idea of hearing what you want. And those are all experiences that are built on some basic building blocks of technology that we've been developing for a long time. But because we were developing them for our own products, we've had to do a bit of a complete shift in the way that we think about it so that we're now developing kind of ground up those building blocks. And now we're able to say with common platforms, with common algorithms, AI, think of them as sort of AI units. We can create different experiences for our own products and we can port that same technology through the same platform tech into other people's products. What that's creating is a lot of efficiency at the research and development level. It's creating more breadth because now that we're thinking about things like noise cancellation for different spaces or spatial audio or hearing what you want, it actually is creating more innovation and more invention at the core. And it's making us faster because we've made these building blocks a lot more consumable for our B2B customers. Guess what? Makes us faster at bringing our own products to market too.

[Nilay Patel]

I think this is a great place to ask the decoder questions because you're describing the end point of a pretty big culture and structure shift at Bose that you've been architecting for several years. So how is Bose structured today?

[Lila Snyder]

So there's a business unit structure, there's a functional structure, and we are living in what I would describe as hybrid. So for the core functions that matter deeply to what we deliver, like engineering, like marketing, like supply chain, those are global functions that support all of our businesses. But because we've added new customer sets and really two new businesses with luxury and audio tech, we're also running four business units. So those four business units have business unit presidents and they draw on the global functions for the work that they need.

[Nilay Patel]

How many people are is bose today?

[Lila Snyder]

About 2,500.

[Nilay Patel]

And you're mostly in Framingham or are you all over the place?

[Lila Snyder]

We're global all over them, yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

And then how's that split between. You said you're hybrid, how's that split between engineering, sales, all that sort of thing?

[Lila Snyder]

I don't actually think about it that way. But the one thing that I do know is that it's sort of the most important statistic to me is half of our employees are engineers.

[Nilay Patel]

You're describing aws, you're describing Amazon, right? You've modularized a bunch of components inside the company. Now you can build new products faster. This is really great. Every company that goes through this transition ends up hiring more and more engineers over time because you just need to build more and more components. Has that been growing? Are you investing more in that kind of engineering?

[Lila Snyder]

We are for sure. So I think probably not unique to us. We've been in this transition of hardware long, long ago, just hardware and then hardware and software and then more and more software. And now as we're building the technology pieces, those are truly just software products that are an algorithm kind of AI based products that we're selling in. And so you see that mix shift continuing. We're certainly seeing growth in our engineering ranks and we've got a lot more productivity out of engineering as we start to have more sophisticated tools as we use AI and other things to help with some of that development. So yes, Growing and I think more productivity per engineer, if you will, as we start to use more sophisticated tools to do the development.

[Nilay Patel]

You said it's pure software products, right? When you sell out to B2B, you're just selling the algorithms. Do those feel protectable? This is one of the things that I think about all the time. Like, what is the actual thing you're selling and how easily can it be copied by a Chinese firm that does not respect our intellectual property laws or something like that.

[Lila Snyder]

Yeah, I'm probably oversimplifying. We're really selling three things. We're definitely selling software, algorithms, et cetera. I'll come back to your how do you protect it? Question. One of the very special things about Bose is actually systems engineering, which is an underappreciated discipline, in my view. So software is great, but software has to run on hardware. In our world, ultimately, that software has to get delivered through something. And the magic at Bose, I think the secret sauce has always been systems engineering and how you're marrying together hardware elements, software elements, for an experience that feels unified across the device and that's optimized to provide the best experiences. So we're certainly doing that on our own products. But you see that kind of a service as we start to sell more and more technology into our B2B customers, there's also a lot of desire for help on that system side, because our expertise there is real. That's always been true in automotive, in our automotive business, and it is increasingly true in our partnerships and our customers on the audio tech side as well. So I think that's a second piece which is really important to call out, is that it's not just software for software's sake, it's software that has to be integrated into a system where everything comes together to work. And then you've got kind of the idea of systems engineering and then services on top of that. So how you tune a product, some of our partners and customers need help with that, want help with that, some don't. So there are a lot of services that get married along. Sometimes it's the systems engineering, sometimes it's things like tuning, et cetera. So three pieces.

[Nilay Patel]

Can I play devil's advocate here for one second? What you're describing here, if you wanted to poke at it as hard as you could, is a process of a little bit of commodification. Right. There's a lot of common components here, and then it's the layers on top that differentiate in the market. And if you're an audio nerd, you know, the magazines are all like, one engineer in their garage innovated on speaker technology, and they made the speaker cones out of waffle paper, and now they're more transparent than ever. Whatever that myth was that sold a lot of speakers back in the day. If you're not starting from the products back, but you're starting from the components up, there's a risk that everything kind of becomes the same in its branding and marketing. And maybe, you know, the sound signature that's tuned into it is artificial now. It's not from the components themselves. How do you balance that? Or is that just not a worry with modern consumers?

[Lila Snyder]

I think what you're describing is, if we're putting Bose technology in other headphones, doesn't that just revert to the mean? I think there's a second. The bigger market for us is not audio products. Things that we call audio second. So, for example, the XR glasses, the main function is not audio, but audio is really important. The car. You don't usually buy a car because it has a Bose sound system, but when you buy the car, the sound system is actually one of the most important features of the car. A projector that you buy for your house, you're buying because it's a great projector. We're partnering with Epson, but the sound is also really important there. So it's a little bit different, I think, when you get into audio second in the audio market. I think the key is there are so many different customers who want different things. And so when you think about products that have ingredient technology that's the same, it's really enabling you to do things for your customer and the experience that you're trying to create. So I'll just use Skullcandy as an example. Skullcandy just launched a pair of headphones with sound by Bose. And you couldn't have two more diverse customer sets, Right. Between who they're targeting and who we're targeting. We helped them with the technology. Right. So there's Bose technology inside to help make that sound better. But the design choices of what they want for their customer are incredibly different than what you would find. And so I don't think you would ever put those two products, a Bose headphone and a Skullcandy headphone, side by side and say, wow, this is really commoditized. It sounds the same. It is the same. They're very, very, very different.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I think I'm asking maybe slightly more about the audio second product, but if all of your audio first products come from the same technology base, the same modular components that can be remixed into all the products you want. Do you lose the ability to innovate at the product level? Right. If everything is made out of the same Legos, at some point you can't be like, actually, what I need is all new Legos.

[Lila Snyder]

I think the answer is no, because the product is so much bigger than just those ingredients. So if you think about a headphone, design, comfort, all of the other features, so there may be a lot of ingredient technology, but the ones that you choose may be different. One of the things that I think we talk a lot about now is being at the intelligent edge. Everything Bose does is what we would describe as at the intelligent edge. And as you know, it's a pretty hostile environment. You have limited computer, you have limited power, you're always making trade offs between what am I putting in this product and how does that impact my ability to do that? Because there's just not enough room to put everything in it. And so I think the reason why you still see so much differentiation among products, even if some of the ingredients are the same, is because all of those product choices that you're making are really critical and you have to make a lot of them to fit inside that constrained environment that you're working with.

[Nilay Patel]

This brings me to the other decoder question about decisions. You've obviously made a lot of them and you've got a few big ones to make that I want to come to. Around AI, how do you make decisions? What's your framework?

[Lila Snyder]

I am a believer that you get the right people in the room. You have a intense debate that isn't always comfortable, that sometimes makes people a little bit queasy. And you move as fast as you can to decide, knowing that if it's wrong, you can pivot.

[Nilay Patel]

We get a lot of type one and type two decisions move fast. And we had ex Amazon employee write to us and say every decision is reversible if you have enough money.

[Lila Snyder]

That might be true for Amazon.

[Nilay Patel]

That's a very Amazon perspective. The reason I bring this up in the context of AI, I'm looking at the sweep of things you're doing and I'm looking at where in particular the big tech companies think their headphones are going to go. And I was reviewing our conversation from four years ago. Boy, did we talk about Bluetooth a lot.

[Lila Snyder]

We did.

[Nilay Patel]

This is a core limiting technology. It's an enabling technology in an important way, but they hold on to what Bluetooth can and can't do on their platforms. Very tightly. And then their products, their first party products get to extend that standard in different ways and they all do it. And this means broadly, if you have an iPhone, the best working headphones that will do all the things the platform wants you to do are probably AirPods. If you have a Pixel, it's probably Pixel Buds. If you have a Samsung phone, it's probably their buds. And this is because they have reduced the capability of the interconnect. And one of the reasons they're doing that is because they want your earbuds in your ears 24, 7 so you can talk to their AI systems on the back end. And this is their future. And maybe the answer is we're all going to wear meta glasses or we're all going to wear xreal glasses. It seems up for grabs in big particular ways. What's your view of that? What's your view of AI wearables? And do you think there's room for third party players here?

[Lila Snyder]

We absolutely think wearables are critical to the AI future. Right. I think that we're clear. The form factor, if you work backwards from that, we're going to use our wearable devices to communicate with our AI agents and that is going to become more and more important and more and more natural. We believe that strongly. The second thing we believe is that is more likely to be conversational and sound based than anything else. At least that we think is probably the primary mode. And so the types of technologies we're focused on around voice pickup, around clarity, around speech enablement are all, we think incredibly important. What form factor you want to use as your wearable. I think the jury is still out and I think the answer is going to be a whole proliferation of them. Some people will like glasses because they like the glasses. Some people will like open earbuds, which we hadn't launched when you and I talked last time. We talked a lot about open ear audio, but not yet about that form factor, that clip on form factor that Bose invented and launched into the world. We think that is a really powerful form factor that will be for some. Others might want a watch or a pin or a ring or 18 variations of how those work together. Part of the reason we think being in the audio tech business is important is because it gives us the ability to participate in a lot of those different places that we might not naturally be able to go on our own. So we think form factor is going to matter. But I don't think there's a single winner there. At least that's my Current view, I think that there will be multiple types of devices that consumers will choose based on their own personal preferences. And then we know there are going to be a limited number of LLMs, right? We know that those are going to converge to the large ecosystems that already exist. New ones may emerge as we're seeing, but there won't be hundreds of those. There will be few of those. And yes, there may be some advantages if you stay within that ecosystem for your earbuds, but fundamentally, I think even though a lot of people do choose earbuds and headphones and other devices in their ecosystem, a lot of people don't. I think consumers still want choice and I think it is important for those ecosystems and in our conversations with them, they need third party players to interface with their AI as well. They need third party players to produce devices that work with what they're doing because they recognize they're not going to have a full share of the market and that choice matters. And so we believe we've got a couple of ways to compete. Now. Our own devices for sure need to be compatible across the different LLMs and the ability to interface with them. And we need our technology starting to crop up in other places where that interface will happen.

[Nilay Patel]

Is this a way to just hedge the bet that no one actually knows what's going to happen with AI? If you're selling Bose beamforming technology to a handful of Silicon Valley startups making pendants, that means you're not making the big bet on pendants being the form factor yourself. You can wait and see. Is this just a way to make sure the technology is available and being monetized while you wait for the answers to emerge?

[Lila Snyder]

There's certainly a diversification play. Absolutely. And I wouldn't shy away from betting on a few. And if one becomes a winner, awesome. I also think that it's important that you don't lose sight of what your brand is. And the Bose brand is, we are for music lovers. And if we start to branch out and create some of those other devices that are not core to who we are, I just don't think it works. And so it is a way to participate because we don't think those are areas that it makes sense for the Bose brand to go.

[Nilay Patel]

We have to take another quick break here. We'll be back in just a minute.

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[Nilay Patel]

Welcome back. I'm talking with Bose CEO Lila Snyder about getting consumers to care about sound quality in a world of literal constant noise. One of the things I worry about again as a music fan, as an audio nerd, is every single time the tech companies come to music, convenience wins and quality suffers, right? It just this is the pattern that has been repeating since MP3s first came out, right? We're going to go from CD quality audio, which in 2026 is still what people refer to as the best audio you can get. CD quality is, that's the bar. But we went from that to, I don't know, 128 kilobit mp3s on iPods. We stayed there for a long time. We got a little better, the headphones got worse. The interconnect went from a wired to a compressed Bluetooth interconnect Like at every point, the market picks convenience. And there's some point here, even in luxury, where you just walk in and the music is playing because the AI has determined the music should be playing. And the end point of the music is the least important thing. It's just that it's happening to you and there's not this focus on listening intently because you're probably also watching TikTok at the same time or maybe you're only listening to music on TikTok and that's where all your discovery happens and all of your music money spent at concerts and live experiences. Somewhere in there is the audio industry, right? It's been going through this convulsion. There's another turn coming here where Apple and OpenAI and Samsung and whoever else are going to launch AI first devices that are conversational, that have audio input and output capabilities, and they will say, and you can also listen to music. And they will commodify it even further. And the idea of a music lover gets even more squeezed. How do you view that? Because as a music lover myself, I'm like, this is only getting worse. It's only becoming. It's not audio second, it's like audio 15th.

[Lila Snyder]

Okay, so it's a complicated web there that you just spun.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm having an existential crisis here.

[Lila Snyder]

I'm gonna try to help you. In some ways, what we find with our luxury customers is what they're looking for is moments of clarity, quiet moments where you put down the phone, you put on a record, right? You listen to it the way that it was supposed to be heard on an amazing sound system. And the quiet nature of that, the ability to step away from what is a chaotic digital world, that trend is picking up. It's picking up. We see it in the luxury space. We actually see more of it in the premium space a little bit now too. And so I do think that the appreciation of music, right, just appreciating it for the emotional state that it puts you in and what it does for your mental health, I actually think that is a trend we're seeing and I actually think that's going to continue to grow. Our belief and part of the reason that we started this audio tech business is we want you to have the best sound experience no matter what. Even if you're listening in a hostile environment, you're listening on a lower cost pair of headphones, you're not, you know, you're listening to a crappier format. Let's at least make sure you have the best experience you can and that you can tell the difference between what good and better sounds like or what better and best sounds like. So I think that's the second thing. The other thing that I think, I think is a positive about what you said is there's just so much music discovery because it's everywhere and not everyone is gonna turn into a music lover and that's okay. But I think for young people who are discovering, I'm always amazed at the songs my kids are excited about because I'm like, you know that's not a new song, right? Like, that's from when I was a teenager. And I think that's great. Like the way that the younger generation is doing music discovery is creating a love of music which is not bound by time or genre. And I think that's really cool. And our belief is that if you help people listen to that as best you can, they will get an appreciation for what better sound sounds like. And over time they will graduate into the formats and the products that actually bring that to life in an amazing way.

[Nilay Patel]

But that's music and I appreciate that this is happening in music. I think the question I'm asking is honestly about AI and the almost religious belief in Silicon Valley that AI in particular natural language input will usher in a platform shift, right? Mark Zuckerberg has a religious belief that you're going to talk to musespark through meta glasses. And whether or not you believe him, he is laser focused on that because he wants to stop being constrained by Apple's platform policies. That is the story that plays out in the pages of the Verge every single day. Apple probably believes this, right? Apple believes natural language input is some kind of enormous threat to the iPhone and they're reacting to it. Somewhere in there is, are you wearing headphones to talk to this? And can Bose headphones meaningfully participate in those ecosystems or will all of these companies create more first party opportunity for themselves?

[Lila Snyder]

I think both can be true. So I think we'll see if Mark is right. But that doesn't mean you want to have a crappy listening experience. When you're listening to music, do you take glasses off and put on headphones? Do you make the glasses sound better? I don't think that just because we have a utility which is AI on the. So I'll just use phone calls. It's an old school example. Just because you can take phone calls on your headphones if they didn't sound good to play your music, most people who love music would not wear those to listen to music. It's just the reality. And I think the same is true. It's a utility. And if you're someone who doesn't care so much about music and it's not part of your personal brand or your identity, you may say, that's good enough for me. It sounds, I can't tell the difference, but I think for most people, they will choose multiple devices or they will choose one device that can do all of it really, really well. And I still think there's room for high quality listening experiences even in a world where we're all chained to our AI.

[Nilay Patel]

So I'll just paint a picture for you. So if xreal wins the AI race and all of us interact with Claude all day long through our xreal glasses and the sound is powered by Bose through an audio tech partnership, is that victory, is that success, or is there more to be done?

[Lila Snyder]

I think there's always more to be done. Right. So when you think about how fast technology is moving, I think we're imagining experiences today that can be had at the edge that live within the compute constraints and the battery constraints that we have. And two years from now those constraints are going to still be there, but the amount of capability you have will be bigger. I think we're going to continue to see innovation and invention in the space that's going to create experiences we haven't imagined yet.

[Nilay Patel]

One of the things that I'm really curious about is just the amount of audio input all of these companies want to do. We had the CEO of Zoom on decoder and he was like, everyone will talk to AI avatars in Zoom and all of us will be mediated by Zoom. And that means we got to record the in person meeting. Everyone has to wear the rings or the pendants and we're going to record everything all day long so the AI can fully know us. I have a lot of thoughts about that. But that's one vision in the world, right? We're going to record everything, which sort of puts a lot of pressure on noise cancellation, on rehabilitating the audio once you have it, because there's just a lot of not just noise, but just damage that happens in the compression process and transmitting over the Internet. That all seems like opportunity for a company like Bose. Is that where the investment is is to help the AI hardware companies deal with lossy streaming and TikTok audio. Like, how are you thinking about that opportunity?

[Lila Snyder]

One of the things that we're learning as we kind of further venture into the space is that the core problems are the same if you take something like speech clarity, voice pickup, that is a world we've done a lot of research on, a lot of work on. It's an incredibly important part of a Bose headphone, for example, but it's also really turns out important in a dozen other places where the same type of technology at its core can be expanded and extended to have a right. So think about, I'm driving 70 miles an hour down the highway in my car. That same speech clarity technology is really relevant in the car in the same way it is in a headphone, in the same way that it is in a motorcycle helmet, where you can imagine that's maybe the most hostile sound environment you could get. And so I think the same is true. Noise canceling has all sorts of varieties that I think are incredibly important in the AI examples that you talked about and in a lot of other everyday life examples where noise cancellation hasn't yet gone. So a great example of that is hearing aids. So, as you know, we've been working on hearing aid technology at Bose for over a decade. And just this year, we launched the world's first hearing aid with a customer and partner called Orca in China that has noise canceling. And so it actually now solves what I think is the biggest problem that hearing aids have had for decades. Which is my most challenged environment, if I have some hearing loss, is a noisy restaurant, for example, and. And traditional hearing aid amplifies all of that sound. Noise canceling has always been the dream of hearing aids, because if you could take the noise of the environment down and amplify the speaker, right, the person you're trying to have a conversation with, that's sort of the holy grail now, because you're doing exactly what the customer really wants and needs. And that up until now has been impossible to do because in a hearing aid, you need 15 to 18 hours of battery life. You have very limited compute. It's been a really tricky problem. And for us, solving that problem was both about hardware, a new driver that actually fits in the ear canal, but can power noise canceling. And the platform that we built to enable that at a low enough compute level that you could do it inside of a hearing aid over a period of 15 to 18 hours in a day. That's the kind of innovation for noise canceling, for example, where it's an obvious use case. But to get there required a considerable number of building blocks.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm glad you brought up hearing aids. The last time I were on the show, you had a partnership. I Believe with Lexi. And after our conversation, I ran out and I bought my dad those hearing aids. After four years, he won't wear them because he says everything is too loud. Exactly the problem you're describing. But you exited that partner with Lexi. And the parent company just announced a couple weeks ago that they're leaving the US Market. They're out. You're describing hearing aids that you're making in China. Is there something particular about the US market that just makes it too hard or are you going to re enter?

[Lila Snyder]

No, we've been here with Lexie and they're going through some challenges and so we'll find the right partner for us in the US I think the over the counter hearing aid market has struggled more than any of us thought. If you go back four years, it hasn't taken off at the rate we had hoped that it would. But I still see a ton of opportunity in the hearing aid space. And this hearing aid happens to be in China, but there's no reason that you won't see it in other places around the world.

[Nilay Patel]

Why do you think it hasn't taken off?

[Lila Snyder]

I think it hasn't worked yet. There are a couple factors and again, we've been partnering into it, so we're not as close to the day to day of it. But I think there's really two things. It's definitely cheaper and more accessible than it was in a prescription environment. But these are still very expensive products. So, you know, rounding about $1,000, which is a lot of money. And so I think in an over the counter space, most customers are expecting something that looks and feels more like what they would be willing to pay for a consumer electronics product, which is more like two or three or maybe $400. So while it's more affordable, it is not as affordable as I think the consumer wants or needs or expects. So I still think there's some work to do there from a technology standpoint to figure out how you bring it down. It's also not yet really in the insurance space. So if I get a prescription hearing aid that's covered in Medicare, that's covered by my insurance company, not the case for over the counter. And so I think there's just some affordability challenges we haven't quite fully solved yet. That industry has not yet solved yet. So that's one piece of it. And I think there's still a stigma. Part of it. Right. There's just still a. I don't want to look old, I don't want to feel old, I don't Want to wear a hearing aid. And until we figure out the right industrial design and make it more palatable, I think you still have resistance, no matter the price point.

[Nilay Patel]

The hearing aids my dad was most resistant to were when I tried to get him to wear AirPods after Apple had released that feature. And he looked at me and said, absolutely not. So this is a particular area of convergence, right? What is an augmented reality hearing device except a hearing aid? Right, Except a hearing aid with intense noise cancellation that can focus on the speaker in front of you and maybe translate them in real time. If you don't speak the same language, you're talking to an AI and you just want to whisper so no one can hear you, and it's talking to you, but you're still hearing everything that goes on. This is the convergence, right? The idea of headphones, the idea of augmented reality and the idea of hearing aids, they're in a Venn diagram. And that center of that Venn diagram, I think, is getting bigger and bigger and over time. I just come back to the same question. Is the culture of Bose designed to provide technology into all of the players in that ecosystem, or are you still trying to win with the best product that hits the middle of that Venn diagram?

[Lila Snyder]

We are always focused on who's the Bose customer and what are the features they want. Right? As I've said a couple of times, you can't fit everything in that Venn diagram is getting bigger as compute is getting more powerful at the edge, but it's still limited. And as we add more and more AI, we talk about it at Bose as tiny AI. Right? What we're good at is a lot of companies are good at really big AI. Right? What we're good at is taking really complex algorithms and then figuring out how to shrink them down and take as little power and compute as they possibly can so that they can fit in our devices. But you're always constrained. So we're looking at what our customers are asking us for, what they need, what they want in that Venn diagram, Where do they want the emphasis to be? And that's where we're pushing our products. So you'll continue to see us do that. Other companies will choose a slightly different variation of that Venn diagram and they'll look for a different feature set. And I think that's what makes the industry go right. It is competitive by nature, and it is important to have a deep understanding of what the customer need is.

[Nilay Patel]

Do you think that there's any pressure on Bose just from the Product manufacturing side, right. There's tariffs, there's a lot of focus on what gets made in China. We talked briefly about protectability and whether or not you even want to sell into Chinese companies or Chinese OEMs who might turn around and take your technology, which we have seen at scale with Apple and Tesla and others. Is it worth it to be chasing hardware at this time?

[Lila Snyder]

Yeah, look, I think since COVID supply chain has become a more exciting environment. So it's been a series of things. And I think our perspective back then we said, look, it's clear we're going to need to be more flexible and more agile in our supply chain. That, that I think became clear and we've done a lot of work to get ourselves into a position where we expect curve balls. Now we just don't know what they're going to be. And when they come, we've designed ourselves in a way that we can adjust quickly and we think we're flexible enough to handle it. The world needs hardware as much as everyone is enamored with software and AI. And those are the things creating the magic, perhaps on the hardware these days. But you still need physical things. We are a physical world. You need physical things. And we are going to continue to make physical things and roll with the curve balls that come our way.

[Nilay Patel]

Have you moved manufacturing meaningfully out of China?

[Lila Snyder]

We have, yeah. So we're diversified across Asia. We also have manufacturing in North America for some of our products as well.

[Nilay Patel]

Have you moved anything meaningfully back into the United States?

[Lila Snyder]

We have. The only thing we have in the US is Macintosh. So all of our Macintosh products are built in Binghamton, New York.

[Nilay Patel]

It's funny because those are the only products you have that also wouldn't benefit from the price cut of not having tariffs. Right. You need to keep those prices really high. Have you thought about moving anything back to the United States to avoid whatever tariffs and bring prices down?

[Lila Snyder]

We'll always look at it. And it's a fulsome economic equation of not just the economics but also the expertise. Right. Consumer electronics expertise from a manufacturing perspective moved to Asia a long time ago. And so it's both a cost and an expertise question. We look at it, we talk about it. If it ever makes sense, we'll do it right now. Those things don't play out for us.

[Nilay Patel]

I feel like I have to ask you about Bluetooth one more time here at the end of our conversation. I've waited. It is the limiting factor of so many things you are doing. It's the limiting factor of how you can connect to phones. It will almost certainly be the limiting factor of how all these AI devices work. The manufacturers have really put Bluetooth in a box. Like there is a wall around what it can do and what they will ever allow it to do on their platforms. And then there are their extensions. And this is across the board. I'm not even singling out one manufacturer. I used to always single out Apple, but now they're all doing it. So it's like, great, there's a wallet on Bluetooth for a company like Bose which has to connect to phones. That is the limit. Have you tried to push hard to overcome that limit? Have the antics of the European Union helped you open up and overcome the limit? How has this played out over the last four years?

[Lila Snyder]

Probably not terribly different than what we talked about last time. We partner, we push, we ask for what we want and we work with what we have. So I think we are always trying to test and push the limits as much as we can. And we're incredibly good at not using that as an excuse. So how do we create amazing experiences with the advantages that we have? And we think we're pretty great at doing that.

[Nilay Patel]

The other side of this, you've got Macintosh products or premium home products and people are disconnected. A lot of people still want to play Spotify off their phone onto their home CRI system. There's a joke we tell in our other show, the Vergecast, where we just try to locate the computer. Where is the computer supposed to be? Here, right? If you're playing music off your phone, is the computer your phone? And you're just Bluetooth streaming to your speakers. In the context of Macintosh, that just is like a heartbreaking crime. Like don't stream to your Macintosh system.

[Lila Snyder]

Don't do that.

[Nilay Patel]

That means the Macintosh system needs a computer, right? It needs to run some variant of a Spotify app. App that has WI fi that pulls lossless down. That means it needs ram. Like the whole thing immediately becomes a computer. Maybe a somewhat low powered computer that's only focused on a handful of apps, but a computer. And then you have all the carrying costs of a computer, right? Software updates and application updates and Spotify changes its file formats. Whatever is going to happen, you've got some problem there. How do you think about that, right? Because that across all of your products, the amount of compute going into them is going up as you've described. Maybe in tiny ways, but it's going up. And then you're not charging service fees. So how does that all work as more and more of your products fundamentally become network computers.

[Lila Snyder]

It's a great question that we always wrestle with. Right. I think consumers are subscriptioned out. I think that the idea that you're going to create a subscription service over an over the update that they're going to pay for on a monthly basis is just not. I think that's not coming in our space. And so we have to kind of think long term as we're selling products today, what is the software, compute, cloud storage, all of the security, all of the costs that live across the life cycle of that product that we're going to have to support and we have to build that into the cost of maintaining that product. Right. Which is different than what you would have done in the past. We've made some design choices, I think that are, that are important as well. We don't need to duplicate what Spotify is doing either. And so as we think about the lifestyle collection products that we just launched, what we heard overwhelmingly from our customers was, I just want to go to my music. I don't understand why I have to deal with you. I love how this sounds, but please just get me to my music faster. And so we thought a long time about how best to do that in the home and we think about it in our wearables too. And so we want you to be able to control your home speakers through Spotify or AirPlay or however you want to do that. And that offloads some of that from Bose, which is good. We also just made an acquisition of a company called Stream Unlimited and their business is to connect to all of the streaming apps, devices, et cetera. That allows a smart home device to have those easy connections. That gives us some scalability and some participation in that orchestration layer, which is also helpful for us. So we come at the problem in a couple of different ways.

[Nilay Patel]

There's rumors in a few months or weeks here that Apple will put out a whole bunch of new smart home devices. OpenAI might put out a smart home device, obviously I have Google ones and there's Amazon ones. You ask any of those companies what are the number one and two things people ask for from their assistants in their house? And it's setting timers and playing music. And then everything else is a long tail of almost nothing. Like the drop off is enormous. You know, if you want to play music and you've got a great stereo in your house, you've got to go connect to their smart home system. Now you're on their network and now you're just another endpoint for whatever, whatever forthcoming successful consumer AI agent will exist. Big question mark there, but I'll just. Let's say it happens. That further commodifies you, right? That's like yet another time when they're not going to use your interface or your streaming. They're just going to say out loud in their home and the OpenAI device will be like, I found some speakers on your network. I'm playing the music for you. Do you need to participate there? Do you need the OpenAI agent to say, I'm playing it on your Bose speakers and then you collect a tiny little licensing check back? Or like, how should that work?

[Lila Snyder]

I don't think so. I think, you know, we understand there are a lot of components in this chain and customers think about Bose for amazing sound. And when they're playing the speaker and they're asking whatever agent they're asking to play it, there is an appreciation. There is going to be a logo on that speaker. You know, if you have a new Bose lifestyle speaker, there's going to be a logo right on the front of it. You're going to look at it every day in your kitchen or your living room or wherever.

[Nilay Patel]

I get the feeling these logos are about to get bigger and start lighting up like you can see it coming.

[Lila Snyder]

We're not going to make them that big.

[Nilay Patel]

So that chain is long. And in fact, you launched another piece of the chain of music, which is you launched studios, which feels like a record label, a marketing venture for new artists. How does that play into it?

[Lila Snyder]

So bigger than a record label? Not just a record label, but that's a piece of it. So think about Bose Studios as a way to connect with our customers and give them new avenues to participate with us. And if you look at it, the announcement may feel like a sudden thing, but if you sort of look at what we've been doing at Bose over the last four or five years, we've been moving in this direction. You know, getting the attention of consumers is hard. You don't do that with traditional advertising anymore. Consumers are engaging with content and that's it. And so we've been building more and more content. We've been partnering with more and more creators. We've been dipping our toe in this water for the last several years. So I'll give you a couple of examples. We've been partnering with NME to do their mixtape, where we're helping them bring undiscovered, up and coming artists to the forefront and helping bring those artists and celebrate those artists that we've learned a lot from doing that. The connection and the participation of our customers with that content and with those artists has been incredible. We've been sponsoring an event, Chris Brickley Invitational, which is this amazing basketball event for high school basketball players. It is becoming the place to go if you're a all American type high school basketball player, both on the men's and the women's side. And that event has turned into something so special. It is a we're not talking about kind of major. We're not putting on a new super bowl over here, but we are participating in content creation in a way that connects with our customers. We think that's really important. We also like this idea of up and coming creators who need support to launch their careers. We're such a independent at Bose we say fiercely independent. There's something so unique about our structure and the independence that we have. We kind of like the idea of supporting this up and coming group. It supports our connection with our customers and we think we're helping them along the way as well.

[Nilay Patel]

I feel like I could spend another full hour just talking about the economics of the music business and brands supporting creators in this way, but sadly you have already given us too much time. Lila, thank you so much for being on Decoder.

[Lila Snyder]

Thank you for having me back.

[Nilay Patel]

I'd like to thank Lila for taking time to join Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. Click. Let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all. Drop us a line. You can email [e-mail] we really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at Decoder Pod and we have a TikTok and Instagram. Same handle at Decoder Pod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe over. Your podcast code is Fresh and Verge and part of the Boxing Podcast Network. The producers are Greg Ott, Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Kabir Chopra. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. Decoder of music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time. Hi, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.

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[Nilay Patel]

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[Lila Snyder]

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