It sucks to be right: Yesterday we said Apple wouldn’t release a radically different version of the AirPods Max, and then Apple managed to fail to meet even our low expectations by unveiling a minor upgrade for its first over-ears, coming in December 2020.
The first update in the Max’s four-year lifespan brings one hardware change, and even that’s one Apple was forced to make: USB-C. And that’s your lot. There’s no audio chip upgrade, no alternative to the spectacularly awful AirPods Max case, no Apple Lossless transmission. Just a couple of new colors and a slightly different connector.
I’m not a hater. I have a pair of Apple AirPods Max, bought with my own money, and I love them. And so do my music-crazy kids. But you have to admire Apple’s nerve: at an event where many of the features are still vaporware (most of it Apple Intelligence, some of the health features coming to the Apple Watch and AirPods Pro), Apple managed to outdo itself with the time it spent on an upgrade that isn’t an upgrade.
Maximum disappointment
It’s fun to watch the Apple sausage being made as they try to sell you the sizzle. Once you notice that all those Apple presenters standing on lots of green grass are using the same superlatives (“magical,” “beautiful,” “incredible”), it can turn into a potentially deadly drinking game. Alternatively, you can skip ahead to the forty-minute mark in any major Apple event, because that’s when Apple starts talking about its biggest product, in this case the iPhone 16.
But the funniest part was the 32-minute preview, during the Cupertino giant’s Glowtime event on September 9, when Apple announced the AirPods Max as if they didn’t exist yet: their “exceptionally crafted over-the-ear design” that “people around the world love,” presumably because they’ve had more than four years to get used to it.
“We’re excited to introduce beautiful new colors,” said hardware engineering VP Kate Bergeron, who looked far from thrilled. But there was more! USB-C makes the AirPods Max “even easier to charge.”
I’m teasing Apple here, of course. But I think Apple is teasing us a little bit too, because this update was supposed to be a press release. The last bit of the announcement was that the AirPods Max would “still cost $549,” as if Apple was a Awesome deal, instead of charging the same high price for four-year-old headphones.
At $549, the AirPods Max are more expensive than the excellent new planar magnetic Edifier Stax Spirit S5, more expensive than the noise-cancelling Bose QuietComfort Ultra, more expensive than the Matt Berry-toting Cambridge Audio Melomania P100… more expensive than most of the headphones in our current roundup of the best wireless headphones.
The AirPods Max were probably too expensive when they launched. They’re definitely too expensive now.