I mean, if there was another "commodity" processor one could just insert into their earbuds and write some awesome software, why hasn't anyone done that yet? If you could offer the same features as AirPods (and other Apple headphones) at half the cost, you'd make serious money. People might not care too much about those technical features of them, but I know they care about consistently good performance, and the AirPods have so far delivered on that promise. Making something that works just as well, but doesn't require you to be locked in to the Apple ecosystem, would absolutely change the game for the headphone market.

I own airpods max and so far I didn't notice anything special about them. They're just ordinary headphones. They have noise suppression, but it's hardly a unique feature. Head tracking is a gimmick and I disabled it almost immediately.

There are a lot of alternatives noted for their performance. Jabra, Bose, Sony all have earned high marks from reviewers.

I’ve got the extremely well regarded Sony WH-1000XM4s. Getting them to switch between devices is an absolute pain in the ass compared to Apple’s fairly seamless handoff.

The custom Bluetooth processor seems to be letting Apple solve a lot of pain points that every other Bluetooth headphone just makes you live with.

"Upgrading" to my Sony's was painful. Beforehand I had some cheap Chinese brand that had the best bluetooth experience of my life.

I could switch devices and the one I was using could connect up easy without having to do the whole disconnect from the other device first thing.

I suspect on connect it was also issuing a disconnect to the previous sender as well because I never had an issue of a device reconnecting overtop.

Multiple devices could be paired at the same time and it just latched on to whichever device tried to connect last.

Even apple doesn't do well at this. Apple also has all kinds of weird bugs and sound issues. They are still nice for walking around though so I won't be ditching them anytime soon.

Diminishing returns are very real when it comes to BT headphones. The cutoff seems to be around 100 USD/EUR. If you care about sound quality, you are probably using AUX still. An alternative is the Fiio bluetooth/aux adapter that solves the bluetooth part but still has an acceptable sound quality.

The ones I had were around 60usd and had good enough sound for me. The only problem I had with them was the headband was built for small heads. Broke in the same spot twice. After second I just took the refund and got some Sony's.

Sound is pretty nice upgrade though even for someone like me that can't tell. Noise cancelling helps a lot over COVID too.

I have one of each within my family. Sound quality wise they’re better than AirPods but the usability and seamlessness sucks real bad. The good reviews are all like ones that rate the XPS as the best laptop because the reviewers think “a MacBook is not a laptop” and similarly the Jabra is the best Bluetooth headphone because to the reviewer the AirPod isn’t even competition. Which is true if you are on Android anyway.

Nobody cares about the processors themselves but they very much care what they do. One of the biggest things I constantly hear about from others with AirPods is that they connect seamlessly to all their Apple devices and switch automatically as they use them. That's only possible because of these chips.

I don't agree, but even if someone thinks they don't care they actually do since the custom silicon is no small part of why the multi-device stuff works so well. Not to mention the noise cancellation, transparency mode, etc. Sure, you buy because of the characteristics, but the characteristics are due to the custom silicon.