One More One More Thing - Apple Unveils AirPods Max

[NotTheFirstDaniel]

1 minute ago, DrMacintosh said:

Also, nothing indicates Apple is going portless soon. 

Many leakers have been pointing to a model of iPhone 13 without a lightning port.

 

Plus have you not seen MagSafe? As much as it is a terrible implementation of magnetic wireless charging, it looks like it will be the way forward for Apple in terms of connectivity. All Apple needs to do is make a cheap plastic MagSafe charger and put it in the box (This would be the most expensive iPhone anyways) and they can get rid of the lightning port.

[Bombastinator]

4 minutes ago, NotTheFirstDaniel said:

Many leakers have been pointing to a model of iPhone 13 without a lightning port.

 

Plus have you not seen MagSafe? As much as it is a terrible implementation of magnetic wireless charging, it looks like it will be the way forward for Apple in terms of connectivity. All Apple needs to do is make a cheap plastic MagSafe charger and put it in the box (This would be the most expensive iPhone anyways) and they can get rid of the lightning port.

The leaker thing has been happening for a long time now.  Years. The more interesting one is the EU law being considered about port standardization.   If it is passed AND Apple didn’t like their port choices I could see them going portless.  They are introducing technology which would make it possible to do so.  I suspect the timing of the law will have a lot to do with that decision. If they go too early they could be caught by a last minute law change.

[DrMacintosh]

13 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

The more interesting one is the EU law being considered about port standardization.

Nah. That won’t affect it at all. Apple can get around it by including whatever port the EU mandates on the other end of the cable. I personally hope that law fails. The EU has no place dictating the advancement of technology. 

[Lord Vile]

 

3 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

Nah. That won’t affect it at all. Apple can get around it by including whatever port the EU mandates on the other end of the cable. I personally hope that law fails. The EU has no place dictating the advancement of technology. 

It's a nice idea but would have been useful before it became pretty much USBC or Lightning. saying that if a better port comes along but the EU says it must have USBC for example that stops people using the new design.

 

Also they're gonna get around it by not having a port.

[D13H4RD]

$549

 

OUCH. 

 

While I have no doubt that these will sound pretty good (the Airpods Pro were actually pretty good in that regard) that price is just gut-wrenching for a pair of headphones, especially ones that have batteries which will eventually go bad. 

 

Not to mention the over-ear NC wireless headphones segment looks to be pretty darn competitive. 

[startrek03]

8 hours ago, Lord Vile said:

How do you know they won't be so much better? From first looks they seem to be a lot better but I'll wait until more detailed reviews come or I get to listen to them. Also you can run them wired with a lightning to 3.5mm jack so you could run them through an external DAC and AMP. 

Knowing a little bit about headphones and also Apple, I don't expect them to be this revolutionary. For one there's a point of diminishing return, where you pay tons of extra money to get just a slight improvement. For another, Apple didn't publish any real specs. They just say that they are revolutionary. Sounds a lot like marketing bs to me. Why not back it up with stats like frequency response etc.?

With the 3.5mm cable it is unclear wheather it is a direct passthrough or if an adc is integrated into the cable. The latter would mean, that there would be a DAC, ADC and another DAC wired in series, which, admittedly, doesn't sound like a good solution to me.

 

Edit: And I genuinly don't think, that the average consumer would want to pay 200 additional bucks to get just a slightly better audio experience. I think, that all of this is marketing shenanigans, even if the product is actually good.

[Lord Vile]

1 hour ago, startrek03 said:

Knowing a little bit about headphones and also Apple, I don't expect them to be this revolutionary. For one there's a point of diminishing return, where you pay tons of extra money to get just a slight improvement. For another, Apple didn't publish any real specs. They just say that they are revolutionary. Sounds a lot like marketing bs to me. Why not back it up with stats like frequency response etc.?

With the 3.5mm cable it is unclear wheather it is a direct passthrough or if an adc is integrated into the cable. The latter would mean, that there would be a DAC, ADC and another DAC wired in series, which, admittedly, doesn't sound like a good solution to me.

 

Edit: And I genuinly don't think, that the average consumer would want to pay 200 additional bucks to get just a slightly better audio experience. I think, that all of this is marketing shenanigans, even if the product is actually good.

Because frequency response is a dumb characteristic to quote? The human ear can only get to a certain point and that diminishes with age.

 

We will have to see

[saltycaramel]

1 hour ago, startrek03 said:

Knowing a little bit about headphones and also Apple, I don't expect them to be this revolutionary. For one there's a point of diminishing return, where you pay tons of extra money to get just a slight improvement. For another, Apple didn't publish any real specs. They just say that they are revolutionary. Sounds a lot like marketing bs to me. Why not back it up with stats like frequency response etc.?

 

 

I think you’re not taking into account computational audio tho.

Just like in the last few years computational photography on smartphones is allowing results that go far beyond the mere hw specs of the physical sensor.

 

Regular headphones are “feature headphones”.

These are smart headphones.

 

I’m curious about what the new batch of Airpods based on the “H2” (or whatever the successor to the H1 will be called) chip will bring to the table in that regard.

- Airpods 3 in spring 2021

- Airpods Pro 2 in fall 2021

- Airpods Max 2 in fall 2022

[Video Beagle]

18 hours ago, NotTheFirstDaniel said:

 

No one expected Apple to release headphones in December,

Well, other than those of us who'd heard about a "Xmas surprise" and figured it was the AirPods Studio or Airpods 3 that had been rumored since those fit a press release launch rather than an event

[Bombastinator]

7 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

Nah. That won’t affect it at all. Apple can get around it by including whatever port the EU mandates on the other end of the cable. I personally hope that law fails. The EU has no place dictating the advancement of technology. 

Sure.  It merely produces an option.  There are 3 options: stay FireWire, go USB4, go portless. I would prefer USB4, I think most people would prefer USB4.

Edited December 11, 2020 by Bombastinator

[startrek03]

5 hours ago, Lord Vile said:

Because frequency response is a dumb characteristic to quote? The human ear can only get to a certain point and that diminishes with age.

 

We will have to see

Yes, but they on their technical specifications Apple doesn't mention any of the industry standard technical specifications... The only thing we know because of marketing material, is that they have 40mm neodymium drivers. It's the same as with M1. They don't tell you really anything about the product itself.

5 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

 

I think you’re not taking into account computational audio tho.

Just like in the last few years computational photography on smartphones is allowing results that go far beyond the mere hw specs of the physical sensor.

 

Regular headphones are “feature headphones”.

These are smart headphones.

 

I’m curious about what the new batch of Airpods based on the “H2” (or whatever the successor to the H1 will be called) chip will bring to the table in that regard.

- Airpods 3 in spring 2021

- Airpods Pro 2 in fall 2021

- Airpods Max 2 in fall 2022

There is actually a slight difference with headphones and cameras, It think. While a camera converts something from the real world to data (photons to .png), headphones do the exact opposite, taking some sort of data and converting it to something from the real world (.wav to pressure waves). Therefore the driver is the crucial part. The sound, that comes out of it, can't be modified by AI anymore. On a file however, an AI can do whatever it wants.

[Lord Vile]

4 hours ago, startrek03 said:

Yes, but they on their technical specifications Apple doesn't mention any of the industry standard technical specifications... The only thing we know because of marketing material, is that they have 40mm neodymium drivers. It's the same as with M1. They don't tell you really anything about the product itself.

But why would they include what are essentially worthless specs like frequency response? Higher end headphones are more about preference vs specs anyway. 
 

They literally showed graphs with the M1

[startrek03]

55 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

But why would they include what are essentially worthless specs like frequency response? Higher end headphones are more about preference vs specs anyway. 
 

They literally showed graphs with the M1

*unlabeled graphs... They could've easily shown, that the AirPods have a flat sound signature by displaying the according graph, if nominal level, impedance, frequency response etc. aren't enough... But they didn't. And that shows, where their priorities are, I guess.

[Bombastinator]

2 hours ago, startrek03 said:

*unlabeled graphs... They could've easily shown, that the AirPods have a flat sound signature by displaying the according graph, if nominal level, impedance, frequency response etc. aren't enough... But they didn't. And that shows, where their priorities are, I guess.

To me it shows that stuff like that gets filtered through the marketing department and as such is not trustworthy.  The product might still be good, but there’s no way to tell one way or the other because of the marketing blather.

[Ankh Tech]

On 12/11/2020 at 1:38 AM, LAwLz said:

Yep. Seems like people have already forgotten about the bird flu, swine flu, ebola, SARS, measles, dengue fever, the regular influenza, yellow fever, the zika virus, MERS...

and H1N1

[Lord Vile]

15 hours ago, startrek03 said:

*unlabeled graphs...

anyone with 2 brain cells can get information from those graphs 

15 hours ago, startrek03 said:

 

They could've easily shown, that the AirPods have a flat sound signature by displaying the according graph, if nominal level, impedance, frequency response etc. aren't enough... But they didn't. And that shows, where their priorities are, I guess.

Again why would they? What would be the point? Headphones are for the most part subjective beyond a certain point plus they’re Bluetooth so you’re not getting the best reproduction regardless  

[startrek03]

3 hours ago, Lord Vile said:

anyone with 2 brain cells can get information from those graphs 

Again why would they? What would be the point? Headphones are for the most part subjective beyond a certain point plus they’re Bluetooth so you’re not getting the best reproduction regardless  

Apart from the results themselves the testing methodology is a really important part of validating your test. Giving "performance" as a metric is superficial and could litteraly mean anything and doesn't tell anything about the testing methodology.

And why should Apple brag with their "revolutionary" drivers, if they couldn't back it up with significant data. It's not like they wouldn't tell us it's revolutionary or whatever.

That's just like saying the earth is flat because I can't see the curvature...

[Lord Vile]

5 minutes ago, startrek03 said:

Apart from the results themselves the testing methodology is a really important part of validating your test. Giving "performance" as a metric is superficial and could litteraly mean anything and doesn't tell anything about the testing methodology.

Which means literally every graph shown in most things are invalid because the exactly methodology isn’t given. 

5 minutes ago, startrek03 said:

And why should Apple brag with their "revolutionary" drivers, if they couldn't back it up with significant data. It's not like they wouldn't tell us it's revolutionary or whatever.

That's just like saying the earth is flat because I can't see the curvature...

Because headphones are subjective, they’re down to preference. For the purpose Apple want to use they might be revolutionary. You’ll have to test them to find out, some people say some £800 headphones are amazing, I might not like them but like a £200 more or a £1000 set more. People get too tied down in “specs” when past a certain point they’re not worth much. 

[startrek03]

37 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

Because headphones are subjective, they’re down to preference. For the purpose Apple want to use they might be revolutionary. You’ll have to test them to find out, some people say some £800 headphones are amazing, I might not like them but like a £200 more or a £1000 set more. People get too tied down in “specs” when past a certain point they’re not worth much.

Well, in this case I wouldn't want companies to market their products as revolutionary advancements in technology...

[Intergalacticbits]

I'm waiting to see Linus's video.

I saw iJustine's video on these and they did look nice.

Plus all that directional audio stuff and other features seemed like they would be good too.

A little too smooth for my taste design wise but they still looked super nice.

Sadly like most Apple products except the iPad they are priced way above anything I could ever purchase.

I mean I'd have to slap myself several times hard, maybe even with a bottle.  

If I ever spent $500.00 plus US on a pair of headphones.

 

Makes me wish I was crazy rich so I could spend money obscenely on stuff lol.

 

[saltycaramel]

From some reviews I gather these headphones don’t make ears sweaty/warm thanks to mesh fabric. 

 

These may be some of the few over-ear headphones for people who usually don’t like over-ear headphones because of “hot ears”.

 

They’re heavy tho. No headbanging. I feel their greatest competition are the Airpods Pro and their freedom/lightness (plus all the same smart feature set). Even battery life, during sales you may be able to score THREE pair of Airpods Pro at the price of one Airpods Max. That’s infinite battery life. 

[Lord Vile]

1 hour ago, startrek03 said:

Well, in this case I wouldn't want companies to market their products as revolutionary advancements in technology...

They might be you’ll have to test them to find out 

[Commodus]

3 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

From some reviews I gather these headphones don’t make ears sweaty/warm thanks to mesh fabric. 

 

These may be some of the few over-ear headphones for people who usually don’t like over-ear headphones because of “hot ears”.

 

They’re heavy tho. No headbanging. I feel their greatest competition are the Airpods Pro and their freedom/lightness (plus all the same smart feature set). Even battery life, during sales you may be able to score THREE pair of Airpods Pro at the price of one Airpods Max. That’s infinite battery life. 

There aren't any reviews as of yet — it's too early for that!

 

With that said, it sounds like Apple might do well simply by solving a lot of the little problems that crop up with other over-ears, like sweat, overall comfort and of course setup and pairing. I'm still not sure they're worth $549, but there's an easier case to make for that pricing if you can wear them for several hours at a time without discomfort.

[saltycaramel]

About the price, at 550$ they are priced between the Beoplay H9 (500$) and the Beoplay H95 (800$), two ANC headphones with premium design and premium materials...plus the AP Max have the smart brains of the H1...can’t honestly say they feel wrong in that price tier compared to those B&O offerings..

 

The Sony and Bose alternatives look more comparable to Beats in terms of design and materials...those would have been a fair price comparison if Apple launched a new Beats Studio Wireless model with the same features as the AP Max (spatial audio, etc.)...

[Video Beagle]

Curiously Linus and Luke on WAN didn't even blink at the price. Linus raged a bit about the claim of "the best listening experience ever"...seems to take it as a literal claim rather than marketing hyperbole.....boy, is he gonna be shocked to learn his "World's Greatest Dad" mug might not be totally accurate.