@Bryan9 Thanks for a great review and follow-up. I’m in the market for my first set of hearing aids after shying away from the facts for years and until I read your review, the Oticon Opn1 was my first choice, if I could find a provider who takes the deal my BCBS offers through TruHearing.com. After $1,000 per ear coverage, I might be paying $1,000 per ear myself for Opn but $300 per ear sounds for the Forte a lot better!
A couple of questions come to mind, though, about having to go through Costco. I wonder if Costco will support its version of the Forte as long as a ReSound HA that one might take to any provider? Did Costco give you any info on support time into the future (at $300 out-of-pocket cost/HA, replacing every few years wouldn’t hurt much, though). Also, with Google just announcing its “Made for Android” initiative with GN Hearing, the parent company of ReSound, I wonder what the likelihood will be that the Costco Forte’s will be upgraded to Android BT streaming via a firmware upgrade or whether any retroactive BT streaming upgrades, if even possible, will be one of those little incentives that ReSound uses to selectively reward those that bought full-featured HA versions - too bad you went for the reduced feature set at Costco, etc.
I guess before I run straight to Costco, I will wait to see what the deal is with the Starkey Livio AI device set to debut August 27th (“a revolution in hearing” according to the PR). But that would be likely to cost me big bucks, too. As my age-related hearing loss seems reasonably stable over the past 8 years, maybe I can afford to wait until Spring, 2019, to decide what to buy, by which time everyone should have fielded their AI-improved, deep learning HA’s, etc., and I’ll be able to tell if anyone is really going to offer anything an order of magnitude better than any HA currently on the market, i.e., is 2019 going to be MAJOR TRANSITION TIME?