AirPods Max have a lot to offer. Their price tag may be high, but if you’re looking for over-ear headphones made by Apple, there’s plenty to love about AirPods Max. However, despite their strengths, AirPods Max also hold a unique status among Apple products that’s not so great.
AirPods Max aren’t Apple’s only niche product
Earlier this week, Mark Gurman reported some disappointing news for AirPods Max fans:
Apple has no concrete plans to update the AirPods Max again in a meaningful way. The headphones aren’t a hot enough seller to justify pouring money into development, but they’re also not a big enough flop to kill them outright. If you’ve ever been to an upscale gym in Los Angeles or New York, you can see these $550 headphones have a market — even with the high price and outdated technology.
Gurman’s explanation is understandable: if the product is too niche to invest in, Apple should prioritize using its resources elsewhere.
However, even among some of Apple’s other niche products, there’s nothing else quite like AirPods Max—and not in a good way.
- the Mac Pro is one of the most niche Apple products, yet it still gets semi-regular updates to the latest Apple silicon
- Apple TV 4K is arguably niche too, and while hardware changes are rare, tvOS continues getting solid feature upgrades year after year
- another niche product—for now—is the Vision Pro, but of course Apple is investing heavily in building out its still-nascent Vision platform
As I look at Apple’s full product lineup, perhaps the device that shares the most in common with AirPods Max is the HomePod.
Both products are focused on audio, yes, but more relevant in this case, Apple seems to be content leaving both to languish with minimal investment.
HomePod first launched in 2018, and its successor came five years later in 2023. There was a HomePod mini in between, too.
The HomePod line originally got some attention from Apple in the form of regular feature updates. But for the past couple years, those have slowed to a halt.
Apple still ships new HomePod software regularly, but meaningful improvements have been absent for a while.
The unique problem of AirPods Max
Despite HomePod’s lack of attention from Apple, it’s arguably better off than AirPods Max for one key reason: there’s no other Apple product in the same category that can upstage the HomePod (for now).
AirPods Max, however, have been bested in many respects by the rest of the AirPods product lineup.
- AirPods Pro 2 have the new Hearing Aid, Hearing Test, and Hearing Protection features. Plus Adaptive Audio, Conversation Awareness, Voice Isolation, Personalized Volume, and more.
- AirPods 4 come with many of the same features as AirPods Pro 2.
As Apple’s AirPods comparison page just reminded me, you can’t even say ‘Siri’ to invoke Apple’s assistant on AirPods Max. You have to say the full ‘Hey Siri.’
Yet somehow, both of Apple’s in-ear AirPods options are significantly less expensive than AirPods Max, despite coming with much better features overall.
That’s a major price difference, and with huge feature disparities that run the opposite direction.
There’s no other Apple product that’s receiving so little investment from Apple, while simultaneously being embarrassingly outperformed by its cheaper sibling products.
I’m not a product designer, I can’t exactly comment on how easy or hard it would be to throw a little more love in AirPods Max’s direction.
But it seems like it shouldn’t be that much trouble to make this problem go away. I’m not asking for a big redesign. Just move from the H1 chip to H2 so that modern AirPods features can come to the high-end AirPods Max.
Will that lead to a big sales boost? It’s hard to know. But it will, at least, make the unique problem of the current AirPods Max shortcomings go away.
Do you think Apple should invest more in AirPods Max? Let us know in the comments.
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