The AirPods Pro 3 take on Sony’s WF-1000XM6 to deliver on two major fronts
By | Published: 2025-11-02 14:00:00 | Source: Digital Trends
When a new product enters the market, there is always a standard that must be met, or better yet, raised; A competitor to compete with or, preferably, surpass.
Given the class-leading position of its flagship earphones, the WF-1000XM5, it’s understandable that Sony is focusing its efforts on going better and better with its anticipated successors, the WF-1000XM6.
But for the Japanese audio giant, to look purely within its own camp when conjuring up upgrades for next-generation headphones would be to risk falling behind an ever-advancing group of hungry competitors.
After all, the biggest competitor to the upcoming
I tried the Pro 2 and Sony XM5’s noise cancellation in a range of environments, and although the Sonys beat it for overall effectiveness, it’s a close race. TRUE Closes.
Upgrading the ANC is indeed a must
If the Pro 3 deliver on their promise of ANC that is twice As effective as the Pro 2’s ability to block out sound – a big claim that Pro 3-wearing Gareth Beavis believes plays a role – Sony will need to up the ante in the noise-canceling department again with the XM6 in order to keep its nose ahead.
This upgrade is arguably actually necessary, as the new Bose QC Earbuds 2nd Gen are the best noise-cancelling headphones I’ve personally tried.
ANC efficiency is now more than ever a selling point for wireless headphones, and a head-to-head ANC competition between the Pro 3 and the XM6 will no doubt be interesting and rating-defining.
Then you have another point of contention about Sony’s earbuds: their price. Perhaps the biggest surprise of the AirPods Pro 3 launch was the fact that Apple kept their price at $249. Sure, RRP launches have remained steady since the arrival of the original Pros in 2019 — but it’s 2025, and rising prices between generations of tech products seem largely a given for now.
This fixed pricing not only means that the Pro 3 will appeal to those who can’t afford the high cost demanded by competitors like Bose, Bowers & Wilkins and Sony, but it also means that, with more features and higher performance than before, they enjoy better value than ever before.
The Sony XM5 launched at $299 — $19 more than the previous XM4, which launched at $50 more than its XM3 predecessors. So history suggests the XM6 is unlikely to stay under $300, let alone match the AirPods Pro 3’s $249 price.
That would be a significant gap (somewhere between $50 and $80?) that could see Apple edge out Sony on the value front. Such an outcome would see Sony relying on superior audio and ANC performance (and loyalty to Android!) to justify any price gap, because it would have to go some way to compete with the Pro 3’s feature offering…
Really, this is where Sony will likely struggle on paper, relatively speaking. Apple has consistently packed innovative, useful everyday features into each generation of its flagship flagship products, and the Pro 3 really stands out on this front with new real-time speech translation, a heart rate sensor with iOS tracking integration, and decent water resistance (IP57 rating).
Add to that the Pro 2’s carryover features, including spatial audio and hearing aid functions, and you have a cutting-edge feature set that no other brand is likely to come close to. This has been the case for some time, and I don’t think such “extras” are, fortunately for Sony and every other headphone manufacturer, the deal makers at the moment.
The opportunity is there…
The XM6 certainly has a chance to outperform the Pro 3 and sit at the top of the leaderboard. Sony has been laying the groundwork for the success of its WF-1000XM models for years, and the Pro 3 comes within striking distance in many respects. The Pro 3’s battery life only matches that of the XM5 (eight hours on the buds, 24 hours in total), for example, giving Sony an opportunity to improve on these specs with the smallest improvement over the XM5.
And if the XM6 includes the very good new “Cinema” spatial audio mode found in their XM6 over-ear siblings, they could finally rival the AirPods Pros in implementing in-ear “immersive sound.” But they are will Need to nail that all-important ANC performance and competitive pricing too.
If Apple is a leader in both key areas, that could spell trouble for the reign of the Sony WF-1000XM.
(Tags for translation)Audio/Video
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
