Over ear As much as I love Apple I don’t think any over the ear is going to compare overall to a Sony or Bose. Again, that’s overall.
If there is one thing Apple is good at, it's the "overall" package. As plainly demonstrated by the AirPods Pro vs. other true wireless earbuds. Stuff as dumb as caring about the exact force of the retaining magnets, or as complicated as caring for the latency.
That doesn't make it a better device
for your own use case, and there are plenty of very good reasons to prefer other wireless earbuds over the APPs, but in most measurable metrics or aspects that can be rather objectively evaluated the APPs have proven themselves to be a rather
complete product that will satisfy a large chunk of people (which is the only type of product Apple tries to make, they're not very interested in niche applications), despite Apple setting for themselves numerous design constraints that must have posed lots of challenges to the engineering team (if only the total internal volume of the APP vs. other true Wireless ANC headphones, for example, it's
waaaaay smaller).
As far as noise cancellation is concerned, we already have all the evidence needed thanks to various measurements from various sources that Apple has most of the necessary know-how to perform as well as Bose or Sony headphones. For example, we already know that Apple's DSP is fast enough to perform ANC operations at least as fast as 1000-2000hz in a tiny package like the APP, which is basically state of the art as of now regardless of the headphones size :
That being said it's likely that Apple may prioritise other aspects of the headphones over sheer noise cancellation capacity (I'm pretty certain that Apple will try to limit cabin pressure as much as possible, or try to vent the headphones quite liberally).
As far as sound quality goes recent Beats and Apple products have already been measured as being somewhat decently close to FR targets such as Harman's ones and having low distortion so...
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(yes that includes the recent Beats... something I would have never believed a few years ago
).
Frankly I see very little engineering challenge for Apple to match, if they wanted to, headphones such as the Bose 700 or the aforementioned Sony.
Now if Apple were to design a pair of headphones that can ensure, thanks to real-time analysis of your ear shape (I don't know if it is possible simply with mics, something fancier like IR dots projection and multiple IR cameras around the cup + real time 3D calculation of the effect of your pinae on FR might be needed, IDK ?) and a powerful but low latency and power efficient DSP, a constant frequency response that's within 1-2db of a specific target across the whole audible FR range
regardless of the individual wearing them - something that Apple will HAVE to solve anyway if they want their spatial audio to be truly convincing and go beyond the uncanny valley - now
that would be a challenge. As in : so far no one has been able to come even remotely close to that and I'm not even sure Apple can within the next few years.
