For raw mic quality in a perfectly silent environment, sure. But background noise rejection is a matter of ratios. The closer the mic is to your face the louder your voice is in comparison to any background noise. The computer can do some computational noise reduction, but that always ends up being a bit like virtual backgrounds; fine, but clearly insufficient.
Personally I use a XLR mic on a boom arm, because I can be a bit extra in these things. But among my colleagues the Airpod Pros are probably the best normal person mics anyone uses. I've never heard any background noise from the people wearing them, even those I know happen to share an office with their significant other and someone who literally had a baby on their lap while they were talking to me.
This is a confident, and wrong, assertion, if we limit ourselves strictly to the array microphones in 16" MBP.
As I said, empirically, those are my best choice. I use the AirPods for voice-only calls through my phone, but I've gotten lag from them through the laptop-to-Zoom pipeline.
Again, the sound quality and noise cancellation from this array of microphones (please note what I'm emphasizing here) is better than it has any right to be. It figures out what's my voice and what isn't, and passes along what it should.
Sure, if I had to make a call from a very loud environment, I'd use the AirPod Pros and hope for the best. But of the options I have, under normal use conditions, the 16" microphone array is simply the best one.
> Again, the sound quality and noise cancellation from this array of microphones (please note what I'm emphasizing here)
I’ll repeat myself; no number of microphones will make the inverse square law go away. You can attempt to use computation to detect human voices and reject background noise, but this will always be an inferior technique to moving the microphone closer to the sound you want and further from the sound you don’t want.
This is the same reason why the speakerphone on your cell will never beat out just holding it up to your head. It’s also why podcasters use XLR mics rather than laptops. Sure, laptops have gotten better, but they’re still not as good as other options.
If you have issues with lag, wired headsets work great. Gaming ones are particularly good, since they’re designed for long periods of use.
For raw mic quality in a perfectly silent environment, sure. But background noise rejection is a matter of ratios. The closer the mic is to your face the louder your voice is in comparison to any background noise. The computer can do some computational noise reduction, but that always ends up being a bit like virtual backgrounds; fine, but clearly insufficient.
Personally I use a XLR mic on a boom arm, because I can be a bit extra in these things. But among my colleagues the Airpod Pros are probably the best normal person mics anyone uses. I've never heard any background noise from the people wearing them, even those I know happen to share an office with their significant other and someone who literally had a baby on their lap while they were talking to me.