Apple’s new AirPods Max 2 deliver even better Active Noise Cancellation (ANC), elevated sound quality, and intelligent features to its iconic over-ear design. Powered by H2, features like Adaptive Audio, Conversation Awareness, Voice Isolation, and Live Translation come to AirPods Max for the first time. Plus, AirPods Max 2 could get even better with future software updates.
TechRadar sat down with Apple VP of Platform Architecture Tim Millet and Director of Audio Product Marketing Eric Treski to unpack how AirPods Max 2 is finally catching up to its own ambitions.
“When we build chips at Apple, it’s always about the product. We don’t sell chips out in the open market, and this gives our team really the luxury of knowing exactly what they’re building for,” says Millet.
That’s the philosophy that defines AirPods Max 2 — and it’s what makes the H2 upgrade more than a spec bump. Rather than dropping in an off-the-shelf component, Apple created a purpose-built audio streaming processor co-designed from the ground up with its acoustics and firmware teams. The goal, as Millet puts it, is to make sure they’re “only limited by the physics.”
The processing capability that unlocks is significant. Millet relays that his team’s view is that “some of the processing we do here is exceeding the kind of compute that you get in a general sense in the Mac — but because we’ve made it so specific for audio, it’s actually deliverable in these tiny form factors.”
“We’ve got giga-operations of floating point implemented in the most energy-efficient possible way,” he adds. And crucially, all of it feeds into a single constraint that Millet returns to repeatedly: “It’s all about latency. It’s hard to trick the human mind when it comes to audio.”
“H2 is this platform that continues to demonstrate that it has continued headroom,” he says. What AirPods Max 2 ships with today may not be the ceiling of what it eventually does — and that’s been a hallmark of AirPods broadly. AirPods Pro have repeatedly expanded their capabilities over time, from Adaptive Audio to the Hearing Health suite to Live Translation.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s AirPods Max 2 in Midnight are currently $20 off at Amazon while the deal lasts. Buy one of the very best over-the-ear headphones available today and they’re very likely to get even better, for free, over time via software updates!
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[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
