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Apple Announces AirPods Max Over-Ear Headphones With Noise Cancellation, Priced at $549
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Apple's own economists probably concluded that the US economy is doing absolutely great! (don't know about Canada, my 2nd favourite country in the Americas)
While everyone is arguing how overpriced these are, delivery times are slipping fast into January as they are flooded with orders.
In France this thing is the same price as the brand new iPad air, more or less.
Probably not the only expensive headphone in France at that price point.
Yes, that is correct. So, these will operate over USB when connected to, say, a MacBook? That's a plus if the Lightning port isn't just for charging, even if it's still just an AAC experience over a cable. I was hoping the HomePod mini could act that way as well. (I just received a mini, I should test if a MacBook Pro can drive it when wired.)
I mean, there are tons of headphones in the $500-600 range too (and significantly up). They're not aiming these to compete with products half the price, they're aiming to compete with products in the same and higher price ranges. Like you I'm personally not the target market for that, not going to spend that much, but the market's definitely there.
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Cheers to 2021 and the hope that Apple will return to its roots in leadership and innovation and abandon this 9-years-long practice of reinventing the wheel. This right here, certainty over uncertainty, is why we have $550 headphones instead of flying cars.
If they sound like high-end phones then even at $549, the Apple AirPods Max is a bargain.
Top audiophile headphones from Focal, Meze, Audeze, Abyss, Sennheiser, and others cost thousands of dollars.
Naturally, the volume of sales of those are in the ten of thousands and Apple aims to sell millions of their products.
This AirPods Max at 13.6 ounces is a lot heavier than the popular ANC from Sony, the WH-1000XM4 at 8.95 ounces.
As such, not many will be walking around with this heavy rig all day. In the audiophile category, AirPods Max is light with many near a pound or more.
Top audiophile headphones from Focal, Meze, Audeze, Abyss, Sennheiser, and others cost thousands of dollars.
Naturally, the volume of sales of those are in the ten of thousands and Apple aims to sell millions of their products.
This AirPods Max at 13.6 ounces is a lot heavier than the popular ANC from Sony, the WH-1000XM4 at 8.95 ounces.
As such, not many will be walking around with this heavy rig all day. In the audiophile category, AirPods Max is light with many near a pound or more.
Have you never seen high-end headphones? Sony makes $13,000 pairs.
Maybe not every product is aimed at the same audience.
These are ultra-premium headphones priced well below the competition.
If Apple Music offered a lossless codec (ALAC) with these headphones over bluetooth 5.0 then it would be worth the money for me. From Apples perspective though, they have no use for lossless/high bitrate connectivity unless they are also supplying the content in that format. So, there's no sense grousing over them not supporting someone else's format until it's native in their Apple Music subscription based service. It's got to happen on the content side as well. They aren't going to create a high bitrate transfer protocol just so we can subscribe to Tidal HD (or some other HD service) and lose AppleMusic subscribers over it.
hopefully the super good apple sound engineers can fix Apple Music's terrible EQ in macOS which never seems to be working when on bluetooth.
Sennheiser's marketing has been successful apparently. Reality is just a little bit more complicated than that.
$779 to be exact...and you can tack on an extra $79 for AC.
That works out to a 1.41x Forex over the USD. Well guess what Apple...the current exchange is 1.28...best its been in a long while. What a ripoff.