This Is the AirPods Max Accessory We’ve Been Waiting For
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We’ll be the first to admit that Apple’s AirPods Max aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. However, most folks who use AirPods Max love them, but for one annoying problem: finding a good way to keep them close at hand and charged up.
The AirPods Max come with a case that’s not too bad for stashing the headphones away when you’re not using them. There are also numerous other options available for those seeking something more elegant for travel. However, none of these make it easy to charge the AirPods Max. The best solution seems to be using a generic headphone stand and awkwardly fiddling with a Lightning or USB-C cable to plug it into the bottom of the headphones.
Thankfully, the folks at Mophie have just solved this problem. As the name suggests, the company’s new Max Charging Stand will both give you a place to leave your headphones when they’re not in use, while also ensuring they’re always charged and ready to go. Plus, it does so in style and even offers a charging pad in the center. It’s designed for a pair of AirPods earbuds, but you can charge any Qi-compatible device, including an iPhone, although it’s low power, so we wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re not in a hurry.
The stand also includes built-in magnets to trigger the AirPods Max sleep mode when they’re docked, and is built from weighted anodized aluminum coated with soft-touch silicon to give it a bit of heft while cradling and protecting your headphones. However, the real pièce de résistance is how Mophie has deftly handled the charging feature.
As any AirPods Max owner can imagine, a stand with a protruding connector would be less than ideal since it would require you to line up the headphones every time. That’s why Mophie has come up with a clever solution for this in the form of a magnetic USB-C charging dongle.
This works by leaving the dongle plugged into the bottom of your AirPods Max. When you drop them into the stand, it connects and aligns effortlessly to the pins in the cradle to ensure the headphones charge properly, regardless of how precisely you place them.
The dongle is unobtrusive enough that you can leave it in place during regular use, although you’ll need to remove it if you want to charge your AirPods Max the old-fashioned way or want to plug in a USB-C cord for wired listening. However, Mophie is also including an extra dongle in the box for families with more than one set of AirPods Max, as well as a USB-C magnetic adapter, so you won’t have to remove the dongle when traveling.
Unfortunately, this design comes with a significant drawback for long-time AirPods Max fans: The Max Charging Stand is only compatible with the second-generation AirPods Max.
While the dongle-based design appears ideally suited for universal compatibility between Lightning and USB-C AirPods Max, as you could simply swap out the dongles, only a USB-C version is currently available — and this is unlikely to change in the near future.
In theory, Mophie could someday release a Lightning dongle that would work with the current Max Charging Stand. However, when I spoke with the folks at the company during a press briefing last week, they told me that, while they’re not ruling out the possibility of creating a Lightning version if there’s enough interest, they had no immediate plans to do so.
That’s disappointing, as there’s little reason for existing AirPods Max owners to upgrade to the 2024 version, since the USB-C port is the sole difference between the two generations.
On the other hand, as someone who has covered Apple accessories and the companies behind them for the better part of two decades, I’m not the least bit surprised that the company found it far easier to build these for the open USB-C standard rather than winding its way through the more complicated requirements of Apple’s MFi certification program, which remains mandatory for anyone who wants to build a Lightning-based accessory. The fact that it has taken five years to see a stand like this is evidence of how complicated it can be for companies to create unique accessories for Lightning-based Apple devices.
The Mophie Max Charging Stand is now available on Amazon.com or directly from Mophie and ZAGG. It sells for $150, and you can have it in any color you like as long as it’s black.
