“Wait, this thing is how much?!”
Yesterday, Apple announced the AirPods Max, a premium noise-cancelling headphone. The thing that immediately sticks out about it is the price: $549. In a product space that hovers around the $300 mark, the price for AirPods Max seems rather absurd. Why would anyone pay over two hundred dollars more for this instead of the critically acclaimed (and oddly named) Sony WH-1000XM4? $549 is not an impulse purchase by any stretch.
And yet shipping times for the AirPods Max have already stretched to weeks beyond the December 15th release date. Some of the color options are backordered well into February of next year. It seems the demand for this nearly-the-cost-of-an-iPhone product is strong. More evidence that this pandemic have largely spared the white-collar professional class. The tech bros still have jobs and money, and there’s no problem at all spending this amount of listen to music.
I understand why the AirPods Max cost so much. These headphones essentially has a computer chip inside, doing all sorts of computational trickery to make the sound as best as possible. No other competitor in the space have the CPU prowess that Apple possesses. So I’m sure the AirPods Max will sound absolutely fantastic, well worth the insanely high entry price.
But I am not buying one. I already have a set of AirPods Pro that I use frequently. I'm not a frequent user of headphones anyways: the only time the excellent Bose QC35 comes out of the case is during flights. Getting the AirPods Max at this point would just be something to showoff with; it’s very low on the utility scale.
I said I wasn’t going to get the AirPods Pro when it launched, so we’ll see what happens down the line. Should third-party retailers discount the AirPods Max to, say, $400, then that would be something to consider. Perhaps during Black Friday of next year.
Short tail.