It feels as if every year, every month even, there are rumours of the AirPods Max 2’s launch being close to hand. But according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of Apple releasing an AirPods Max sequel any time soon.
Why? Well in Gurman’s Power On newsletter (you need to subscribe to read it), he writes that an AirPods Max 2 model is not on the horizon is because they’re “too popular for Apple to stop selling them”, but conversely, “not popular enough for the company to invest a ton of time and money into creating a new version”.
Colour us a bit confused by the wording of that assessment. They’re popular, but not popular enough to warrant a sequel?
Since the AirPods Max launched, there have always been rumours of another model. Some believed this could be the modular version, which you could take apart and put back together and customise it the way you wanted too, in a not too dissimilar fashion as the Dyson OnTrac.
However, after a slow start, sales for the AirPods Max picked up rapidly; and now you’d be hard pressed to walk outside your house without seeing someone wearing Apple’s over-ear headphones. They’re as popular as the AirPods true wireless, if not more so.
Super-Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported earlier in the year that Apple was looking to out the AirPods Max 2 into production in 2027, but Gurman’s latest insight suggests the AirPods Max is not uppermost in Apple’s mind at the moment.
If this is Apple’s reasoning, I don’t understand it. The Apple TV 4K surely doesn’t sell by the bucketloads and in my mind is a fairly niche product, but seems to receive an update every few years. The AirPods Max headphones are everywhere. I see just as many AirPods Max as I see efforts from Bose and Sony.
It would seem that not only is there interest in AirPods Max, there’s plenty of demand for them too; which makes Apple’s current approach confusing. There are improvements to be made (the battery charging case remains perplexing), and other brands have made progress with each new model.
Apple have shown with the pricing of the AirPods Max that there’s an appetite for buying premium headphones. When I wrote about the AirPods Max 2 rumours in 2024, I wrote there wasn’t really a need for a new model, but it’s head-scratching that Apple doesn’t seem interested whatsoever in scratching that itch again.
