New Bose Earbuds Help You Sleep but Don’t Play Music

The world can be a noisy place, and somehow it seems to be even louder when you’re trying to get to sleep. Bose has a potential solution with its latest earbuds. The Sleepbuds can block out the world and lull you to sleep with gentle white noise. However, that’s all they do. These earbuds don’t play music at all.

You might think that earbuds that don’t play music would be less expensive than full-featured earbuds. You’d be wrong, though. The Bose Sleepbuds are on sale today for $250 at Best Buy, Amazon, Bose, and other retailers. They look like compact completely wireless earbuds, but there’s no audio streaming support — therefore no radios sucking up battery power.

So, surely they use Bose’s impressive noise cancellation technology, right? Nope. These are not noise-canceling devices, either. According to Bose, active noise cancellation is good at filtering out ongoing sounds like a noisy room, but it’s not ideal for abrupt and loud sounds. Thus, passive noise isolation and white noise is allegedly the best solution to help you get a good night’s sleep.

The Sleepbuds  weigh a mere 1.4 grams each, and they’re just 1 centimeter wide and tall. A small rubber wing helps wedge them in your ear, where they should remain comfortable all night. Since they don’t protrude, laying your head on the pillow won’t jam them deeper in your ear, which is a common issue if you’ve ever tried to sleep with regular earbuds in. The miniature earbuds have small batteries, but they don’t need much power to play local audio tracks all night. They’ll run 16 hours on a charge, and the included battery case adds another 16 hours.

The Sleepbuds in their battery case.

The earbuds don’t stream from your phone, but they do connect to a phone for controlling your settings. There are 10 audio tracks stored on the tiny internal storage, running the gamut from blowing wind to ocean waves. Bose claims it mastered each track to provide optimal coverage across frequencies that hide familiar nighttime noises like traffic and snoring. You can also adjust the volume of each sound to block out noise without rendering you deaf to important things like smoke alarms.

The app will eventually get more track options, allowing you to add and remove them from the Sleepbuds wirelessly. The app also has an option to set an alarm in the earbuds so you won’t sleep through an external alarm noise.