AirPods Max 2 review | Macworld

Price When Reviewed

$549

Best Prices Today: Apple AirPods Max 2

The original AirPods Max were somewhat flawed upon launch, but mostly just too expensive. They cost too much, weighed too much, had middling battery life, and came with an absolutely atrocious sleeve-like “Smart Case,” and got left behind for all the fancy new AirPods features because of their aging H1 chip.

The AirPods Max 2 fixes that last item, and only that last item. After five years, we expected more than this “chip and ship” update.

Iconic design that’s still too heavy

There’s no doubt that AirPods Max are attractive and uniquely Apple. You can spot someone wearing these in a crowd at 50 feet. The simple button-and-crown controls and single USB-C port (which supports low-latency audio over USB-C, including lossless audio) haven’t changed from the 1st-gen model, and they still work fine.

For peaceful listening while resting in place, however, they’re extremely comfortable. The canopy band doesn’t put pressure on top of your head, the ear pads are soft, and the weight sort of disappears. Start to move around, and it quickly becomes a problem.

However you’re wearing a pair of over-the-ear headphones and somebody calls your name, the headphones shouldn’t slide out of place when you quickly turn your head to respond. Thanks to the inertia of the unusually heavy aluminum AirPods Max, where most of the 13.6 ounces, which is about 50 percent heavier than most competitors, rests in the cans rather than the canopy, you’ll find yourself frequently adjusting their fit as you move your head around.

I wanted three things from a sequel to the AirPods Max, and one of them was a big weight reduction. I didn’t get it. Instead, AirPods Max 2 has exactly the same design as the 1st-gen model with USB-C, right down to the color options: Midnight, Starlight, Blue, Purple, and Orange.

A bad case and battery life issues

Let’s talk about that atrocious Smart Case and the weird battery issues surrounding it, because that’s the second of the three things I wanted fixed from the original AirPods Max.

Apple doesn’t include a proper case with AirPods Max. Instead, you get a “Smart Case” which is actually a sort of soft-touch origami plastic sleeve with magnets to hold it in place. It exposes the entire headband and large portions of the earpieces.

It doesn’t prevent dust or debris from scratching up your expensive metal headphones, and something like a pen in your bag could easily poke right in there and get rubbed around as you move. It provides no real crush resistance. It’s essentially a dust guard and a middling one at that.

Foundry

The 20 hours of battery life is fine, though well behind its best competition like the Sony WH-1000XM6 or Bose QuietComfort Ultra 2nd gen, both of which last 30 hours.

But the real issue is that, even though the headphones go into a low-power state when you take them off, the battery still slowly drains. It’s enough to go through a third of your battery if you just leave them on your desk for a day. The only way to prevent it is to put them in the Smart Case dumb sleeve, or another case specially made to trigger the magnetic sensor in the AirPods Max that drops them into their ultra-low power state.

It’s just overall poor design that could easily be solved by adding a simple a power down gesture; pressing the crown and button together for two seconds, perhaps.

This is such an own goal by Apple. Every AirPods Max review from 2020 onward complained about the case and the constant battery drain. You would think it would be top of the list to address these things in AirPods Max 2, but after five years, Apple just…didn’t even try.

H2 provides some welcome improvements

AirPods Max have always had among the best active noise cancelling you can find in a consumer product, and that remains unchanged with the 2nd-gen model. The transparency mode is still one of the most natural-sounding you can find anywhere.

The sound quality with music, movies, and games is quite good, too. Relative to other over-the-ear wireless headphones in this price range, the argument over which is “better” is more or less down to taste at this point. It certainly can’t be said that they lag behind other $500-ish wireless headphones for audio fidelity.

For interactive applications, plugging in via USB-C creates a very low-latency connection that supports lossless audio, too.

Foundry

New to AirPods Max 2 are all the latest features found in regular AirPods that have the H2 chip: Adaptive Audio, Conversation Awareness, Voice Isolation, loud sound reduction, and Live Translation. These are all excellent and useful features, easy to use and pretty well implemented, and it’s about time they came to Apple’s most expensive AirPods.

That’s the third thing we wanted the AirPods Max 2 to do: catch up to the features of the in-ear models. With the exception of the hearing test and hearing aid features (which necessarily require in-ear buds with tips that create a seal in your ear canal), Apple checked all the boxes here.

Should you buy the AirPods Max 2?

Just sitting here listening to AirPods Max 2, it’s hard not to like them. The stationary comfort, sound quality, and noise cancelling are all truly excellent.

Living with them is another matter. The weird way the battery drains if you don’t put them in their special origami sleeve because Apple doesn’t want to allow you to manually turn them off. The way they slide out of place a little if you move around too vigorously because of their weight. The little dongle dance you have to do if you want to use a 3.5mm audio jack.

AirPods Max 2 carry a price premium of roughly $100 over competitors such as Sony and Bose, and it feels like Apple doesn’t really care about this product when they push out a 2nd-gen version after five years and doesn’t address any of these issues.

None of them are dealbreakers, and like all AirPods, those who live within the Apple ecosystem will find unmatched ease of use. But it’s hard to recommend this chip-and-ship upgrade when most of the AirPods Max problems remain totally unaddressed.