Sony's best true wireless earbuds are super-cheap in the Boxing Day sales

(Image credit: Future)

published 29 December 2022

If you're looking for a great deal on the best true wireless earbuds, you'll find it in the Boxing Day sales. Sony's superb WF-1000XM4, which currently top our best-buds guide, are down to just £159 on retailers such as Amazon and Very. That's more than a third off the £250 RRP.

In our Sony WF-1000XM4 review, we gave these earbuds the full five stars and said they may well be "the ultimate true wireless earbuds package". They were a five-star buy at the full RRP; at £159 they probably deserve a sixth star. Sony's buds are the absolute state of the noise-cancelling art.

Should you buy a set of Sony WF-1000XM4 earbuds?

Yes. While rivals sometimes offer better battery life – these buds are good for about eight hours with ANC switched off, with a total of around 24 hours via the charging case – Sony's double whammy of superb audio performance and equally superb noise cancelling makes these a brilliant buy. As we said in our review, these are "stunningly good true wireless earbuds".

As far as the competition is concerned, at this price you're getting the Sonys for less than Apple's 3rd gen AirPods, which I reckon are inferior, and they're much cheaper than the closest Apple rival, the AirPods Pro 2. They're not quite as iPhone-friendly as Apple's own headphones but they're perfect iPhone partners with great sound.

As far as other rivals go, my personal favourites, the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds 2, may have slightly better noise cancelling performance – but right now even the cheapest deal brings them in at £80 more than these Sonys. I'm not sure I'd want to pay that much more when the Sonys sound so good.

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Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).