Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

We bought on of these for our 90 year old mother, who has moved into a retirement home and needed something more compact and easy to use than her old component system. We are probably going to be returning it due to two seemingly trivial problems. - the headphone jack is on the BACK of the machine, so to hook up headphones you have to lift the radio, turn it around and search for the tiny black-on-black jack. If you have the multi-CD changer the radio part comes off when you do this and is fussy to reposition. She likes to listen with speakers during the day but headphones at night when it would bother others, but moving the radio to plug and unplug it on a daily basis is just too hard for her, as I suspect it is for many other older users. Why not just leave the headphones attached all the time, or put a short extension cord on them to allow plugging and unplugging? You can't because when the earphones or extension cord are plugged in the speakers are automatically turned off. There is apparently no way to fix this without doing very tricky internal rewiring which would void the warranty. - the remote is too small. She can use it, but just barely, and is frequently frustrated by the experience. It's hard to read and the tiny, tiny buttons with little feedback are hard for her to push. She frequently pushes the wrong button then gets confused. And she frequently misplaces the remote because it is so tiny (and the Bose has no controls on the radio, so without the remote it cannot be used). It's too bad Bose won't put the headphone jack on the front where it could be found and used like on most other modern systems. And it would be easy to offer a larger remote for the old or hard of seeing. My impression is that older buyers are one of Bose's largest market, too bad Bose will not direct some engineering at them - rather than just advertising! BTW if you are buying one of these for an older user, avoid the multy-CD changer - it makes the system much more complicated to use.