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.
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.