Is the Sony WF-1000XM6 worth the upgrade from the Huawei FreeBuds Pro 4?

Verdict

Meaningful upgrade

The Sony WF-1000XM6 scores 8.3 points above the Huawei FreeBuds Pro 4. That's a real improvement, though not the kind you'd notice on every track. The gains are concentrated in sound (7.5 to 9.0), battery (6.5 to 8.0) and noise cancelling (8.0 to 9.0). On paper: battery life 7 h to 12 h, weight 11.6 g to 6.4 g and battery life (anc on) 4.5 h to 8 h. Worth checking: codecs goes SBC, AAC, LDAC to LDAC and driver size goes 11 mm to 8.4 mm. One caution: this steps down a line tier (FreeBuds Pro 4 to WF-1000XM6), and base models usually trade away tier features - check the codec and ANC rows above before trusting the score gap alone. That costs $90 more, or about $11 per point of score - reasonable value for the jump. Worth doing if you're replacing anyway; harder to justify as a pure upgrade if what you have still works.