The Apple AirPods Max: A Review and Analysis

One of the most significant drawbacks of the Apple AirPods Max is their lack of a charging port on the device itself. Instead, they come with a USB Type-C lighting cable that can be used to charge the earbuds, but this means that users will need to carry a separate charger with them at all times. This decision has been met with criticism from many fans, who feel that it is unnecessary and inconvenient.

To address this issue, Apple sells a Lightning to 3.5mm audio cable for £35 in the UK, which can be used to connect the AirPods Max to an iPhone or other device with a headphone jack. This cable is significantly cheaper than the Thunderbolt cable that would have been required if the AirPods Max had retained the traditional charging port found on earlier Apple earbuds.

One of the most interesting features of the AirPods Max is their extensive use of sensors and hardware to improve their performance and functionality. Each earcup contains an optical sensor, which detects when they are placed on or removed from the user's ears and adjusts the audio accordingly. There is also a positioning sensor in each earcup that adjusts the audio based on how the earbuds are oriented relative to the user's ears. In addition, there is a case detect sensor in each earcup that puts the AirPods Max into low power mode when the charging case is detected.

The AirPods Max do not, however, feature the ultra-wideband (U1) chip that has become a staple of many Apple devices, including the iPhone 11 series and newer models. This U1 chip allows for more accurate positioning and location tracking using spatial audio. It's unclear why the AirPods Max were designed without this chip.

Despite their numerous sensors and advanced hardware, the AirPods Max do feature two H1 processors, one in each earcup. These processors are responsible for processing audio from each earcup independently, which could potentially allow for more accurate sound reproduction and reduced latency. However, it is unclear how these processors work together to deliver this functionality.

In a surprise move, Apple has reportedly scrapped several features that were initially planned for the AirPods Max, including touch controls on the earbuds themselves and a magnetic headband that was intended to be removable. The company had also announced plans to release two models of the AirPods Max, with one priced at £350 and another at £550. However, it appears that only the higher-end model will be released.

The AirPods Max have been criticized by some for being rushed to market in order to coincide with the holiday season. This criticism is valid, given the numerous features that were cut from the final product. Despite this, Apple has made a significant investment in the design and engineering of the AirPods Max, which suggests that the company is committed to delivering high-quality products.

Ultimately, the decision of whether or not to purchase the AirPods Max will depend on individual preferences and needs. While they offer several advantages over earlier Apple earbuds, including improved sound quality and advanced features like spatial audio, they also come with some significant drawbacks, including a lack of a charging port and the absence of certain features that were initially planned for release.

In conclusion, the AirPods Max are a complex and multifaceted product that offers both advantages and disadvantages. While they demonstrate Apple's commitment to innovation and quality design, they also raise several questions about the company's priorities and decision-making processes. As with any new product, it will be worth monitoring reviews and feedback from users in order to fully understand the benefits and drawbacks of the AirPods Max.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe airpod studio are now here they're called airpods max and these would be apple's very first over-the-head headphones under the apple brand name so without any further ado here are not five not 10 not 15 but actually 14 things you need to know about the airpods max number one extreme sound quality so apple claims that these new airpods max are something else they deliver high fidelity audio with custom drivers and zero distortion even at full volume according to apple at least they're also very comfortable with stainless steel telescopic arms for accurate adjustment to your head the ear cups themselves are also independently adjustable so they will tilt and adjust to automatically match the shape of your head not only that but the inside cushions are made out of acoustic memory foam that automatically matches the shape of your ear for an immersive seal they feature a vastly improved active noise cancelling even more superior to the airpods pro in fact apple claims that the earpods max have the best noise cancelling in the industry yeah we'll have to wait and see about that but i do need to use nine different microphones to cancel the noise which seems like an overkill like you basically get all the features of the earpods pro just boosted to the max noise cancelling is there but better the excellent audio quality from the airpods pro is also there but better and things like transparency mode and always on siri are also there and better at least according to apple so definitely subscribe to make sure that you don't miss our actual full coverage now the second thing that you should know is that these headphones are very very very expensive so the airpods pro were already pretty expensive at 250 dollars especially when you consider the fact that high-end over-the-head headphones like the sony wh 1000xm3s are actually less now at 230 dollars and the new ones the xm4s that just launched those are 280 and those sound miles better than the airpods pro and the noise cancelling is really the best in the industry or at least was again we'll have to see about apple's claims if they're really true but anyway these new earpods max they cost 550 or 550 pounds in the uk like holy smokes guys like for that money you could literally buy a playstation 5 or you know when you can find one on amazon because they're nowhere to be found aside from our giveaway down below in case you missed it yes we are giving away a ps5 but there are so many things that you can buy for that amount of money stuff like i don't know an iphone se for four hundred dollars and you would still have 150 left for a pair of regular airpods how about that or uh for just 150 more you can just pick up a mac mini with a brand new m1 processor we've done a video very detailed video on that here which you can check out so do you see where i'm coming from these headphones are very expensive however they do have some interesting things going for them like the heavily inspired apple watch design that they have so if you take a look at these from the side they literally look like an apple watch with the headbands looking a lot like an apple watch band and they even have the digital crown that the apple watch has not even kidding so you can use that to turn up the volume turn down the volume you can answer a phone call by tapping once you can you know tap twice to skip to the next track you can activate siri by holding so it pretty much works in the exact same way as it does on the apple watch the only difference being that as far as i'm aware there is no haptic feedback like on the apple watch i do actually like the design and they do seem to have some elements inspired by the homepod too like stuff like the inside of the ear cups the texture on them more specifically oh and they also come in five colors silver space gray sky blue pink which kind of looks like orange to me and uh green i do like these colors quite a lot but my personal favorite is of course space gray now something else that you should know is that the cushions just like in the leaks are indeed magnetic meaning that you can easily swap them out with a different color and in fact apple even sells individual cushions which you can attach to your own airpods and as expected those are pricey too at 69 each i do think that it is a bit scammy how you cannot customize the airpods max your liking before buying them like if you want to get a silver model with the black cushions you will have to buy those cushions separately afterwards whereas with an apple watch you can basically build that to your liking before you order i just don't like that uh it definitely seems like another typical apple money grab now the airpod studio do come with a carrying case which is actually called a smart case and i'll explain why in just a second but you gotta admit that uh it looks very very strange like to me it kind of looks like a diaper so yeah i'm definitely not a fan of how this thing looks but okay the reason why this is called a smart case is because when the airpods max are inside of that case they will enter this ultra low power mode to preserve the battery life which again i'm not fully sure how i feel about that because i would expect most people to just leave them on a desk or you know on a headphone stand when they're not using them the fact that you need a case to ensure that you have a good standby time is a bit worrying to me speaking of standby time let's talk about battery life so the standard airpods would last you for five hours and then if you count the charging case too you would get essentially 24 hours of audio playback which is really really good the earpods pro offer 4.5 hours and 24 hours with the case which is again pretty good so you would expect the airpods max to offer a much better battery life than the rest of the airpods and they do in some ways so they offer 20 hours of audio playback which is actually very good when you compare them to the 5 and the 4.5 hours of the regular earpods and the airpods pro but the airpods max did not have a battery case like the other two airpods do which means that the other two airpods actually do offer you a better battery life 24 hours versus 20 hours on the airpods max so now let's talk about charging the standard airpods are small and they have a small battery and therefore they can charge very very fast in fact just five minutes of charging can get you one entire hour of audio playback whereas on the airpods max that can get you 1.5 hours uh from a five-minute charge so that's that's better right well not really because you see unlike the earpods and the airpods pro where you get that extra hour just from charging them in their case the airpods max have to be plugged in apple doesn't really specify what kind of charger you need but it is likely that you'll need a usb type-c fast charger like you know the 20 watt fast charger that apple sells separately for the iphone 12s speaking of that the cable that you get inside the box is a usb type-c to lightning cable you don't get a charger inside the box so do keep that in mind you will have to buy a separate charger uh but since we got the usb type-c lighting cable we also have a lightning port yes a lightning port on the airpods max themselves come on apple this is this is such such a bad move like if you don't have an iphone and you just have an ipad or a macbook you would literally need to take a separate cable with you just for charging the airpods max which is so bad come on apple like i get that you want to remove the charging port entirely from the iphone next to your video not here uh but at least give us usb type-c on everything else everything else usb type-c and you can do whatever you want for the iphone speaking of lightning you can actually buy a lightning to 3.5 mm audio cable that apple sells for 35 pounds in the uk like what that's that's like half the price of a thunderbolt cable that's nuts but hey at least it comes in black so that's cool right now there is no 3.5 millimeter headphone jack on the airpods max themselves you literally just have the crown and the button for the active noise cancelling and that's it so the cable would connect by lightning to your mac which would come in handy for when you're doing any audio editing now something quite interesting that i found is that the earpods max they have a lot of sensors so they have one optical sensor in each cup for detecting when you've placed the airpods on they have one positioning sensor again one in each ear cup likely to adjust the audio based on how they're oriented in comparison to your ear they have a case detect sensor in each ear cup that puts the air pods in low power mode when the case is detected and then they also have an accelerometer in each cup um and a gyroscope in the left ear cup for adjusting spatial audio but interesting enough we did not have a u1 chip which is that ultra wide band positioning chip that apple has been adding to a lot of their devices lately so this will allow those devices to find and be located by other devices with d1 chip much more accurately with a margin of error of just about one centimeter or so now the apple air tags will have this the new apple watches the series six has this uh and the iphone 11s and newer they all have the one chip so it is just a bit odd how the airpods max don't have the e1 chip but something that i do have is two processors yes the airpods max actually have two h1 processors one inside each ear cup which is very interesting so i'm assuming that each of them processes the audio from that specific ear cup by the way the airpods pro they also use two h1 processors one in each airpod but since the airpods max have that band in between i was expecting apple to add some cabling in there but it seems like all the hardware is literally just in the ear cups speaking of ear cups there was this rumor that the airpods max were supposed to have smart ear cups that would automatically detect which ear they were on and recalibrate the audio that way but it seems like that feature was actually scrapped as we now have symbols on each ear cup as to which one is left and which one is right in fact mark german reports that apple had to cut back on some features to get the airpods max out as soon as possible very likely to get uh on that christmas sales train so some of the features that got removed were the touch controls the magnetic headband which was also supposed to be removable and the automatic left and right ear detection so at the end of the day we are actually getting these next week i'm not sure if we'll get uh to make a video because i'm actually leaving on holiday next week and i'll be back in january so uh we'll see but anyways i'll be testing them and i'll report my findings on twitter in the meantime so definitely follow as of tech but to me it looks like apple definitely rushed these out and removed some pretty big features in favor of launching these for the holiday period also remember how uh there were supposed to be two models of the airpods studio sorry airpods max that we're supposed to launch a low end 350 dollar and a high-end 550 dollar model well this one seems to just be the high end so i would suggest you wait until reviews are out and also until maybe the second gen uh is out which could bring back those missing features and hopefully drop that price tag too but yeah let me know in the comments what do you guys think about the airpods max definitely give this video a like if i've enjoyed it and subscribe for more interesting tech videos like this one hopefully was and thanks for watching youthe airpod studio are now here they're called airpods max and these would be apple's very first over-the-head headphones under the apple brand name so without any further ado here are not five not 10 not 15 but actually 14 things you need to know about the airpods max number one extreme sound quality so apple claims that these new airpods max are something else they deliver high fidelity audio with custom drivers and zero distortion even at full volume according to apple at least they're also very comfortable with stainless steel telescopic arms for accurate adjustment to your head the ear cups themselves are also independently adjustable so they will tilt and adjust to automatically match the shape of your head not only that but the inside cushions are made out of acoustic memory foam that automatically matches the shape of your ear for an immersive seal they feature a vastly improved active noise cancelling even more superior to the airpods pro in fact apple claims that the earpods max have the best noise cancelling in the industry yeah we'll have to wait and see about that but i do need to use nine different microphones to cancel the noise which seems like an overkill like you basically get all the features of the earpods pro just boosted to the max noise cancelling is there but better the excellent audio quality from the airpods pro is also there but better and things like transparency mode and always on siri are also there and better at least according to apple so definitely subscribe to make sure that you don't miss our actual full coverage now the second thing that you should know is that these headphones are very very very expensive so the airpods pro were already pretty expensive at 250 dollars especially when you consider the fact that high-end over-the-head headphones like the sony wh 1000xm3s are actually less now at 230 dollars and the new ones the xm4s that just launched those are 280 and those sound miles better than the airpods pro and the noise cancelling is really the best in the industry or at least was again we'll have to see about apple's claims if they're really true but anyway these new earpods max they cost 550 or 550 pounds in the uk like holy smokes guys like for that money you could literally buy a playstation 5 or you know when you can find one on amazon because they're nowhere to be found aside from our giveaway down below in case you missed it yes we are giving away a ps5 but there are so many things that you can buy for that amount of money stuff like i don't know an iphone se for four hundred dollars and you would still have 150 left for a pair of regular airpods how about that or uh for just 150 more you can just pick up a mac mini with a brand new m1 processor we've done a video very detailed video on that here which you can check out so do you see where i'm coming from these headphones are very expensive however they do have some interesting things going for them like the heavily inspired apple watch design that they have so if you take a look at these from the side they literally look like an apple watch with the headbands looking a lot like an apple watch band and they even have the digital crown that the apple watch has not even kidding so you can use that to turn up the volume turn down the volume you can answer a phone call by tapping once you can you know tap twice to skip to the next track you can activate siri by holding so it pretty much works in the exact same way as it does on the apple watch the only difference being that as far as i'm aware there is no haptic feedback like on the apple watch i do actually like the design and they do seem to have some elements inspired by the homepod too like stuff like the inside of the ear cups the texture on them more specifically oh and they also come in five colors silver space gray sky blue pink which kind of looks like orange to me and uh green i do like these colors quite a lot but my personal favorite is of course space gray now something else that you should know is that the cushions just like in the leaks are indeed magnetic meaning that you can easily swap them out with a different color and in fact apple even sells individual cushions which you can attach to your own airpods and as expected those are pricey too at 69 each i do think that it is a bit scammy how you cannot customize the airpods max your liking before buying them like if you want to get a silver model with the black cushions you will have to buy those cushions separately afterwards whereas with an apple watch you can basically build that to your liking before you order i just don't like that uh it definitely seems like another typical apple money grab now the airpod studio do come with a carrying case which is actually called a smart case and i'll explain why in just a second but you gotta admit that uh it looks very very strange like to me it kind of looks like a diaper so yeah i'm definitely not a fan of how this thing looks but okay the reason why this is called a smart case is because when the airpods max are inside of that case they will enter this ultra low power mode to preserve the battery life which again i'm not fully sure how i feel about that because i would expect most people to just leave them on a desk or you know on a headphone stand when they're not using them the fact that you need a case to ensure that you have a good standby time is a bit worrying to me speaking of standby time let's talk about battery life so the standard airpods would last you for five hours and then if you count the charging case too you would get essentially 24 hours of audio playback which is really really good the earpods pro offer 4.5 hours and 24 hours with the case which is again pretty good so you would expect the airpods max to offer a much better battery life than the rest of the airpods and they do in some ways so they offer 20 hours of audio playback which is actually very good when you compare them to the 5 and the 4.5 hours of the regular earpods and the airpods pro but the airpods max did not have a battery case like the other two airpods do which means that the other two airpods actually do offer you a better battery life 24 hours versus 20 hours on the airpods max so now let's talk about charging the standard airpods are small and they have a small battery and therefore they can charge very very fast in fact just five minutes of charging can get you one entire hour of audio playback whereas on the airpods max that can get you 1.5 hours uh from a five-minute charge so that's that's better right well not really because you see unlike the earpods and the airpods pro where you get that extra hour just from charging them in their case the airpods max have to be plugged in apple doesn't really specify what kind of charger you need but it is likely that you'll need a usb type-c fast charger like you know the 20 watt fast charger that apple sells separately for the iphone 12s speaking of that the cable that you get inside the box is a usb type-c to lightning cable you don't get a charger inside the box so do keep that in mind you will have to buy a separate charger uh but since we got the usb type-c lighting cable we also have a lightning port yes a lightning port on the airpods max themselves come on apple this is this is such such a bad move like if you don't have an iphone and you just have an ipad or a macbook you would literally need to take a separate cable with you just for charging the airpods max which is so bad come on apple like i get that you want to remove the charging port entirely from the iphone next to your video not here uh but at least give us usb type-c on everything else everything else usb type-c and you can do whatever you want for the iphone speaking of lightning you can actually buy a lightning to 3.5 mm audio cable that apple sells for 35 pounds in the uk like what that's that's like half the price of a thunderbolt cable that's nuts but hey at least it comes in black so that's cool right now there is no 3.5 millimeter headphone jack on the airpods max themselves you literally just have the crown and the button for the active noise cancelling and that's it so the cable would connect by lightning to your mac which would come in handy for when you're doing any audio editing now something quite interesting that i found is that the earpods max they have a lot of sensors so they have one optical sensor in each cup for detecting when you've placed the airpods on they have one positioning sensor again one in each ear cup likely to adjust the audio based on how they're oriented in comparison to your ear they have a case detect sensor in each ear cup that puts the air pods in low power mode when the case is detected and then they also have an accelerometer in each cup um and a gyroscope in the left ear cup for adjusting spatial audio but interesting enough we did not have a u1 chip which is that ultra wide band positioning chip that apple has been adding to a lot of their devices lately so this will allow those devices to find and be located by other devices with d1 chip much more accurately with a margin of error of just about one centimeter or so now the apple air tags will have this the new apple watches the series six has this uh and the iphone 11s and newer they all have the one chip so it is just a bit odd how the airpods max don't have the e1 chip but something that i do have is two processors yes the airpods max actually have two h1 processors one inside each ear cup which is very interesting so i'm assuming that each of them processes the audio from that specific ear cup by the way the airpods pro they also use two h1 processors one in each airpod but since the airpods max have that band in between i was expecting apple to add some cabling in there but it seems like all the hardware is literally just in the ear cups speaking of ear cups there was this rumor that the airpods max were supposed to have smart ear cups that would automatically detect which ear they were on and recalibrate the audio that way but it seems like that feature was actually scrapped as we now have symbols on each ear cup as to which one is left and which one is right in fact mark german reports that apple had to cut back on some features to get the airpods max out as soon as possible very likely to get uh on that christmas sales train so some of the features that got removed were the touch controls the magnetic headband which was also supposed to be removable and the automatic left and right ear detection so at the end of the day we are actually getting these next week i'm not sure if we'll get uh to make a video because i'm actually leaving on holiday next week and i'll be back in january so uh we'll see but anyways i'll be testing them and i'll report my findings on twitter in the meantime so definitely follow as of tech but to me it looks like apple definitely rushed these out and removed some pretty big features in favor of launching these for the holiday period also remember how uh there were supposed to be two models of the airpods studio sorry airpods max that we're supposed to launch a low end 350 dollar and a high-end 550 dollar model well this one seems to just be the high end so i would suggest you wait until reviews are out and also until maybe the second gen uh is out which could bring back those missing features and hopefully drop that price tag too but yeah let me know in the comments what do you guys think about the airpods max definitely give this video a like if i've enjoyed it and subscribe for more interesting tech videos like this one hopefully was and thanks for watching you\n"