And if I do stretch my budget to $350 for the Bose.....I like the look of those Sonys......
@Kevin , have had a chance to compare the two of them, or did you just "go for it".
I didn't have a chance to do any extended time length comparisons between the two but before hitting the Amazon 'buy' button I checked out both Sony & Bose at our local Best Buy and then spent a few minutes with the Bose and at an actual Bose store in our local mall.
I'm not qualified to even pretend to know what I'm talking about when it comes to audio design but sound wise the Bose to me, when not playing music, made me think of being in a large vast empty room with a slight echo chamber effect while the Sony units was more of a flipping the switch type effect... noise on, noise off. While wearing both of them I could perceive tiny hum from the noise cancelling. When listening to music both of them have phone apps for making adjustments for personal preferences.
From a purely "
Oooh, shiny!" perspective the Sony's caught my attention more because the Bose uses physical buttons for everything while 1000XM3 uses Sony's touch-and-slide method. Raise the volume? Slide your finger on the right headphone from bottom to top. Top to bottom to lower volume. Forward to the next song? Slight your finger on the right headphone from rear to front while front to rear goes back. Double-tap the center to pause/play. If you hold your hand over the right headphone then your music is paused and the noise cancelling disabled so you can have a conversation easily. On the left headphone there are still two physical buttons for power on/off and the second button is used for either turning on/off the noise cancelling or if you enable the Google Assistant then the second button is used for talking to the assistant.
There are a couple of things with the Sony that are slight detractors for me but not related to the headphones themselves. The case they come with feels pretty cheap & flimsy versus the case that came with my ancient wired Sony noise cancelling headphones; for the prices involved I would've expected the opposite. The 1000XM3 uses a USB-C cable for charging and the cable that comes from Sony is a whopping 6" long. I have no idea how you're expected to actually use it to charge them. At the office I'm using a normal 3' cable to charge them. Fortunately the battery seems to last forever so it's not much of a problem, more of an annoyance that they bother including a cable at all that isn't practical to use. They are 'over the ear' headphones as opposed to 'on the ear' which is great for the office to block out all noise but when walking outside on hot days they tend to get a little... sweaty.
In all honesty for the casual usage I use them for, listening while at the office, daily walks, occasional trip, I could have saved a bunch of money by either going with the Bose QCII through my work or one of the other Sony units like the
H900N and been just as happy but it was really hard to ignore the early 1000XM3 reviews. And they were shiny. Really, really shiny.