Teardown Shows the AirPods Max 2 Are Still the Same Headphones (Mostly)
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Now that the AirPods Max 2 are officially on the market, repair site iFixit has done its customary teardown to see what’s actually new inside Apple’s latest premium over-ear headphones, and (spoiler alert?) the answer is, “not much.”
To recap, the original AirPods Max launched in 2020 to no small amount of fanfare. They were not only the first set of “AirPods” branded headphones released directly under Apple’s name, but they came in a rare December product release, and had a premium design — and a price to match.
Pundits quickly questioned whether the AirPods Max justified their premium price of if this was a matter of the usual Apple premium. The answer, it seemed, was somewhere in the middle: a more than competent set of headphones that could hold their own against the best in their class, with a high price tag that was undoubtedly at least partly due to the Apple name and partly to a solid aluminum design in a sea of plasticky competitors.
The original AirPods Max didn’t exactly take the world by storm. They appealed to a relatively small group of fans who liked the design and the tight AirPods-style integration and didn’t mind paying a bit more to get it. Still, it wasn’t a big surprise that Apple sold the AirPods Max for nearly four years without an update, and when a product refresh finally arrived, the only thing that changed was the port. In a move that was more about compliance with EU regulations than anything else, the old Lightning port was swapped out for a USB-C port in what was literally the only difference between the two models.
A late 2024 iFixit teardown of the USB-C AirPods Max confirmed what many already suspected, and now the disassembly and repair experts are doing the same with the new AirPods Max 2 — with pretty similar findings.
According to the spec sheet, the biggest change in the AirPods Max 2 is the upgrade to an H2 chip that arguably should have happened two years ago when even the most affordable AirPods 4 got Apple’s newest silicon. Despite a prevailing theory that this update was more about supply chain management — Apple was reportedly tired of cranking out H1 chips for a single remaining product — the H2 chip makes the AirPods Max 2 a worthy contender, even if features like Adaptive Audio and Conversation Awareness are of dubious value in a set of over-ear cans.
Apple also promised that the AirPods Max 2 added a new high dynamic range amplifier to the AirPods Max 2 for “even cleaner audio,” and early reviews have said that whatever the company has done delivers better ANC and a cleaner sound signature, but these appear to be subtle hardware changes that are likely related more to the H2 chip than any other new components.
It shouldn’t be all that surprising that the hardware in the AirPods Max 2 hasn’t changed much. Apple didn’t even bother to refresh the colors this time around, with the second-generation headphones available in the same midnight, starlight, blue, purple, and orange finishes as their USB-C predecessors. The elimination of the Lightning port at least meant a new color palette for the 2024 refresh, but the AirPods Max 2 are physically identical on the outside, which means you won’t be able to visually tell them apart from the AirPods Max (USB-C).
iFixit has confirmed that this similarly is far more than skin deep. The AirPods Max 2 open the same way as the USB-C version, and unless you take the time to scan the H-series chip, you’d have a hard time knowing which model you’re looking at even from the inside.
More importantly, the repair site notes that Apple doesn’t appear to have done anything to address one of the most common complaints from the original AirPods Max, which is the problem with condensation building up in the ear cups. While iFixit still gives the AirPods Max a repairability score of 6 out of 10, it notes that the lack of support for them through the company’s self service repair program gives them a much shorter lifespan than they might otherwise have if owners were able to conduct their own repairs — or at least have them serviced by independent repair shops.
That’s not to say that the AirPods Max don’t have staying power. I’m still rocking my original Lightning-equipped AirPods Max from early 2021, and they’re still going strong. Granted, I don’t use mine in humid environments or for things like workouts, so your mileage may vary, but five years is a solid run, and they’ve shown no sign of being anywhere near the end even in terms of battery life. With the AirPods Max 2 sharing a virtually identical design, it’s a safe bet that they’ll have the same longevity.
