If Apple wanted To hide the fact that it makes its most expensive headphones look like the least technically capable in its line, it didn’t do a very good job.
It all started out promisingly. At Apple’s September Glowtime event, CEO Tim Cook primed VP of hardware engineering Kate Bergeron for the big unveiling by claiming that the company’s much-loved AirPods family had “significant updates across the line.” And with four years under their belts since their debut, it seemed like the supposedly flagship AirPods Max had Being at the top of the billing.
Instead, that honor was given to the AirPods 4, Apple’s most affordable AirPods at $129, and now with the option of noise cancellation for an additional $50. Among other new features, Bergeron announced that they will now come with the “power of the H2 chip,” Apple’s most advanced headphone chip, first introduced in the AirPods Pro 2 in 2022.
That chip also offers some major improvements. Apple said at the time that the H2 chip in the AirPods Pro 2 cancels “twice as much noise” compared to the original Pro. Now, in the AirPods 4, Apple writes in its press release that the H2 offers a “major improvement in sound quality” and that it unlocks a host of “smart features that change how users answer calls, interact with Siri, and more.”
Many of these features are thanks to the H2 chip’s advanced machine learning capabilities, and Bergeron mentioned a few of them in his enthusiastic unveiling of the AirPods 4. Features like Siri Interactions, which lets you respond to Siri by nodding or shaking your head; “the magic of Adaptive Audio,” Bergeron said, which combines noise cancellation and transparency modes to better adapt to your surroundings; and also Conversation Awareness, which turns down the audio when it hears you talking to someone, then turns it back up afterward.
And that’s not all. There’s also personalized audio, shorter Siri calls, and voice isolation for clearer calls.
Better sound, better active noise cancellation (ANC), and better features? It sounds like a very tempting package, to be sure. But when it came time to launch the AirPods Max with the H1, Apple quickly swept all that good stuff under the rug, offering us a handful of new colors and a USB-C connection in the hopes that we’d forget about everything that came before.
Photo: Courtesy of Apple
