AirPods Max

Updated 2026-04-08

Apple’s over-ear headphones, first released in December 2020. Initial price: $550, later increased. Metal chassis, mesh headband, Apple Watch-style digital crown. Known for exceptional comfort, a solid sonic base, and one of the most controversial product decisions in Apple’s recent history: the case.

What Works

  • Build quality - metal housing that makes even much pricier headphones feel cheap by comparison; the pad material is top-tier
  • Comfort - surprisingly wearable for a heavy device, even over long sessions
  • Vocals - the strongest single trait; voices stay clear and centered even in dense mixes
  • Closed-back width - unusually wide staging for a closed headphone, helped by aggressive sub-bass boosting and stereo compression

What Does Not Work

Bass: the sub-bass is too prominent. On some tracks it dominates in a way that feels wrong. Great for bass-heavy electronic music, less convincing everywhere else.

Treble: too sharp across a broad range. EQ cannot fully fix it because the issue is baked into the tuning.

The case: a famously poor product decision. It attracts lint, gets dirty easily, and is awkward to use without knocking the cups together. The Lightning connector placement also feels wrong.

Audiophile Framing

The review in this wiki comes from Theo Browne, who compares AirPods Max with headphones like the Sennheiser HD800 and Philips SHP9500. His conclusion: too inflexible for $550, with better value available elsewhere.

What It Says About Apple

The AirPods Max launch was a rare Apple hardware misfire: excellent physical feel, but foundational UX mistakes and no really clear user profile. Audiophiles found it sonically inconsistent. Many Apple users found it too expensive for what it delivered.

Connections

  • Theo Browne - review author and framing perspective
  • Apple - manufacturer; this product is an outlier below Apple’s usual hardware standard

Sources