Bose has three new speakers to spice up your home listening. The company’s new “Lifestyle Collection”—designed with a snazzy fabric-wrapped grille and gentle curves—includes the Lifestyle Ultra Speaker, Lifestyle Ultra Subwoofer, and Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar. All of them can be connected to multiple units and third-party speakers via AirPlay and Google Cast for a better multi-room audio experience.

These audio products mark a “reentering” into the home speaker space for the company, bringing back the iconic Lifestyle lineup that originally debuted in 1990—known for simplicity and ease of use—which Bose subsequently discontinued in 2022.

To no surprise, Bose says the Ultra Soundbar is the “best soundbar we have ever made,” and that the Ultra Speaker might even be one of the company’s best in its storied history. The wireless speaker starts at $299, with a $349 limited-edition model in Driftwood Sand; the soundbar costs $1,099, and the subwoofer is $899. They’re available for preorder now and go on sale May 15.

These Wi-Fi-enabled speakers support AirPlay, Google Cast, Spotify Connect, and, uniquely, are the first to integrate with Alexa+ (in the US only), allowing you to ask Amazon’s chatbot to play music through the speakers via voice commands. There’s also Bluetooth support, and even an auxiliary input for connecting the Ultra Speaker to a turntable.

You can group two Lifestyle Ultra Speakers into a stereo system in the Bose app, or group them all together for a home theater system. Sadly, if you hoped to use it as a surround system with your existing Bose soundbar, the company says it’s only backward compatible with the Bass Module 700. And with the new Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar, it can only be used as a wired connection. For multi-room audio, the company has passed those grouping duties to the Google Home app for Google Cast technology, or Apple’s AirPlay for iOS users. Speaking of the app, there’s a redesigned onboarding process that purportedly makes setting up all of these speakers a breeze.

On the audio front, the Ultra Speaker notably features an upward-firing driver for Dolby Atmos–like spatial audio, along with two front-facing drivers. (It doesn’t seem to support Dolby Atmos Music at this time.) The company is also touting its CleanBass technology, which pairs Bose’s QuietPort acoustic opening with the woofer for deep sound that performs better than its size suggests, though we’ll have to hear it for ourselves to see if it lives up to Bose’s claims.

When the numbers coming out of the biggest AI companies get reported, the coverage is almost always the same: revenue up, growth accelerating, the boom is real. What almost nobody asks is what kind of revenue it is. In AI right now, that question is being skipped entirely. It’s the only one that matters.

Any investor who has sat across from a founder in a pitch meeting knows that headline revenue is just the starting point. The real questions come after: Is this B2B or B2C? Is it contracted or casual? Does the use case suggest land-and-expand potential, or is this customer already at their ceiling? Is the product embedded in something the customer cannot easily stop doing, or is it a nice-to-have competing with shrinking budgets and fading attention? These questions are table stakes at the startup level. They have almost completely vanished from the conversation about the companies now defining the AI landscape.

Take Anthropic and OpenAI. By most coverage, OpenAI is the dominant player – larger revenue, broader adoption, a product that has become genuinely cultural. That may all be true. But when you ask what colour that revenue is, the picture gets more complicated. OpenAI’s CFO confirmed that roughly 75% of its revenue comes from consumer subscriptions. ChatGPT has somewhere in the range of 800 million weekly active users – and only about 5% are paying subscribers. That is an enormous base resting on consumer willingness to pay for something most people still access for free, competing with curiosity, with free alternatives, and with whatever captures attention next. Consumer subscriptions cancel quietly and they cancel fast.