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
8 months ago
No plans to drop the price either. :cool:

Score: 43 Votes (Like | Disagree)
phenste Avatar
8 months ago
what a self-fulfilling prophecy…”APM sales are stagnating because they’re overpriced and out-of-date…so to combat that we’ll keep them overpriced and out-of-date”

oooooooooookay
Score: 23 Votes (Like | Disagree)
m.x Avatar
8 months ago

No plans to drop the price either. :cool:


That decision is pure Tim Cook bean counter style. Just slap an H2 chip into it and try to waterproof the insides a bit better against the condensation issues, but even that is too expensive so they just let the product rot. It's insane. Music was at the heart of Apple for so long and now they can't even be bothered to update their 4 year old most expensive headphones. If it wasn't for the USB-C in the EU I think we wouldn't have seen a "new" ( :rolleyes: ) model this year.
Score: 23 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Rradcircless Avatar
8 months ago
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: 19 Votes (Like | Disagree)
UltimateSyn Avatar
8 months ago
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: 17 Votes (Like | Disagree)
DHagan4755 Avatar
8 months ago
Disappointing. I refuse to spend so much money on headphones like this & that also come with a bra to store them.
Score: 16 Votes (Like | Disagree)