The Marvels has Auto Sense, which is one of their main selling point. It’s an artifical intelligence component which senses the type of environment you’re in and switches to the correct program without the user having to manually switch programs. There are many pre-installed programs that are proven by company research to enhance the sound quality.
The pre-installed programs are listed in the Marvel Brochure for the Audi.
If Phonak keeps up with the software development, I wouldn’t believe these devices would be outdated for functionality for awhile.
Phonak will service and support their HA for up to 5 years. After that, they expect you to purchase the next HA.
The biggest question for all HA is how long the company plans to continue to provide updates to the software for the HA.
The HA becomes useless once the company stops focusing on that product and begin marketing a new HA with better capabilities.
One solution to this problem would be to have someone “jailbreak” “unlock” the firmware and keep it under open source as the community updates the code to their liking versus waiting for the company to update it or whether they will add a feature you request, which the company has every right to say no.
You should try as much different sound environments as possible to see how the Auto Sense corrects or enhances the sound quality for you. Loud, quiet, background noise, concerts, busy street with alot of vehicles, anything like that and see if you can understand or follow the conversation with the added difficulty and see how the Auto Sense handles that
The Phonak Remote app for Android is only as useful and full of features as the Audi sets it up. They have to enable the option on their programmer for you to use it. Or, like me, do it yourself.