Why is Apple sleeping on the AirPods Max?

Apple announced a new set of AirPods Max during its event last week, updating them with USB-C and in a new set of colors. The switch to USB-C is a welcome one, to be sure, but Apple changed nothing else about them. And that feels weird, right? What gives?

Apple’s high-end luxury headphones were impressive when they launched in 2020. They had all the features of the AirPods Pro and made clever use of the Apple Watch’s digital crown for volume control. They also sounded fantastic — still do, in fact! But the rest of the market didn’t sit still; alternatives from Sony, Bose, and more recently, Sonos, all offer comparable features and sound — most notably, they each compete with the AirPods Max when it comes to noise cancellation (Bose does this the best) and transparency modes (AirPods Max still reign, but the Sonos Ace are close).

Despite being among the most expensive headphones you can buy without going into ultra-high-end audiophile territory, the AirPods Max seem to have caught on in recent years. Apple doesn’t break the headphones’ numbers out when it reports its earnings, but they’re all over the place in New York City, and I even see them on a lot of heads in my home city of Milwaukee too. You’ll see them in airports and planes, city transit, or just walking around the block. There was a whole trend at one point of people sharing AirPods Max accessories on TikTok. I’m fond of the crocheted ones:

There’s also a very visible market for “dupes,” or knockoffs. They have a hefty presence in Reptronics, a 115,000-member-strong subreddit where people share deals on cheaper fake versions of popular products. (TikTok, again, has tons of videos about dupes.)

27 minutes into episode 6 of the splashy Netflix drama The Accident, a teenager is wearing AirPods Max knockoffs that I’m certain are the exact pair I bought a couple of years ago. I gave mine to my child, who quickly broke them. 

So why didn’t Apple update the AirPods Max? Is it because it’s focused on Beats and doesn’t have time for the AirPods Max? Did it just need to get something out the door so the EU doesn’t come down on it for not switching over to USB-C before the region’s December deadline requiring it to? Does Apple think that it did a perfect, no-notes job for its first over-ear headphones right out of the gate, even with its several-years-old H1 chip? 

They’re so, so expensive, but they’re also a stellar pair of headphones that I love listening to music through. The ecosystem benefits like being able to pair them to my Apple TV to watch a movie at night or quickly switch them from my computer to my phone to my iPad are great. And they still feel as solid now, two years after I bought mine, as ever.

But in their original iteration, they’re extremely Apple — you need a special cable that only Apple sells for wired listening because they don’t have a 3.5mm audio jack. They don’t have a power button, so you have to trust that they’ll go into low-power mode and will be ready for you next time you put them on. (This has been very inconsistent for me.) 

Apple didn’t change any of that, and now it’s hard to feel like they’re the most premium headphones of Apple’s lineup, thanks to the glaring omission of the AirPods Pro H2 chip that was introduced two years ago. Without it, they won’t get features like Adaptive Audio or Conversational Awareness — or those coming to the AirPods Pro later, like doubling as hearing aids.

I wouldn’t upgrade for those features, and I don’t necessarily think anyone else should either. But the AirPods Pro being more “advanced” sure takes the premium shine off of the AirPods Max, doesn’t it? It doesn’t help that the market has more or less caught up, either. All of that really makes their $549 pricetag a hard pill to swallow in 2024.