The Consumer Product Safety Commission announced on Nov. 5 that Bose is recalling about 634,759 lithium-ion battery packs made for its S1 Pro and S1 Pro+ portable Bluetooth speaker systems in the United States. The packs can overheat and ignite. About 35,400 more were sold in Canada, where a companion notice was issued alongside the American one.
Tech news worth reading: Get Techpresso, the daily email with the most interesting tech news and insights, read by 400,000+ professionals from Google, Apple and OpenAI.
We may earn a commission if you sign up.
The action is recall number 27-065, handled on the agency’s Fast Track path, and it reaches every affected pack whether it shipped inside a speaker or was bought separately as an accessory or a replacement part. The speakers themselves are not being recalled, and a speaker can keep running on wall power once the pack is out.
Seven incidents, six with property damage
According to the CPSC recall notice, the agency has seven reports of the packs melting, producing smoke or catching fire. Six of those involved property damage. No injuries have been reported. The notice names no spokesperson and quotes nobody, so the account of what happened in each case comes only from the incident counts the agency published, not from a described failure sequence or a stated cause inside the cells. Canadian regulators framed the risk in blunter terms. Health Canada advises owners to “immediately remove and stop using” the packs, and it warns that continued use as the packs age “exposes the lithium-ion cells to potentially damaging operating conditions,” as BNN Bloomberg reported on Nov. 6. As of Oct. 5, Canada had logged no incidents or injuries, while the worldwide count stood at seven incidents.
Serial prefixes that mark an affected pack
A pack is covered when the first six digits of its 17-digit serial number match one of seven prefixes: 083723, 078352, 084105, 078591, 078592, 084106 or 086409. The serial is printed on a label at the bottom of the pack, below the barcode. Packs with other prefixes are outside the recall. The CPSC says the packs were sold with S1 Pro and S1 Pro+ speakers and separately, from December 2017 through July 2026. Retail channels were broad: Bose, Best Buy and other stores and distributors nationwide, plus Amazon.com, Bose.com, BestBuy.com and Walmart.com. Individual packs cost between $100 and $160, and a speaker system sold with a pack cost $700. Canadian sale windows were narrower, with S1 Pro packs sold from April 2020 to May 2024 and S1 Pro+ packs from June 2025 to July 2026, per the Canadian notice.
Bose’s own recall page walks owners through removal. Power the speaker off, unplug it, loosen the two bottom-plate screws and slide the pack out by its pull tabs. Some S1 Pro systems were sold without a battery, so only a pack added later needs checking. The sales window shapes who is likely to hold one. A pack bought in the first years of the S1 Pro line could be more than eight years old by now, while an S1 Pro+ pack from 2025 is barely used. Because the recall is keyed to serial prefixes rather than purchase dates, an owner cannot sort by age alone and has to read the label on each pack, including any spare kept in a case or a closet for gigs.
Free replacement and the disposal restriction
The remedy is a free replacement pack. Owners submit the 17-digit pack serial number, not the speaker’s serial, on the Bose site, or call 800-278-1083 from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. ET on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. ET on Saturday. Bose says the recall is run in cooperation with the CPSC. Online requests are not offered in every region, so some owners will need Bose’s international support page. Disposal comes with its own rule. The CPSC says a recalled pack must stay out of household trash, curbside recycling and retail battery drop-off boxes. Owners are told to call the municipal household hazardous waste center first and confirm it accepts recalled lithium-ion batteries; if it does not, the municipality is the next call.
Fast Track status carries consequences for the company. Under the CPSC Fast Track program, a firm commits to stopping sale and distribution immediately and to a consumer-level remedy, and in exchange CPSC staff do not make a preliminary determination that the product has a defect creating a substantial product hazard. Performers, DJs and small venues are the obvious users of these portable speakers, and many keep a spare pack charged and ready. That habit matters here: the recall covers packs sold separately as accessories, so a spare with an affected prefix is just as subject to the stop-use instruction as the pack inside the speaker. Bose says packs with other prefixes are not part of the recall.
Lithium-ion packs in other CPSC alerts
Battery fires are a recurring CPSC theme. A warning about Rad Power Bikes e-bike batteries, dated Nov. 24, 2025, cited 31 reports of fire and 12 reports of property damage totaling about $734,500, with some fires starting while the battery was idle or in storage. The open question with the Bose packs is scale versus signal. Roughly 670,000 packs across two countries have produced seven reports, and the notice does not say whether the affected serial ranges share a production lot, a cell supplier or an aging pattern. Health Canada’s warning about aging packs hints at a time component that the American notice leaves unaddressed.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
Tech news worth reading: Get Techpresso →
We may earn a commission if you sign up.
More from Morning Overview
- A Chevy dealer wants $696,445 for a Corvette ZR1X after adding a $400,000 markup
- Zero Motorcycles unveiled an electric motorcycle targeted at under $8K and a street-legal dirt bike at EICMA
- The Justice Department asked courts to undo approvals for three offshore wind farms, one already making power
- Neanderthals in Spain carved a wooden object that matches nothing archaeologists have ever found
