Apple AirPods Max | $450 | Amazon
As an addition to the Apple ecosystem, people who’ve tried the AirPods Max seem to love a lot about them, but there is one massive issue: that price. One can easily buy headphones with similar headphone performance to the AirPods Max for more than $200 less. One could argue that the price is justified, since they’re designed to work with all of your iOS and macOS devices, and they have special features you simply won’t find in any other over-ear headphone, such as automatic pairing and switching between devices, Siri activation, and features like head tracking and spatial audio, which delivers an all-around-you sound stage that can stay put when you’re using them to watch a movie at home. They also boast active noise canceling, and here they’ve been praised in most reviews. It’s hard to really argue that these features make the premium worth it, as you’d really have to value them to think it is, but at least this discount, which knocks $99 off most of the color variants (for some reason, the silver one is an extra dollar off), takes away some of the sting.
Beyond the price, additional caveats seem to be that these are fancy headphones for fancy people, and as such not really intended to be worn during exercise, as they sit a little heavy on the head and their mesh headband gets reportedly wobbly when you move around. It’s also not possible to use these wired out of the box, and you’ll have to purchase a separate dongle from Apple, which is a lame, but not uncharacteristic, move from the company. Still, people do seem to love them, AirPods on their own are a wonderful thing to have, if you actively use Siri. If you’ve been waiting for a decent deal, this is about as low as these headphones ever get, outside of big holiday sales events, (although they appear to have been hanging out at this price for some time now.)
For anyone more interested in the wireless earbuds AirPods, the AirPods Pro, AirPods 3rd Generation, and AirPods 2nd Generation are also on sale, at $197, $170, and $119, respectively.