The $129 AirPods 4 Have Features the $549 AirPods Max Don’t

Better sound, better ANC, better features? That sounds like a very tempting package indeed. But when it came to H1-packing AirPods Max, Apple quickly swept all that good stuff under the carpet, throwing a handful of new colours and a USB-C connection our way in the hope we’d forget about everything that had just come before.

Photograph: Courtesy of Apple

Where exactly were the “significant updates” here that had been promised? There wasn’t even the sniff of a price drop to help soften the blow.

It’s not like these features wouldn’t even be really helpful to the AirPods Max users either. Over-ear headphones tend to be worn in cities and busy spaces, and particularly for travel, thanks to the improved noise isolation that their design brings. Who wouldn’t want to be able to have a quick conversation with a barista without slugging the (quite heavy, actually) AirPods Max on and off their head? Or to block out the noise of public transportation, while still getting the intercom announcements cut through so you don’t miss your stop? And that’s before we get into the potential performance improvements the H2 could bring, as they have elsewhere in the line up.

Of course, this had all been predicted by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman back in December last year. “The cans don’t sell well enough for the company to invest in entirely new hardware or software features,” he said, offering a potential reason for Apple’s lack of love for the Max.

So, have the AirPods Max been a flop, and are they now on the slow and winding path to being retired from the line-up? Because if Apple isn’t updating them now, then when? With a pretty meagre 20-hour battery life, they’re already lagging behind the major competition in key areas, and this is only going to get worse as time goes on. To not even be able to compete with the cheapest AirPods in a technical face-off feels like a difficult, and frankly embarrassing, position to be in.

It’s all the more disappointing, of course, because, for all intents and purposes, they’re a good pair of headphones. Our review praised them for everything from their build quality and comfort to their “industry-leading fidelity.” But that was then. Right now, and at their not-inconsiderable price, they feel hard to recommend to anyone but the biggest Apple fan—and they’ve probably already got a pair.