Apple Has 'No' Plans Yet for AirPods Max 2 With 'Meaningful' Changes

While this should come as no surprise given that Apple just updated the AirPods Max in September, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman today said that Apple currently has "no concrete plans" to update the headphones again "in a meaningful way."

airpods max 2024 colors
"I expect the company to keep the Max headphones around for the foreseeable future in their current form," he added.

AirPods Max received only two changes in September, including a USB-C charging port instead of Lightning, and new color options. The headphones did not receive Apple's H2 chip that debuted in the AirPods Pro 2 a few years ago, so they continue to miss out on Adaptive Audio features, and there were no improvements to active noise cancellation either.

This means the AirPods Max continue to have the H1 chip that Apple introduced in 2019, yet the $549 headphones did not receive a price cut.

Gurman believes that AirPods Max sales are too low for Apple to justify allocating more development resources to the headphones. So, if you are hoping for AirPods Max 2 with more significant improvements, keep your expectations low for now.

Related Roundup: AirPods Max
Buyer's Guide: AirPods Max (Buy Now)
Related Forum: AirPods

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Top Rated Comments

Mrkevinfinnerty Avatar
3 hours ago at 06:14 am
No plans to drop the price either. :cool:

Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Rradcircless Avatar
2 hours ago at 06:28 am
What I don’t understand is why; Apple doesn’t shy away from discrete incremental upgrades to products, so why won’t they toss an H2 chip in the Max and give them some feature parity with the Pro 2s?
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
HobeSoundDarryl Avatar
2 hours ago at 06:38 am

Might as well discontinue them. Apple baffles me sometimes with their decisions.
What baffle? Whenever we consumers are baffled, ask ourselves a simple question: "But who makes the most profitable..." Or just think about the money.

Modern Apple is relentlessly focused on "another record quarter..." above all else. They have all the money necessary to put teams on everything to keep everything as up to date as desired. But it's much more profitable to sell relatively ancient tech at the "same great price."

Modern Apple could also hire and assign whole teams to debug it all and get us back to a "just works" Apple too. But that's a cost-adding concept vs. a profit-maximizing one. So bugs linger- sometimes for many years- like the one that drives me batty...



...which has persisted through now FIVE generations of macOS. Enclosure through same cable linked to any PC or any Mac with macOS BEFORE "Big Sur" is just fine. Hook it to "latest & greatest" in the last approx. 5 years and mine can't stay connected for more than about 3 hours. Others report different amounts of time and it is a widespread problem- not just for me or "a small percentage of users."

If Apple buyers would stop "just buying" these headphones, it would "force" Apple to either update them or discontinue them. But buyers just keep paying and thus rewarding Apple for such choices in the most tangible way. While "we" do that, Apple is doing exactly what they should... even if it makes little sense through our consumer lenses. It makes lots of $en$e to AAPL shareholders. ???
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
DHagan4755 Avatar
2 hours ago at 06:40 am
Disappointing. I refuse to spend so much money on headphones like this & that also come with a bra to store them.
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
UltimateSyn Avatar
2 hours ago at 07:10 am
The sales are low because they cost $549 and are increasingly noncompetitive in an extremely saturated high-end headphone market. They should update them to have feature parity with their other headphones.... ie. bare minimum.
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
coolerkid Avatar
1 hour ago at 07:36 am
That's lame. These headphones have great sound quality and ANC, but the design is comically flawed, and they are very overpriced. If they released a redesign that addressed a lot of the issues, especially the weight, and lowered the price, I'm sure they would sell a ton of these.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)