Following rumors that Apple would soon be pulling all Bose products from the shelves of its Apple Retail Stores, comes the news that all Bose products -including all headphones and speakers – have been pulled from the Apple online store.
A rumor first surfaced a week ago claiming that Apple was planning to remove Bose sound products from its stores. On Friday, that became a reality, when all of the company’s headphones and speakers disappeared from the online storefront.
As of Friday afternoon, searches for some Bose products still showed up as suggestions in the online Apple Store’s search bar. However, the products were no longer available for purchase.
Until the removal of the products, Apple’s online store listed 17 Bose products.
Apple recently settled a patent infringement lawsuit that Bose had filed against Beats Electronic for allegedly infringing on Bose noise-cancellation patents. It’s not known if the removal of Bose products from the Apple store was a part of the settlement. The settlement between the two companies is confidential.
A more likely reason would be that Apple prefers to promote and sell its own brand of headphones. Apple acquired Beats Technology in a $3 billion deal back in May.
Another possible contributor to the removal of Bose from the Apple store is the ban on Beats headphones by the NFL, who has an exclusive deal with Bose that says players are banned from wearing any other brand of headphones on game day, including during warmups, on the sidelines, or when conducting interviews, until 90 minutes following the end of a game.
That ban came to light last week when San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick was fined $10,000 for wearing a pair of pink breast cancer awareness headphones made by Beats during a post-game press conference.
