AirPods Max Review: $549, 20 Hours, and Four Figures Apple Does Not Publish

Not one figure. Apple's specification page for AirPods Max runs to nine headings and uses the word driver exactly once, in the phrase "Apple-designed dynamic driver". No diameter follows it. No frequency range, no impedance, no sensitivity, no distortion figure, and no decibel number anywhere in the cancelling section.

B&H Photo Video's listing for the same headphones runs to 36 specification rows and repeats the silence: Driver Type reads Dynamic, Number of Drivers reads 1 per Earpiece. But the four rows a reader would compare against anything else are absent. Two independent sheets, the same four holes.

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What it is: 386 grams of aluminium and steel over knit mesh

An over-ear closed-back pair with one dynamic driver per cup and no analogue input. The frame is stainless steel, the cups are anodised aluminium, the canopy is knit mesh and the cushions are memory foam under a mesh textile. Apple's current model is AirPods Max 2 at $549, in Midnight, Starlight, Blue, Purple and Orange, while B&H still lists the previous USB-C model at $449. That's the card this collection holds.

Inside each cup sit an H2 chip, an accelerometer and three sensors handling optical, position and case-detect duties, and the left cup adds a gyroscope. Nine microphones sit across the pair: six outward-facing to hear the room, two inward-facing to hear what the driver is doing, and three for voice, two of which do double duty. Charging is USB-C, wireless is Bluetooth 5.3, and lossless audio arrives only down the cable.

There's no folding hinge and no 3.5 mm socket. The cups rotate to lie flat and go into a case that leaves the headband outside it.

Four figures 31 of 37 cards publish, and this one publishes none

Thirty-one of the 37 over-ear models collected here state a frequency response. 30 state an impedance, 26 a driver size, 17 a sensitivity. Two state none of the four, AirPods Max and the Bose QuietComfort, and the pair sold at the higher price of the two is this one.

That is the shape of the silence, but it isn't an oversight of one page. It survives on a second, independent sheet, which is the test that matters. A dealer that omits four rows might simply be lazy, but a dealer and a manufacturer omitting the same four rows are describing a product whose maker never measured them in public.

What replaces the numbers is prose. The driver has an "extended frequency range". Its dual-neodymium ring magnet motor "minimizes total harmonic distortion across the entire audible range". Both sentences would be falsifiable with one number each, but neither carries one. A $159 monitor pair states 15 Hz to 28 kHz, 38 ohms and 45 millimetres, which isn't a claim that it sounds better. It's a claim that can be checked.

20 hours with cancelling on, below all seven that state a condition

Seven of the wireless models here publish a runtime measured with cancelling switched on: 22 hours for the Beats Studio3, 30 for the Sony WH-1000XM5, the WH-1000XM6 and the Focal Bathys, 35 for the Bang & Olufsen Beoplay HX, 38 for the H95, and 60 for the Sennheiser Momentum 4. AirPods Max states 20.

The dealer row that carries that 20 doesn't give a condition at all. Apple's own page supplies it: up to 20 hours of listening or movie watching with Active Noise Cancellation and Spatial Audio enabled. So the figure is honest and the comparison is fair, and it puts these headphones last in a field of eight, two hours below the cheapest pair in it, a $139.95 Beats.

And runtime is where the weight shows up twice. At 385.6 grams on the dealer's card, this is the eighth heaviest of the 36 over-ear models here that publish one, and 97 grams above their 289-gram median. The pair that runs 60 hours with cancelling weighs 293 grams. Neither figure is a verdict on comfort, and the canopy exists precisely to spread the mass, but a heavier pair that plays for a third as long is a specific trade rather than a vague one.

What 11 owners report

Eleven ratings. That's the whole sample behind the 4.5 average, and it's the smallest of any mainstream cancelling model in this collection. The Bose QuietComfort card carries 1,323 ratings, the Sony WH-1000XM5 403, the Beats Studio3 15. Eleven of the 31 rated over-ear cards here carry fewer, though nine of those eleven have no cancelling at all.

But the shape matters more than the average, and with eleven votes the shape is barely a shape. Eight people at five stars and three spread across two, three and four isn't a distribution that separates a good pair from a lucky one. A page with 403 owners can show that an average hides a split; and a page with eleven can't show anything of the kind, and the honest reading is that the dealer sample says nothing yet.

1.5x more cancelling, measured against 2020

Apple's headline figure for the current model is a multiplier: up to 1.5x more Active Noise Cancellation than the original AirPods Max. Here the baseline is the 2020 model, not the USB-C one from 2024, though the quantity being multiplied is never named.

Cancellation is measurable. It's attenuation in decibels at stated frequencies, and it's the number every specification sheet in the anti-noise class could carry and almost none does. A multiplier without a unit can't be compared with a rival, checked against a measurement, or even compared with Apple's own other product. The AirPods Pro 3 on the same page claim up to 4x, against a different baseline again.

Six outward-facing microphones and two inward-facing ones is a real architecture and a serious one. The 1.5x isn't a specification of it.

A dash where the water rating goes

Apple's comparison table at the foot of the AirPods Max page has a row for dust, sweat and water resistance. For AirPods Max it reads not applicable. For the AirPods Pro 3 in the next column it reads IP57.

The support pages say the same thing in words: AirPods Max and the Smart Case are not waterproof or water resistant, and the cleaning instructions run on a damp cloth and a teaspoon of detergent in a cup of water rather than anything a tap is involved in. B&H's card puts it in one row: Environmental Resistance, No.

None of that is unusual for an over-ear pair, though it's worth stating plainly anyway, because the price sits in a bracket where buyers assume otherwise and because the same maker rates its in-ear model to IP57.

$549 now, $449 for the model before it

And two prices are live at once. Apple sells AirPods Max 2 at $549 with free engraving, while B&H sells the previous USB-C model at $449. Both are AirPods Max, and the gap between them buys the H2 chip, Bluetooth 5.3, the five current colours and the 1.5x claim.

Against the collection, $549 isn't the top. The Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H95 lists at $1,250 and the Focal Bathys at $799, both with longer runtimes and both stating figures Apple doesn't. Below, the Sony WH-1000XM5 at $248 does 30 hours at 250 grams, and the Bose QuietComfort at $359 is one of the two other cards here that publish no audio figures either.

Replacement ear cushions cost $69 a set from Apple, which is 13 percent of the headphones and the reason the cushions are the part designed to come off.

Right for an Apple desk, wrong for a long flight

For a listener whose phone, laptop and tablet all come from Apple this is a coherent product: automatic switching between them, spatial audio with head tracking, lossless over USB-C, and a build in aluminium and steel that no plastic rival matches. Nothing on the spec sheet contradicts any of that, because nothing on the spec sheet says anything at all.

But for a flight the case is weaker and specific. Twenty hours with cancelling on is the shortest figure in the field, the pair is 97 grams above the median weight, there's no folding hinge, and there's no wired path without the USB-C cable. And every one of those is a stated fact rather than an impression. What the card doesn't state is the radio layer, which is where Apple's own troubleshooting for crackling points.

So the buyer who wants to compare before choosing is the one this product refuses to serve. Four figures the rest of the class publishes are missing from both sheets that describe it, and the headline number is a multiplier against a five-year-old model of itself.

Price and specifications

Sources

1. Apple's technical specifications for AirPods Max 2: the sensors and H2 chip in each ear cup, the nine microphones, the 13.6 ounce and 386.2 gram weight including cushions, Bluetooth 5.3, USB-C lossless audio, the five colours, and the absence of any driver size, impedance, sensitivity or frequency figure.
2. Apple's product page for AirPods Max 2: the up to 1.5x more Active Noise Cancellation claim against the original model, the six outward and two inward-facing microphones, the extended frequency range and total harmonic distortion wording, the 20 hour figure with cancelling and spatial audio enabled, and the comparison table where water resistance reads not applicable beside IP57 for AirPods Pro 3.
3. Apple's store listing for AirPods Max 2: the $549.00 price, the five colours and the free engraving.
4. B&H Photo Video's listing for the USB-C AirPods Max: the $449.00 price, the 4.5 rating from 11 owners and the star distribution above, the 13.6 ounce and 385.6 gram weight, the 20 Hours runtime row, Environmental Resistance recorded as No, and the 36 specification rows with no frequency response, impedance, sensitivity or driver size among them.
5. Apple's support page on cleaning AirPods Max: the statement that AirPods Max and the Smart Case are neither waterproof nor water resistant, and the damp-cloth method that follows from it.
6. Apple's support page on wearing AirPods, EarPods and Beats devices: the material list for AirPods Max, and Beats devices documented on Apple's own support pages beside them.
7. Counts across the over-ear class come from listings of 200 audio products collected the same way. How those are converted and compared.

The shop figures above date from 23 August 2026, and a price moves faster than anything else here.

What we did not do

Nobody here has worn these. The figures above are what Apple and B&H publish for the model, and the rankings come from the specifications collected here; where a number is missing, that is the finding rather than a gap in the reporting.