If Apple wants to bury the fact that it leaves its most expensive headphones as the least technically capable in its line up, it doesn’t do a very good job.
It all started with hope. At its September Glowtime event, Tim Cook teed up VP of hardware engineering Kate Bergeron for the big reveal by saying that Apple’s AirPods family has “significant updates across the entire line up.” And with four years under their belt since their debut, this looks like the supposed flagship AirPods Max had to be top of the charge.
Instead, that honor goes to the AirPods 4—Apple’s cheapest AirPods at $129, and now with the option of noise cancellation for an additional $50. Among other additions, Bergeron announced that they are coming with “the power of the H2 chip,” the most advanced headphone chip from Apple, first introduced in the AirPods Pro 2 in 2022.
That chip also delivers some significant upgrades. Apple said at the time that the H2 chip in the AirPods Pro 2 canceled “twice as much noise” as the original Pro. Now, with AirPods 4, Apple writes in its press release that the H2 delivers “major improvements in sound quality,” and it unlocks a whole host of “intelligent features that change the way users make calls, interacting with Siri, and more.”
Many of these features are down to the H2 chip’s advanced machine-learning capabilities, and Bergeron touched on some of them in his enthusiastic introduction of the AirPods 4. Features like Siri Interactions, which allow when you respond to Siri by nodding or shaking your head; “the magic of Adaptive Audio,” says Bergeron, combining noise cancellation and transparency modes that best suit your environment; and also Conversation Awareness, which lowers your audio when it hears someone talking to you, then raises it again afterwards.
That’s not all. There’s also Personalized Audio, shorter “Siri” summoning and Voice Isolation for clearer calls.
Better sound, better ANC, better features? It seems like a very tempting package. But when it comes to the H1-packing AirPods Max, Apple has been quick to sweep all that good stuff under the carpet, throwing some new colors and a USB-C connection our way in hopes we’ll forget about it all what happened then. .
Image: Courtesy of Apple
