Today, two years ago, Apple made its first foray into the high-end over-ear headphones market with the release of the AirPods Max. Throughout 2020, speculation about Apple’s development of a pair of high-end headphones—at the time dubbed the “AirPods Studio”—got hotter.
Many of the popular AirPods features, including the H1 chip, simple pairing, Active Noise Cancellation, Transparency, automatic switching, and Spatial Audio with dynamic head tracking, are available in the AirPods Max, but for the first time in a premium over-ear style.
Along with these features, they provide a headband made of a flexible mesh canopy, replaceable magnetic earcups, a Digital Crown for volume control, a button for ANC and Transparency switching, and a Smart Case for storage and putting the headphones into a low power state. After their release, the AirPods Max were in high demand, and shipping times were several months long.
Since their release, the AirPods Max have also drawn criticism for a variety of reasons, including their price in comparison to other high-end over-ear headphones, the look of the Smart Case, condensation inside the earcups, a short battery life (which was later resolved via a software update), and, most recently, the ANC strength deteriorating over time.
What the AirPods Pro 2 Tells Us About the AirPods Max 2 in Ten Ways Despite the fact that the AirPods Max are now two years old and a growing number of improvements and features could be added to the headphones, a new model is not in the works. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in May 2021, Apple was not actively developing the second-generation AirPods Max, and there was less talk about changing the device’s colour options. The most recent reference to a second-generation model came from Gurman, who stated in October that the upcoming AirPods Max version would come with USB-C and would be released “by 2024.”
