The $129 AirPods 4 have features that the $549 AirPods Max don’t

If Apple wanted to It didn’t do a very good job of disguising the fact that it was leaving its most expensive headphone as the least technically capable in its lineup.

It all started promisingly. Apple’s September Glowtime incidentCEO Tim Cook asked vice president of hardware engineering Kate Bergeron to make the big reveal, saying that the company’s much-loved AirPods family has had “significant updates made across the entire lineup.” And with four years of experience since their debut, it seemed like the purported flagship AirPods Max would be the perfect addition to the lineup. Was To be on top of the billing.

Instead, that honor went to the AirPods 4 — Apple’s cheapest AirPods at $129, and now with a noise-canceling option for an extra $50. Among other additions, Bergeron announced they’ll now come with “the power of the H2 chip,” Apple’s most advanced headphone chip, first introduced in 2018. AirPods Pro 2 In 2022.

That chip also offers some significant upgrades. Apple said at the time that the H2 chip in the AirPods Pro 2 provides “twice as much” noise reduction as the original Pro. Now, in the AirPods 4, Apple writes in its press release that the H2 offers “big improvements in sound quality” and that it “unlocks a whole range of intelligent features that transform the way users take calls, interact with Siri, and more.”

A lot of these features are due to the H2 chip’s advanced machine-learning capabilities, and Bergeron mentioned a few of them in his enthusiastic introduction of the AirPods 4. Features like Siri Interaction, which allows you to respond to Siri by nodding or shaking your head; “the magic of Adaptive Audio,” which blends noise cancellation and transparency modes to best suit your environment, Bergeron said; and Conversation Awareness, which lowers your audio if it hears someone talking to you, and then raises it again afterward.

Not only that, it also has personalized audio, short “Siri” summoning, and voice isolation for clearer calls.

Better sound, better ANC, better features? It sounds like a very attractive package indeed. But when it came to the H1-packing AirPods Max, Apple quickly swept all those good things under the carpet, throwing some new colours and a USB-C connection at us in the hopes that we’d forget all the things that had just arrived.