Music | Bowers & Wilkins 12+

bom

When will companies learn? In the long term having bad support and costumer service costs money, doesn’t save money.

This is Bowers & Wilkins attitude regarding their products with a software component: we made it, we sold it, we’re done. But that’s not how it works, software needs support, updates, bugfixes.

I have bought several Bowers & Wilkins products: 2 Zeppelin with iPod dock (one stopped working but I loved it so I got another), a zeppelin mini (awful tiny sound), wireless headphones, and 2 earphones back when the iPhone still had an aux port, and 4 A7 wireless speakers.

These four A7 were something like 800€ each, I don’t remember, but I regret purchasing them. Not because of the price, not because of the sound quality, but because the software is still buggy and has stopped being updated years ago.

All of the A7 I have regularly lose connection while I’m listening to music, and don’t tell me it’s the AirPlay standard, don’t tell me it’s my home wireless network, don’t tell me it’s my Apple devices, because I have an airplay speaker with a similar age from a different premium brand and none of this happens and it got updates until much more recently.

Lastly, the cherry on top: the Control app that was used to set up the A7 wireless speakers is not even available in the App Store anymore, and the new “Foundation” app doesn’t detect the A7 speakers, apparently this was a decision to not “confuse customers”, really? Adding the ability to use the foundation app to set up A7 speakers was too confusing? Or just keeping the old app?

But what this means is:

1- I can only set up these speakers, or change my wi-fi password, for as long as I keep the same Apple account to have access to the old app. Also, let’s hope a future iOS update doesn’t make the old app incompatible or broken because the app is no longer being updated.

2- if this happens these wireless speakers will stop being wireless, so since I have no use for them with a wired connection they might as well be four 800€ bricks.

3- I am planning to upgrade my speakers (now I will no longer make the mistake of buying bowers & wilkins) and as I buy new wireless speakers I wanted to give my A7s to some friends who could use another speaker for a different room of their house for example, but I can’t, because those friends don’t have access to the control app, so they wouldn’t be able to set up the speakers etc, as I mentioned before.

If you had any conscience and ethics you would at the very least offer to send me one of the new formation wedge speakers, that seems to have substituted the A7 as your top of the line wireless speaker, as an apology, as a way of saying “we value you as a customer, our software practices have improved as you will be able to verify yourself with this new speaker, we hope to keep you as a customer”.

But no, the response I got from their support confirmed what I said previously, they don’t care, I got a copy/paste response with some instructions for my wi-fi network as if I didn’t know already that my router needed to be in 802.11g, 2,4Ghz mode, etc etc. I am 30 years old, I have degrees in applied mathematics, economics and finance, I know how to set up a router and wireless speaker, thanks.

So, if this is how you treat your customers all I have to say is this: I’ll never buy another product from you again, kindly go bankrupt and I hope you get sued for getting caught doing some shady business practices or something.

As far as substituting my 4 A7 I’ll look elsewhere, like bang&olufsen, devialet or other brands.