I currently own a 1000xm3. My colleague recently just bought an Airpods pro and was going on for ages about how awesome it is. I offered him to try out my XM3s. He tried them out for 15 mins. I never heard another word from him again. See, my colleague's behaviour is what many bloggers and self-proclaimed journalists exhibit today. They try out one thing and simply go on to write about how superior it is.

The Sony XM3s have all the functionality in the AirPods pro with so much more. For example, you can swipe your fingers over the headphone housing and it will do different things depending on the direction of the swipe. They provide you an app to configure this and the buttons on the headphone itself. Not to mention, they also allow you to enable high resolution codecs, equalizer and surround sound from the app itself. The sound quality (which is one of the reasons people buy headphones for) is also vastly superior on the Sony's.

So, it's not an apples to apples comparison, yes (Headphones vs Earphones)?

Ok, In addition to my Sony's, I also have the Galaxy earbuds. It also supported swipe gestures and configurable actions via the app which is tightly integrated with Galaxy phones. The sound quality is superior and has officially been benchmarked by consumer reports to be the same as well[1]. Nothing what the author is excited about here is unique just to Apple even in terms of strategy or technology. IF anything, it's confusing nomenclature bundled with mediocre hardware.

[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/headphones/apple-airpods-vs-...

The author simply needs go out and try other brands of headphones.