A very steep price tag for a quantity of work that is not significant in terms of formulation of major structures.
Some updates cause you to scratch your head. This is the case of the AirPods Max, Apple’s high-end headphones where the high-tech company is asking as much as $550 for a refreshing version. The catch? To put it simply, upgrading is reduced to having a USB-C charging port in lieu of the old Lightning and having different new colours. Nothing that can warrant such an investment, not even for any staunch user of apple manufactured operating systems.
Sony and its ever following inventions
Meanwhile, Sony goes on innovatingnly. With the regularity of a watchmaker, the Japanese manufacturer is renewing its range of flagship headphones: The WH-1000XM3 released in 2018, the WH-1000XM4 in 2020, the WH-1000XM5 in 2022 and WH-1000XM6 in 2025 respectively. The looks are sleeker, battery life is over, and the active noise-canceling function enhanced. That is why AirPods Max have so many real benefits in comparison with which they lack.
A disconcerting technological choice
And yet, experience shows that Apple has not spared internal changes to include the USB-C port. Therefore, one might assume that now it is high time to freshen up the H1 processor of the AirPods Max that was released in 2019 with the H2. The latter is present in all the present generations of AirPods and features interesting things like adaptive audio which changes between transparency and noise-canceling mode based on the surrounding noise, or voiceless control of the AirPods using Siri.
Actually, it looks like an unthinkable decision, which is even more incomprehensible since the baseline model from AirPods has the H2 processor’s benefits.
A thing that has not been said
It is, however, quite clear that the AirPods Max surpass the cheaper versions in terms of sound and acoustics. But are they a good investment, when they don’t come with such features that are present in the AirPods 4, which cost 3 times less? The question remains open.