Almost out of nowhere, Apple announced it’s much rumoured Apple AirPods Max this week. While we haven’t had the opportunity to review them yet, here is our “first glance” look at the AirPods Max.

So these new headphones or “AirPods” from Apple are over-the-ear headphones, which play audio wirelessly and cost somewhere in the range of $549USD. The price for a “premium” headset like this, firmly cements Apple near the top end of the spectrum.

httpss://www.youtube.com/embed/FXI_-OesT3A

Given the way Apple tends to price their products, we’ll leave it to you to decide if it makes sense to grab a pair of these. On price alone, we don’t recommend these as they are $200USD above what an excellent pair of Bose QC35’s will run you.

Now if you are buying these on launch day, it’s likely that you’re buying them off what we call “the Apple promise.” This promise if you buy them: you’re going to wear them everywhere to let everyone know you’ve got a pair, you’ll let everyone know how much you paid for them, and you’ll not complain for one second if you find something wrong with them. What we’re trying to say is with the overt over-branding of the headphones, you’re likely buying these as a status symbol rather than something you’re getting genuine value for.

Are they worth it?

Something that gave us pause when discussing this product, is the fact that Apple who purports to be “visionaries of consumer products” actually doesn’t seem to have done anything remarkable or revolutionary. Apple at first glance appears to have taken your average pair of reasonably well-designed headphones and slapped an Apple logo on it. This is uninspired and seems like you should hold off until our full review.

Of the few things we liked from their announcement, Apple appears to have made these headphones loaded with microphones and sensors to help with noise isolation/noise cancelling. We will be looking forward to testing these out shortly and see if they improve noise isolation/cancelling or if they improve audio quality at all.

Given our first impressions, we’re hoping to see that we’ve misjudged this product and can’t wait to see if Apple has something up its sleeve.

Our entire review should follow in a couple of weeks. Check back to see more.

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