Has Apple Forgotten About the AirPods Max?
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Apple’s AirPods Max got a refresh last year in what could be called one of the company’s most uninspired product updates ever. After a nearly five-year wait, the only thing the second-generation AirPods Max brought to the table was a USB-C port. However, if you were hoping this was merely an interim update to tide us over until Apple can bring some real changes, you may be in for a disappointment.
As we said last fall, the AirPods Max we see today are likely all they will ever be. Apple created quite a bit of buzz when it first released the flagship over-ear headphones in late 2020, but it was hard to believe that four years wasn’t enough time to come up with any meaningful improvements — unless it simply didn’t want to.
That’s especially true when you consider that Apple’s Beats division came out with the Beats Studio Pro over a year earlier, delivering most of the same features of the AirPods Max without the higher price tag and the Apple brand.
Plus, during the time it took for Apple to add a USB-C port to the AirPods Max, it also released the AirPods 3, AirPods Pro 2, and two new versions of the AirPods 4. It also switched the AirPods Pro 2 to a USB-C case only a year later, while improving their dust resistance and adding new lossless audio capabilities for Vision Pro users. Meanwhile, the AirPods Max didn’t even get an update to the latest H2 chips found in the rest of Apple’s AirPods family.
While veteran Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicted in May that a “lighter version” of Apple’s over-ear headphones is expected to go into production sometime in 2027, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman isn’t so sure. In this week’s Power On newsletter, Gurman reiterated the same point he made last fall (and previously), that the AirPods Max simply aren’t enough of a priority for Apple to put any real money in them.
That’s not to say they don’t sell relatively well, which is why Apple keeps them around. However, it seems they’ve turned into more of a fashion accessory than anything else. “If you’ve ever been to an upscale gym in Los Angeles or New York, you can see these $550 headphones have a market,” Gurman said in November, “even with the high price and outdated technology.”
When asked why Apple hasn’t released new AirPods Max, he went even further, suggesting that the only reason the USB-C AirPods Max exist is to satisfy the European Union’s requirements that all rechargeable devices adopt the common charging standard. It would have been forced to stop selling the Lightning-equipped headphones in EU countries on December 28, 2024, just as it was with the iPhone SE and iPhone 14.
Had that requirement not been in place, Apple would likely still be selling the 2020 version of the AirPods Max. After all, as an iFixit teardown showed us last year, the USB-C port is literally the only thing that’s changed in the new AirPods Max (unless you count some additional glue on the inside). It’s also apparent that Apple rushed these changes out to comply with the deadline, since the USB-C AirPods Max lacked wired listening, a feature that was standard on the original Lightning version. That wasn’t a case of Apple deciding to omit it, but rather a clear indication that it needed more time to get it ready; it showed up in a March 2025 firmware update, long after the EU’s USB-C deadline.
Gurman goes on to restate what he’s basically been saying for the past year or so: that the AirPods Max are a big enough seller to keep around, but don’t generate enough revenue to invest in.
The reality is that the headphones are in an odd spot commercially. They’re too popular for Apple to stop selling them, and they’re not popular enough for the company to invest a ton of time and money into creating a new version.
Mark Gurman
“It makes more sense for the company’s audio team to focus on cranking out new in-ear AirPods annually,” Gurman says, than it does to put any effort into updating the AirPods Max. While that doesn’t mean they’ll never get another update, the fact that the premium over-ear cans have remained essentially unchanged for nearly half a decade suggests they’ll continue to take a back seat to everything else Apple is working on. Apple is seemingly content to hand over technologies like Personalized Spatial Audio to its Beats division and leave the AirPods Max to remain a high-end fashion accessory for those who prioritize style over technology.
[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]
