Author: openjargon

• A personality hire is someone who succeeds because of their soft skills.
• AI is thriving on hype (and fear) — and people who are good at creating hype are succeeding.
• Hype men and women and personality hires aren't bad things. In fact, they're necessary.

Of all the world-altering things possible in our new AI era, one decidedly old-fashioned thing is not going anywhere: the personality hire.

A "personality hire" is someone who contributes to a team with soft skills like their dazzling charm. There's a connotation that personality hires might not actually be good at their jobs, that they're just fun to have around the office. But they arguably serve an incredibly important function in the health of an organization.

In the field of AI, it's useful to lightly stretch the definition of "personality hire" to include someone who is really, really good at selling themselves, a product, or simply the idea of AI as this all-powerful entity that will completely change everything about life as we know it, for better or worse (hopefully, for the better if you heed their advice).

They're hype men (or women), you might say. This is because a lot of what's going on with AI right now is hype.

The greatest of all these, of course, is Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. This week, Bloomberg Businessweek reported on Altman's rise within Silicon Valley, starting from founding a mediocre social networking app at age 19 to becoming the head of the most exciting company in tech.

Altman founded Loopt, a pre-smartphone social location app in 2007. He charmed and networked with important tech and venture-capital power players, and was personally tapped to be Paul Graham's successor at Y Combinator at age 29. He was a savvy and successful investor (even still, he has personal investments in more than 400 companies, some of which do business with OpenAI, according to The Wall Street Journal, which has raised some eyebrows about conflict of interest) and convinced deep-pocketed friends Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk (now a frenemy) to fund OpenAI as a nonprofit.

By many accounts, Altman is charismatic, good with people, and even better at getting his way. "Altman's biggest strength is figuring out who can help him the most, then dazzling them," someone who worked with Altman told Bloomberg on the Foundering podcast.

Altman is perhaps the most successful personality hire of all time.

This isn't totally groundbreaking (or even insulting to him). Being a successful CEO or a tech founder requires a certain personality type. This doesn't necessarily mean being fun at cocktail parties: Mark Zuckerberg is a ruthless businessperson but, until recently, seemed to have the charisma of a shingles outbreak. It takes Big Personality Hire Energy to muster the straight-faced ambition to say that you need to raise $7 trillion (yes, trillion) dollars.

Altman's talents as an operator also nearly cost him his job. This past November, when Altman was temporarily fired by the board of OpenAI, it was because some board members found him too smooth an operator and distrusted him. That Altman returned as CEO with a new board speaks to his ability to rally powerful allies like Satya Nadella of Microsoft, although he still has rough waters ahead internally.

And then there's Leopold Aschenbrenner, a newly emerged hypeman of AI doomerism. Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI employee who was reportedly fired for leaking a memo he wrote to the board about safety concerns, published a 165-page manifesto warning about the dangers of unchecked AI. It contains some questionable charts, comparisons to the building of the atomic bomb, and links to a Minecraft video on YouTube.

I don't know if AI will lead to the extinction of the human race or if he's full of smoke. (I sure hope it's not the end of the human race!) Aschenbrenner's warnings have been taken both credulously and skeptically, and I am not in a position to guess how likely it is that we'll soon be in a nuclear war with China over data centers, as he suggests. But there's something about his verbose proclamations that ring to me as hype.

Max Read on Substack has a very astute assessment of the manifesto and how the hyperbole of AI doomerism might be, in some cases, self-serving hype:

What I do know is that the Silicon Valley investor class has become quite contemptuous of Effective Altruism (the school of thought that drove the Future Fund), and highly skeptical and suspicious of the associated focus on existential risk or "x-risk" now that it seems to be a retardant on their ambitions. On the other hand, that same class is quite hawkish on China and bullish on national security businesses and the military-industrial complex. If I were a young and ambitious person whose career so far was largely in "A.I. safety" and other E.A.-associated fields, I might attempt to re-frame my experience and interests as more national-security oriented. And if I were really trying to suck up to reactionary venture capitalists I might also imply that I was unjustly fired over unfair charges of racism by a devious H.R. drone.

While the specifics of this C.V. are credibility-building among Aschenbrenner's target audience (investors and founders in whose companies he'd like to invest, as well as dupes on Twitter who will boost his profile), just as important is the image he fits: Young, prodigious, confident, fast-talking, able to speak fluidly on a range of subjects from geopolitics to epidemiology to chip design. If Aschenbrenner weren't a Zoomer I'd call him a millennial ambition psycho; certainly, he shares with the Ivy League sociopaths of my generation a cloying, manic self-assurance that somehow scans as "genius" to the credulous and the powerful and as "extremely annoying bullshit" to literally anyone else.

And then, tragically, there is the sad tale of the Humane AI Pin. Humane's founders were former Apple employees, incredibly stylish dressers, and produced incredibly cool demo videos that made the product seem amazing. They raised $240 million from investors, including Sam Altman.

When it first started taking preorders, I wrote about how I thought the AI Pin looked awesome and I wanted one — even if I could see how it might be slightly impractical. It was futuristic, fun, and made by really cool and edgy people — the ultimate AI hypesters.

Of course, the AI Pin has been a failure so far. Early reviews were dreadful, sales were far lower than projections, and the company was criticized for launching a half-baked product. This week, they announced a recall on the chargers because there was a danger they could catch on fire. I don't want to laugh (I will not suggest that you just squeeze the AI out of it like Juicero) because I think it's genuinely a huge bummer. I'd love for an ambitious new kind of hardware device to be successful; I'm rooting for that to happen out there in the world because I love cool new gadgets. But this clearly just wasn't it.

At this moment, in June of 2024, everyone knows AI is a "big deal," but most people don't know exactly what that will really mean or look like. This leaves the door wide open for hype purveyors to sell people on its magic and power — or play to their worst fears.

This isn't necessarily bad — hype can be useful just like personality hires in a workplace are useful. And the most beautiful part of all of this? A personality hire is the most human thing — something AI could never replace.

• Precision warfare has been a central tenet of American strategy. 
• But perceptions that precision weapons are effective is a myth, a retired Army officer argues.
• "Accurate strikes do not inherently mean effective," the officer told BI.

America loves smart bombs. Ever since World War II, precision warfare has appealed to what America sees as its strengths: High technology, efficiency and the ability to strike down its enemies with a minimum of harm to innocents.

But that's actually a myth argues Amos Fox, a retired US Army lieutenant colonel. Precision-guided munitions, or PGMs, are no more effective than conventional munitions in limiting collateral damage, and in some cases can make the damage worse.

Fox calls this the "precision paradox." Or, "the incongruence between precision strike theory and the fervent enthusiasm of precision ideologues," he wrote in an essay for the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.

Precision warfare is associated today with guided missiles, but the concept dates back to the 1930s, when the US began to embrace high-altitude daylight bombing by heavy bombers such as the B-17 Flying Fortress. Swayed by Italian airpower theorist Giulio Douhet, American planners were convinced they could cripple an adversary by bombing its factories, without the need for a costly ground war.

This contrasted with Britain's night area-bombing strategy in World War II that targeted entire German cities. Even if factories weren't hit, residential neighborhoods would be destroyed and workers "de-housed," which was expected to collapse the public's morale. In practice, the distinction between precision and area bombardment proved blurry: bombing through cloudy European skies that obscured targets, while under fighter and flak attack and relying on pencil-on-paper navigation plotting and rudimentary bomb sights meant the majority of American bombs failed to hit their target.

PGMs were supposed to solve this problem. Why drop a dozen bombs when a single GPS-guided missile can destroy a bridge or a command post? Fox sees several flaws in modern precision strike theory. For one, "decapitation" strikes intended to defeat an enemy by eliminating its leaders and command posts have not worked. Nor does Fox believe that the precision strike strategy has actually shortened wars.

But most significantly, Fox questions the essence of US precision warfare: the belief that smart bombs spare a need for boots on the ground. "Accurate strikes are not equivalent to effective strikes," he wrote. In other words, a strike can land on the intended area, selected based on intelligence, and yet fail to achieve the goal of, say, killing a militant leader or stopping a factory from making more bombs, hence necessitating follow-on strikes. When PGMs don't accomplish the mission, "then precision-based warfighting requires additional strikes and, likely, a subsequent use of land force activities to offset the shortcomings of precision strikes."

This can actually result in higher civilian casualties than if conventional weapons had been used in the first place because it requires repeated attacks. "If precision strikes are often accurate, but ineffective, and additional strikes or land operations are required to create the effect intended with the initial precision strikes, then precision strategies do not decrease civilian casualties and collateral damage in conflict zones."

Fox points to the extensive use of American PGMs during the ferocious battles of Raqqa and Mosul in 2016-2017. In trying to root out heavily fortified Islamic State positions dug into civilian neighborhoods, many buildings were destroyed and thousands killed. Israel faces a similar situation today as it hunts Hamas in Gaza.

Thus the paradox: an individual PGM may be more accurate than a dumb bomb. But if a PGM fails to knock out a target — whether due to poor intelligence or the pure chance that reigns on battlefields — more guided weapons have to be launched, thus defeating the whole purpose of precision.

"Accurate strikes do not inherently mean effective," Fox told Business Insider. "Therefore, more strikes are required when a strike does not effectively accomplish its intended purpose. Thus, in the aggregate, if a PGM isn't 100 percent effective, it can often result in similar outcomes to ballistic artillery, or other non-precision munition employment."

Fox doesn't believe that smarter bombs will solve the paradox. "Better PGMs isn't really the problem," he said. "PGMs are currently about as accurate as can be. For that matter, although artillery is an area fire weapon, it is still very accurate."

But what about the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, in which massive amounts of PGMs are being employed? In Ukraine, both sides are using massive numbers of guided weapons, at a rate that is depleting stockpiles and factory capacity, yet neither side has managed to achieve decisive results. Israel carried out strikes in Gaza against 29,000 targets in the first four months of the war, often with guided weapons, but that has failed so far to destroy Hamas.

"The lesson is that Hamas is a land force," said Fox. "The inconvenient truth about war is that it still requires a land force to defeat a land force. Precision warfare, which isn't really a thing, augments a land force in defeating another land force. It doesn't replace it."

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

• Jay Cadmus was laid off in his 50s after more than two decades at IBM.
• He was unemployed for six months and had to pause his 401(k) and his kid's college savings. 
• Cadmus said he experienced ageism in his search and found younger people got jobs he applied for.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jay Cadmus, a communications advisor, about being laid off at age 55. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I worked for IBM for 23 years in various roles. I started in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I did internal communications, local and regional media relations, and speechwriting for the general manager.

I had roles working on IBM's sponsorship of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta in its software group, technology, and web content. My final job was as the media relations manager for the global technology services division.

I hoped I'd be able to keep working at IBM until I finished my career unless another great opportunity presented itself.

I was laid off in September 2015 when I was 55. I was surprised when my boss told me, but I wasn't shocked. I'd been laid off earlier in my career and always knew it was a possibility.

I had been laid off before — in my 30s

I was laid off at 31, only three months after joining the organization where I was working. I had two kids and a mortgage — I wasn't prepared.

The experience changed my perspective. After that, I viewed every role as a bridge job.

Over the years, I kept my network current, updated my résumé at least twice a year, kept my LinkedIn profile current, and always looked for other opportunities.

So, when I was told I was going to be laid off from IBM in August, I was ready for it. My résumé was already updated, and I started applying for jobs on my way home.

I knew that it would be harder the 2nd time around

Time wasn't on my side. I thought it would take me several months if not longer, to find my next opportunity. I knew being older, there were fewer opportunities because I'm more expensive, and there are fewer roles where the hiring manager is looking for someone with that level of experience.

When I was laid off at 31, I was given two months' notice in October, and by February, I had landed another position. I was younger, cheaper and the job market was probably a bit different.

I had a kid at home and a mortgage

After my 2015 layoff, I looked for freelance consulting work because I needed an income to bridge the gap until I landed a new job. My third child was still living at home, and I had to pay the bills and mortgage.

We had to make some financial adjustments as a family. I thought getting a new job could take as long as a year. We paused our investments in our funds for our kid's college and our retirement.

My wife increased her work hours from part-time to full-time, and because of that, we were both able to enroll in her company's health insurance.

I reached out to a business associate who ran a small marketing firm. He was growing and needed people to work. The next week, I started doing freelance content writing for him. Some weeks, I worked 30 hours on freelance projects; some weeks, it was 12 hours.

It wasn't as much as I had been making, but it was significant. Doing something kept me from worrying about my finances.

I networked to find job opportunities

I treated finding a job like having a job. I applied for 60 jobs, spoke to around 20 recruiters, and got between eight and 12 interviews. I only applied to jobs I knew I had a chance of getting.

Whenever I saw a job I wanted, I found someone at the company who worked in that function on LinkedIn and reached out. That could help slip my résumé to the top of the stack. The human element was important.

My greatest asset was the network I'd built over the years. When I reached out to people, they told me about job opportunities in their networks.

I was very organized. I kept records of every job I applied for, every interaction I had, and every contact I made in my network so I knew when to follow up.

I experienced ageism in my search

There is some bias against older employees. In some interviews, I could see the light go out in their eyes when they realized my age.

There was one job I didn't get where I saw the person they ended up hiring was much younger and had significantly less experience than I did or even than the job had required.

Employers are never going to tell you it's because of your age, but it was in the back of my mind.

I landed a job after 6 months

I heard about a job through a contact in my network. I'd applied for a role at her company and hadn't gotten it. During a chat with her afterward, she said a recruiter had reached out to her the previous week with a role. She didn't want it because she wasn't looking to move but thought I'd be a good fit.

She gave the recruiter my name, and I landed the offer three weeks later, in March 2016. It was such a relief to have a salary and to start saving again for my son's college fund and my 401(k), which I had paused for six months.

The job I landed was tough but interesting. I worked in the company's consulting group on organizational change and management practices. I'm still there. I do all the communications for the company's sales.

I thought I'd retire in 2021, but I haven't yet. Maybe one day, I'll start up my freelance and consultancy work again. I'll always do this work just because I enjoy it and I'm pretty good at it.

If you have been laid off in your 50s or 60s and would like to share your story, email ehopkins@businessinsider.com.

• A self-described "professional" troll posted that their cousin, a juror in Trump's hush money trial, predicted his conviction.
• The Facebook post became the subject of a letter from the judge to prosecutors and Trump's lawyers.
• While it wouldn't be grounds for a new trial, the post may raise questions, a former prosecutor told BI.

About 24 hours before a Manhattan jury made Donald Trump the first-ever former president to become a convicted felon — a person going by the name "Michael Anderson" made a little-noticed Facebook comment.

"Thank you for all your hard against the MAGA crazies!" he wrote in a comment on an unrelated post on the official page of the New York State Unified Court System.

"My cousin is a juror on Trumps criminal case and they're going to convict him tomorrow according to her. Thank you 🙏 New York courts!!!! ❤️"

In a Friday afternoon letter, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who presided over the trial, alerted prosecutors and Trump's defense lawyers about the comment.

"Today, the Court became aware of a comment that was posted on the Unified Court System's public Facebook page and which I now bring to your attention," Merchan wrote.

But it's far from clear that the comment is genuine.

Anderson — if that is his real name — claims to be a troll.

Business Insider located the Facebook comment, which was timestamped 4:39 p.m. on May 29, a day before the jury verdict. It was made in response to an unrelated Facebook post about a program from the New York state court system to promote diversity.

"Now we are married ❤️ 😁," he posted in response to another Facebook comment, which criticized his purported cousin.

On his Facebook page, Anderson describes himself as "Transabled & a professional shit poster." His profile picture is an image claiming his account is restricted. His cover photo broadcasts the slogan: "Facebook: Wasting peoples lives since 2004."

Few posts are publicly visible on Anderson's page. Visible ones appear to be food videos and comedic Reels, a product from Facebook owner Meta that seeks to emulate TikTok videos.

"As appropriate, the Court informed the parties once it learned of this online content," Al Baker, a spokesperson for the New York State Unified Court System, told Business Insider, declining to comment further on the incident.

Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Susan Necheles, as well as representatives for the Manhattan District Attorney's office, did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Anderson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent through Facebook, but in a public post added to his profile shortly after BI reached out, he wrote, "Take it easy, I'm a professional shitposter," along with a laughing emoji and the Wikipedia definition of shitposting.

While it remains unclear how significant the Facebook post will become during the proceedings leading up to Trump's sentencing, it could complicate things.

Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor, told BI that the social post, though apparently trolling, could raise questions about whether outside influences managed to find their way into the jury deliberation room, which is one of the few times the defense could use jury deliberations as grounds to appeal for a new trial.

However, he said, the burden for a new trial is high and would require the defense to show an outside influence prejudiced the jury enough that the outcome may have been different without exposure to it.

"A stray comment on social media is not enough for a new trial," Rahmani said. "But if the defense can get a declaration from a juror that they discussed the case with family members, then Judge Merchan would hold an evidentiary hearing to examine the juror to determine whether the improper influence and prejudice took place.  I don't think a statement from the family member is enough if it's not supported by a juror affidavit."

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Rumors of a pair of Sonos-branded headphones have been swirling for nearly as long as the company has been a household name. After all, Sonos sells many popular wireless speakers and soundbars, so why not add a pair of headphones to the mix?

Following years of speculation, Sonos' long-awaited headphones have arrived. They're called the Sonos Ace ($449), and they perform great for a pair of flagship Bluetooth headphones. But the keyword there is Bluetooth. Many fans hoped the brand's first headphones would work like its portable Roam and Move speakers, which use Bluetooth on the go but also support WiFi to stream music at home and group with other Sonos audio gear. However, WiFi streaming on the Ace turned out to be wishful thinking.

Don't get us wrong, the Ace still stack up well against the best over-ear headphones from Bose, Sony, and Apple. But they don't do a lot to stand out from the pack. The biggest difference, on paper anyway, is the Ace's ability to pair with a Sonos Arc soundbar for private listening, but we could not get this feature to work with our setup. We also ran into an issue with some faint signal noise with transparency mode engaged.

Still, despite some hiccups, it's no small feat that Sonos' first headphones offer performance that rivals many top competitors. Even with their quirks, the Ace's mix of great sound, fantastic noise-canceling, and an incredibly comfy fit results in a formidable pair of high-end Bluetooth headphones.

The Ace headphones are well-designed and easy to use

Apart from the issues we encountered with the headphones' TV Swap feature (more on that below), the Ace's setup experience is as slick and smooth as you'd expect from a brand of Sonos' pedigree.

Opening the box reveals a fuzzy gray case made from 75% recycled plastic bottles. Unzip it, and you'll find a minimalist pair of matte headphones in black or Soft White wrapped around a bean-shaped pouch. Designed to harbor the Ace's dual USB-C cables for wired playback and charging, the pouch attaches via a strong magnet at the case's center, efficiently utilizing the space. The whole layout feels equally aimed at style and substance.

The headphones themselves borrow aesthetic touches from rivals like the Bose QuietComfort Ultra and Apple AirPods Max but with a Sonos twist, bearing the same elegantly stripped-down design cues found across all Sonos products. From the Ace's sleek rounded ear cups and laser-etched logo to their steel arms and cushy, vegan-leather pads, this is a familiar package that still manages to strike its own chord.

On the right ear cup are dual control buttons, including a multi-function "content key" for playback and volume via a mix of taps and slides. There's also an adjacent key to swap between noise canceling and transparency modes. The two keys are easily distinguishable by touch for error-free control in nearly any setting. On the left cup is the power/pairing key and a USB-C input for charging and wired playback. 

Downloading the Sonos app helps you quickly pair the headphones to your mobile device and add them to your list of Sonos devices where you can monitor status and battery life. Tapping the Settings icon lets you adjust features like bass and treble, head tracking for spatial audio effects, and multi-point audio to pair the headphones to a second device like a laptop or tablet.

The flexible band and fluffy pads give the Ace an edge in comfort

Comfort is always subjective, but we can say without hesitation that the Ace are the most comfortable noise-canceling headphones we've encountered, beating out favorites like Bose's QuietComfort Ultra and the Sony WH-1000XM5. After a week of wearing the Ace nearly all day, every day, we rarely experienced an inkling of discomfort.

Frankly, we're not sure how Sonos did it. At 313 grams, the Ace are lighter than Apple's AirPods Max, but still outweigh both Bose and Sony's top models by a good 60 grams. You can definitely feel the heft as you swing your head around, but somehow between their ultra-soft pads and taut yet judicious clamping force, they manage to pull off the proverbial headphone trick of nearly disappearing on your head over time.

The fit is also quite stable, staying put even on light hikes and other semi-rigorous activities. Without an IP certification for water resistance, we wouldn't recommend the Ace for sweaty jogs or gym regimens, but they're excellent companions for nearly any other task.

The sound is rich, smooth, and detailed

The Ace offer a smooth and mellow sound signature. They have a penchant for digging up lush and vivid instrumental timbres, all spread across a deep and expansive soundstage. The overall performance stacks up well with some of the best-sounding headphones in their class.

The Ace do exhibit a darker tonal color than you'll find in rivals like the spritely Bose QuietComfort Ultra. But this doesn't affect the Ace's talent for exposing fine details. Horns are breathy and full. Strings are smooth and lush. Acoustic guitars ring with a golden sheen. The ability to precisely place all these instruments in the mix may be the Ace's most impressive sonic feature, allowing you to explore each instrument independently or simply sit back and let them wash over you.

There's some sparkle in the treble for pristine clarity in high-flying percussion and loads of definition in instruments like buzzy synths and distorted electric guitars. At the other end, bass is full and punchy without being overwhelming. Unlike many headphones we test, the bass is fairly balanced by default, though we still dropped it down a notch or two in the EQ settings to clear up space in the soundstage. We also turned off the Loudness setting, which tended to make things sound a bit boomy.

On occasion, we wished for a bit more presence and clarity in vocals and dialogue, particularly when listening to podcasts, but we never struggled to hear minute details like vocal fry or room echos, allowing us to notice sounds we'd missed in previous listens. Hardwiring the Ace via a USB-C-to-3.5mm cable offers even better definition, including support for lossless audio at up to 16-bit/48Hz resolution. 

The Ace supports head tracking for stereo content, which keeps the sound anchored when you turn your head to mimic the effect of listening to speakers positioned in a fixed location. This is also supported with Dolby Atmos 3D audio when synced with an Arc soundbar, but we couldn't get that feature to work. However, with stereo content, head tracking works similarly to rivals, effectively simulating a home theater environment.

Noise-canceling and transparency modes are phenomenal, aside from one hiccup

The Ace's incredible noise canceling is a triumph worth celebrating. This is top-tier cancellation that stacks up with some of the best pairs available, seeming to suck the air out of the world and plant you in an isolation chamber of solace.

We tested the feature indoors with studio speakers playing sound effects as well as outdoors on hikes and dog walks, where it was most impressive. Tapping the button can almost extinguish the world, from city din to chirping birds. Even traffic-laden streets glide into a soft whisper.

In head-to-head tests, only Bose's mighty QuietComfort Ultra outpowered them, reducing sounds like keystrokes and drone effects to an even lower murmur. Even so, the Ace's ability to offer such stark silence without a modicum of added white noise makes them a contender for one of the best noise-canceling headphones you can buy.

The Ace also have an excellent transparency mode that's designed to let in environmental sounds to keep you aware. This mode is vividly clear and natural. It's so good that we were able to wear them virtually all day without skipping a beat, similar to Apple's latest AirPods. Though we weren't able to test the Ace directly against the AirPods Max, based on previous listening, we're confident you won't find a more natural-sounding transparency mode on the market.

However, there is one notable caveat to our praise. With this mode engaged, we occasionally heard mild connection noise in the right earcup. Sonos sent us two models to test and this issue was present on both. It's not enough to be a nuisance in most scenarios (it's audible only when connecting for a call or between songs in a quiet room), but it's still disappointing from headphones this pricey.

That said, it's not uncommon for debut products to arrive with a few bugs, so this could be ironed out with firmware.

The Ace's lack of WiFi streaming is disappointing, and we couldn't get TV Swap to work

The Ace have many top features you'd expect from flagship noise-canceling headphones, like multi-point pairing, sensors to pause audio when you take them off, and various other settings from within the Sonos app. Their battery life of up to 30 hours per charge is highly competitive, and we could use them all day for multiple days without the need to charge.

However, the Ace's inability to group with other Sonos speakers to stream music and other audio sources over WiFi is something of a letdown, even if it would have been unique among their peers. It's not particularly surprising at this price — we would have expected another $100 or so added in to get seamless support for both WiFi and Bluetooth — but it does put the Ace in a somewhat siloed position within the Sonos ecosystem.

The consolation prize for the Sonos faithful is the ability to wirelessly switch audio between the Ace headphones and a Sonos Arc soundbar (and eventually the Beam and Ray). This is handled via a TV Swap button in the Sonos app, currently for iOS users only. This means you can hear movies and TV shows privately through the headphones without disturbing others. And this mode supports Dolby Atmos, so you can get a surround sound effect through the headphones. But even with an iPhone and a new Sonos Arc soundbar on hand, no matter how many times we tried, we couldn't get either pair of Ace headphones Sonos sent us to sync with the Arc.

Sonos' support team told us "You've encountered a rare bug that our team is aware of and working to address in a future release." The headphones use a 5GHz connection for this feature (despite their lack of full WiFi support), so it's possible our network played a part. But the fact that we could easily group the Arc with a Sonos Era 100 and Era 300 speaker for multi-room playback made the issue all the more curious (and frustrating).

We expect a firmware update to address this — this is Sonos, after all — and we'll update this review with any changes as we continue to test.

Should you buy the Sonos Ace?

The Sonos Ace's many talents, from their fabulous noise canceling and transparency modes to their comfortable fit and sweet sound, instantly put them in the conversation with other top wireless headphones on the market. From that perspective, they're worth considering for those with an ample budget.

That said, their lack of full WiFi compatibility with the Sonos ecosystem may disappoint some ardent Sonos fans, not to mention the troubles we encountered, like their mild connection buzz and refusal to sync with the Arc soundbar over our network. 

We still recommend putting the Sonos Ace on your shortlist — they're just too damn comfortable and well-armed not to be — but we'll wait until Sonos addresses the issues we encountered before giving them our full seal of approval.