Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “AirPods Max Unboxing & Impressions: $550?!”.
All right what’s up mkbhd here, so we got a little surprise little quiet, but not so quiet addition to apple’s holiday season stuff, a little one more thing. On top of there, one more thing so they’ve added to their headphone lineup and there’s a new pair of over ear wireless noise, cancelling apple, headphones and they’re called air pods max and they cost 550 dollars, and i got them right here now. I didn’t really know what to make of the name right off the bat. I don’t think i would have named them airpods personally, but hey. If you look at the rest of apple’s lineup, i guess all of their audio products have pod in them. There’S ear pods air pods, home pods, so fine either way. This is the box and it’s a pretty big box for a pair of headphones.
But you can see we have this minty green color here today to get into when you pop that top get into the top of the box. First thing you see is the headphones inside already inside the smart case, because they don’t fold they don’t pack down at all. This is how you travel with them. This is how they ship, in this case, with the bands as a handle, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
I’M just gon na take them out of the case for the first time and the metal of the headphones is actually legit cold to the touch which is pretty sweet, not gon na lie. I can get the paper off of the smart case, so we can admire that too, in all of its uh glory. Anyway, not much else in the box. You get a little bit of paperwork, no apple stickers, and there is one cable, but not the typical cable that comes with headphones. No, this is a usb type-c to lightning cable.
There is no brick, and this is purely for charging and there’s no audio cable included. That’Ll be another 35 bucks from apple.com, but yeah there you have the headphones, pretty unique uh. They look like those huge planar magnetic headphones from back in the day, but like a modernized version of that design, i guess it’s kind of classic. This green here probably isn’t the best looking color, if i’m being real, but that’s it, we can get it back into the smart case, slap that magnet shut and we’re off to the races. So it turns out.
There is a lot of really interesting stuff with this particular pair of headphones. I mean you guys have seen headphones before i’ve reviewed them, but there’s a lot. That’S different! A lot! That’S unique about these that you don’t really see very often, and so, while this isn’t my review, uh that’ll be coming up soon and definitely make sure you subscribe to be among the first to see that if you haven’t already uh, this is just gon na. Be my first impressions and the top five things you should know about these new airpods so number one.
The materials like i said when i took it out the box. The metal was cold to the touch, so these have a stainless steel, flexible frame and the ear cups i was touching are aluminum. There’S these shiny, telescoping arms and ball head joints on the ear cups that let them move around a little over 90 degrees.
Overall, there is no doubt these are built very well, there’s no creaks, no gaps anywhere, i mean even the little slide to expand. The headphones is really satisfying because there’s a lot of resistance, and i think i actually like this more than the typical plastic clicks to expand. But really the materials aren’t actually as important as the overall comfort and these are going to sit on top of the head.
Pretty nice that mesh band at the top is basically designed to distribute the weight as evenly as possible across your head and be kind of breathable, and it is really soft, which is awesome but we’ll see about durability, long term. I think it’s probably worth it, though, because with all this metal they are heavy headphones. They come in at a hefty 386 grams compared to the much lighter 250 grams of my sony xm4s but yeah i mean as far as just high-grade headphones go aside from this one’s particular lack of sweat or water resistance. It just doesn’t get much better built than this. That’S just facts by the way: the color options same as the ipad air, so black silver light, blue, pink and this sort of minty green, all right number, two, the ear cups magnetic, so they just pop off pretty easily. They do stay on really well in their sort of groove, when you’re wearing them and obviously most of the time they don’t just flop off. But when you really do pull them to take them off, they come off and that’s actually really smart, because most people should replace the ear cups on their headphones every once in a while, the metal part the outside, that’s designed to last a long time, but the Inside, especially with softer materials and leathers, you see that a lot people sort of outgrow the ear pad and then just buy new headphones. So this is a good idea. Now apple is very happy to sell you some new ear pads for sixty a set but uh.
I guess a nice bonus at least is that you can actually mix and match colors. If you want to would have been nice if you could customize your cushion color straight from the order. Page and mac rumors even put together a little visual aid.
So you can see what the different color combos look like, but that’s just the most apple thing, you’ve ever heard. Isn’T it buying 550 headphones and having to spend an extra 70 dollars to change part of the color? But number three is the controls. So there are no touch controls anywhere on the sides of either of the earcups, as there are with a lot of other wireless headphones.
Instead, they borrow the digital crown from the apple watch, plus there’s an extra noise cancellation button just to go on or off with transparency or noise cancellation. I might have preferred to see these buttons at the bottom of the ear cups for better reachability, but overall, this is probably honestly better than a lot of the finicky touch controls. I like, when there’s a physical control like on microsoft’s headphones having that big dial spinning that was sweet too.
So here on the apple headphones, you can spin that digital crown for volume you can tap it in to answer calls or double tap, to go forward, triple tap, to go back, etc and also in ios 14.3, when you update, there’s uh controls and support built in That let you reverse the scrolling direction for the crown in case. You end up getting it backwards, then number four, the case so uh. Let’S just get the jokes out of the way right off the top. Shall we, it looks like a purse that doesn’t really hold much and it looks like a bra like no way around it, but for real.
This is a super strange case to me, so they call it the smart case. It comes with the headphones and the headphones literally just slot in here and close with a magnet, and my very first impression is: there is no redeeming quality about this case at all. The headphones, don’t actually fold down or get more compact to travel with the most durable part of the headphone is covered, and the softest least durable part is your carrying strap it’s the most exposed part, and then it isn’t even fully protect all of it. There’S like slots in here, i understand you can charge here if you want to plug them in via lightning. But what is all this? What this this case is weird and then also something to note. There is no on off button with these headphones, so instead you put them in this case and when the magnet shuts it detects that they’re in the case and they go okay, we don’t need to be on anymore.
It goes into this ultra low power state to save battery and that’s cool, that’s really smart, and that means you don’t have to remember to turn them off every time and as soon as you take them out the case they wake up and it’s like you never Turn them off easy, but now that means you have to use this case to turn the headphones off. And if you don’t use this case, they will just sit around draining battery for about two hours before they go into auto low power mode, not sure if other cases can be made that also use magnets to trigger this low power mode. That remains to be seen, but then number five. Last but not least, is the smart features. So this is the part: that’s going to require the most additional testing for me, because, basically, aside from sound quality, which first impression is very good and noise cancellation is right about on par with airpods pro, basically they’re, incredibly good with white noise.
But there’s a lot more testing for this sort of thing for the full review and there’s a lot of smart features too. There’S the dual h1 chips doing a lot of computing as you listen to music one in each ear. There’S nine microphones this time for noise, cancellation and transparency, mode and they’re.
Of course, apple headphones made to be used with iphones and apple products. So when you use it with an iphone, you get features like audio sharing, siri you’re. Reading your text, messages and the instant pairing and all that fun stuff but, like i said, i’m going to get super into this and the audio quality and in-depth thoughts on all this stuff in the full review. This is just the impression and there’s a lot of testing to be done, but at the end of the day you know what’s the hardest part for me about these is i i don’t really know what exactly to compare them to like.
Of course, i plan on putting them through the ringer and and very thoroughly testing them, because at 550 dollars they deserve that and you deserve that. But i guess i want to hear from you in the comments section what you specifically want to know about these headphones. What do you care about with headphones, like this, like my natural instinct, as you probably saw on twitter, was to compare them to my precious? My i mean a lot of people’s favorite wireless headphones ever, which is the sony’s and the xm4s they’re. Basically, the top of the line industry, favorite noise, canceling wireless headphones and, as you know, those headphones have the absolute best noise cancellation, i’ve ever heard, they’re lightweight and comfortable. They have a longer 30 hour battery life, they actually fold for travel.
They come with a real protective case. They come with an audio cable and they’re 200 less at their absolute maximum of 350 bucks, but you can already find them for less than that. So by that logic, at least on paper, sony’s headphones absolutely beat apple’s headphones in pretty much every metric right, but i feel, like a lot of people, aren’t going to use that as a comparison. Interestingly enough, maybe maybe it’s like the pro display xdr, where you have to compare it to the super ultra high end reference grade stuff to appreciate it. So if i’m, comparing it to my two thousand, four hundred dollar sennheiser headphones that i’ve edited with.
Maybe this is a lighter weight. Wireless, smaller, cheaper version of that that works with more devices. Maybe that’s the comparison or maybe it is somewhere in the middle with, like you know, the sennheiser hd 650 or even the drop thx panda headphones somewhere in that high-end audio file range, except now it’s just apple’s entry into that space, it’s hard to say, but at The end of the day, if you’re here from my take for my first impression, i have listened to these for a couple hours now and they sound really good, but do they sound 550 good? I mean you’re starting to approach the limits of wireless audio, so tbd um. They are built extremely well, but does that alone make them worth 550 dollars, not really um? They, of course, have all apple smart features, and i don’t think that by itself is going to make you buy headphones that expensive, but maybe all of this stuff combined, maybe just maybe all that put together well, there’s an audience for it because they’re sold out already, But either way, i hope to find that out all in the full review.
This has just been my first look. First impressions of airpods max a weird name: i’m not going to get used to saying that for a while. But again, let me know what you think what you want to know about these headphones thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace. .