AirPods Max USB-C getting wired lossless in 18.4 update as well as a new USB-C to 3.5 mm headphone jack for low latency and analogue listening

They’re great until they break, and then you’re left with a paper weight which is virtually useless, happened twice, with two different units, some sort of issue with the band connection mechanism,, or maybe the headphone itself, either way, one of them gets disconnected, and because of Apple logic, the whole unit is shut down until it reconnected, and if it doesn’t reconnect again, you’re done.

I have a pare of these. how do you update? how do you get transparency mode and spacial audio working?

Just like other people have said, the AirPods Max do tend to break. I have a pair of lightning AirPods Max which have turned into a paperweight, and us are shoved in the drawer.
I hope to be able to get the USB-C AirPods Max someday. I was previously thinking of getting just the lightning version again, because of wired playback. That was something I used frequently.
I’m excited for lossless audio to come to Apple devices with spatial audio.

far as i can recall, the lightning apm were lossless if used over a wire, just capped at a samplerate of 48k, if you got an external dac, that restriction would be lifted. of course if your using them wirelessly that isn't so true any more given your using apple's Legacy wireless protocol which still compresses the audio somewhat. And as of now, the new protocol only works with AirPods that came out 2023 and later, and then only with an apple vision pro, which it's safe to say, no one got

"Trust but verify". Do not trust them after the AI issue. Like the State of missouri model states, Show me.

Not a super audio geek here, but could you not just plug in a cable from your iPhone to your APM to get wired audio? I have the lightning APM but I thought I've read that you can't do that, but that you'll be able to do it with the update coming to the USB C ones.

Not worth upgrading for by itself, but the low latency sounds great, especially for us hard core BSI users.

You bypass the DAC that’s built in to the cable if you use an external one as far as I know, and the cable tops out at 48K 24Bit which is what most songs top out at anyway.

You can get wired audio, but it’s not as high resolution as it could be if you used a converter, I’m guessing the USB-C ones didn’t have that feature or something, makes no sense though.

Support for low-latency audio is included in the update, according to this article.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/03/24/apple-finally-brings-lossless-audio-and-low-latency-audio-to-airpods-max

This should benefit VoiceOver users.

I don't have any of Apple's audio hardware, but I noticed the article while reading news.

Hello,
I have the lightning version & still love them! I got them shortly after they were released & they continue to recieve firmware updates.

If that’s what there marketing, then the lightning AirPods Max already had pretty much zero latency when used with the lightning to 3.5 cable.

Even if some people say they can’t hear a difference between AAC and lossless, I feel like I can.
Although it might not be as “mine blowing” as Apple says it is (take the switch from mono to stereo in the 60s or 70s) I still think things are going to sound Better to my ears at least with lossless audio on AirPods Max.

I'm one of those old fogies that still uses the stock earphone things with wires that Apple put in the iPhone box with the lightning plug. It's just that I don't remember what they're called.
So what do you do when you're forced to use USBC and you still want to use those kind of earphones or buds or plugs out of cheapness? Is Apple making something like that with a USBC plug?

Sony discontinued their best wired in-ear earphones so I came back to the good old jack earpods and except for the sound leak they are incredible for the price. And good microphone but volume control works for apple devices only :( just why, apple? ...
As said by others in the mainstream tech sphere now the airpods max usb c wired are actually going to be more of a tool for mac users with logic and finalCut for example.

Apple calls them "EarPods". Like you, I am old-school as well, and prefer wired EarPods, over anything Bluetooth related. I absolutely loathe latency, especially as a VoiceOver user.

EarPods. Too many terms or names that all end in pods.
Guess I'll eventually need to start looking into USBC adapters to replace the Lightning adapters I have. They'll end up in the box with all the RS-232 cables and floppy disks. Anyone remember parallel ports on printers?

That, or you can just get yourself a pair of third-party USB-C wired earbuds. :-)

I not only remember parallel ports on printers, I remember scanners with a pass through parallel port to the printer that never worked... and dot matrix printers, as well as 5 1/4 floppies.

When I looked into headphones a few years ago, I thought about the lightning airpods max but the general advice was the beats studio pro with USB C were better. I regret my choice though for the simple reason the earpads are extremely thin and soft to the point they become permanantly flattened with minimal use, worst of all they aren't replaceable. I'm never buying headphones again without checking I can get replacement earpads from wicked cushions.

Had to look up Scart, but we didn't have that over here, as far as I know. There might be a bunch of other things that wouldn't make sense if you tried to plug them in on the other side of the world.
I do remember those scanners, and SCSI port cards.
I guess a USBC port will make getting headphones easier. Would a USB to USBC adapter replace the USB camera/Lightning adapter that I have to use to connect drives and sticks to my iPhone?

Most likely, unless you are comfortable with just purchasing some USB-C thumb drives.

Scart was a European alternative to composite which only used a single rectangular connector, though it was big, clunky and came loose easily.

I imagine you should be able to use a USB C to C cable to connect them to your iPhone, unless it strictly requires host power to run. Whether you can use a lightning to USB C cable I've no idea. In either case being able to use them as a backup USB audio device for a mac or PC is always a nice option to have.

But, of course, it should have been there from the start. Still, it makes for better headphones especially for travel and you're all in on USB-C. However they're the same old APMs: keep the case on hand for going standby, and buy AppleCare to ensure the pickers choose one for you that's not going to crap out at the earliest opportunity. This is my second Lightning pair now; no issues this time—not since I bought AppleCare! I probably won't be upgrading until there's a clear need, so long as I have my Sennheiser wired cans I'm set for quality listening. And so far Macs, including MacBooks, still have that wonderful headphone jack …

if my rode nth-100-m brake anytime soon given how flaky they’ve become over the past few months, I go through headphones a lot, might be me, might be Lady Luck , might just be headphones in general. I have the second generation of the AirPods Max as a serious contender. I loved those things, applecare of course though. Or i might go with the Stephen Slate audio VHX, I have concerns regarding the software though.

The wired airpods? were honestly awesome, why didn't they just do that but get rid of the wire?

These earbuds now need to be put into your ears and I just don't like that.

I'm going to probably get a pare of bone conduction headphones when my glide gets hear some time this year but I really wish apple had kkept there design without the in ear bit, I actually thought it was really cool how you could tell if you'd put them in the rong ear because it would feel off.

If the option is available, always go with bone conduction. Walking around with things stuffed in your ears all day is never a good idea.

Something like the Bose Frames is also an option where they put the speaker near your ear but without bone conduction.

You're right, it's best-in-class among the over-ear headphones, no question about that. If the APMs could pick up the amplification feature of the Pros, that would be terrific. Not that I'm endorsing them as everyday out-and-about hearing aids, mind, that would be silly. But it would still be added value for those times when you need the full frequency range, and you still want to here things around you more clearly. I already use headphone accommodations to eq the sound coming from the Max, I couldn't live without that feature. Hopefully Apple are working on it in some lab somewhere.

I don't know why they couldn't add this to the lightning model sense the chips inside the headphones haven't changed. This is sad. Reminds me of how they did a big cash grab with siri on the iPhone 4S even though they knew Siri could run on the iPhone 4 and even 3GS sense it was a third party app that Steve Jobs liked and proceeded to buy the company SRI research, integrate it into iOS 5, sell the 4S and say no other phone was powerful enough to run it even though it was literally on the app store for a damn week! It was on the app store for a week on so many iPhone 4 and 3GS devices and they had to pull that crap. Businesses are greedy uncaring money hungry evil things.

It hasn't been taken out, even though Apple has made the hearing health features prominent with iOS 18. Go to Settings, Accessibility, Audio & Visual, Headphone Accommodations while you are wearing AirPods Pro. You can then turn on custom transparency with an EQ that's generic (broad spectrum, top, bass, to taste) or feed in a spectrogram of your own. I am still using it, even though I get moderate for my hearing test (I suspect it's actually worse, but moderate is the most severe these things go to). To me, balanced sounds better. The hearing aid feature is pretty awesome, and it helps in the vast majority of cases where I otherwise wouldn't be able to listen to my phone because my NHS aids have no Bluetooth, but I really need proper aids. Give it a try and see how you get on.

USB C doesn't have any more pins than Lightning but has considerably more bandwidth. Lightning maxes out at USB 2 speeds which is 480mbps, USB C to C starts at 5gbps or 5,000mbps and only goes upward. That said I'd have thought lightning could still support some kind of audio but maybe just not the quality Apple were aiming for.

I'm actually pretty excited about these news, as the wing tip on one of my Beats Fit Pro wireless in-ear headphones broke and Apple refused to replace them, because their protective grills came out glued to a Q-tip that I used to take out some ear wax, meaning I'll never buy in-ear headphones again. I did consider getting the original AirPods Max, but was phased off by the Lightning connector, and without a wired option, the USB-c variant felt way too overpriced for my needs..

Lossless audio is something that I don't really care about. I am lucky to have clinically tested above average hearing, and honestly I can't really tell the difference between 44.1kHz and 48kHz uncompressed audio even with good equipment, and lossy compressed audio originating from sources with the aforementioned frequencies and bit-depths above 192kbps with a decent encoder like LAME is completely indistinguishable from lossless audio for me. As someone who occasionally dabbles in the more mathy and psycho-acoustics of digital audio processing, I do understand the relevance of higher sampling rates and bit depths in audio data, but in the context of human perception, which is the only relevant context in the case of any kind of speaker equipment, anything beyond 48kHz at a bit rate of 16-bit linear or 8-bit logarithmic uncompressed sample data is a total waste of computing resources.

What I'm excited about is the reduced latency for screen-reader use. At the moment I'm using Apple's 3.5mm jack EarPods, which I consider pretty good considering how cheap and disposable they are, but I miss the characteristic bass bias of my damaged Beats phones, and am hoping that the AirPods Max can either provide a similar or better experience.

Don't use a queue tip to get ear wax, it can siriously damage your ears.

You're right, it's not audio resolution. However, in my personal experience, it is encoders, and the version of the tracks you prefer could very well be artefacts of that encoding. Some are undoubtedly better than others, but my youth is littered with experiences of hearing unacceptable artefacts that didn't show up in any kind of (admittedly highly relaxed and non-scientific) A/B tests of encoding my various ripped CDs from the FLAC original files.

So yes, I think lossless is important, just not high-res—I'm fine with 16bit 44.1K PCM, for listening. My favourite cans are my trusty old faithful (and now, thanks to AirPods, barely used) Sennheiser RS170s. These are cordless and use the MicroChip Kleer technology to send low-latency audio wirelessly (not Bluetooth). I can still recommend Sennheiser's cordless cans, if you're willing to use a wireless clicker remote for controlling your computer.

Don't forget about DACs.You can get a much bigger increase in audio quality by upgrading your DAC than by upping the resolution. Even wireless headphones use a built in DAC since sound is analogue by its nature.

That's why I'd suggest checking how your headphones work before spending money on a fancy DAC. Made worse by the fact that every conversion is a chance to lower quality, going analogue to digital to analogue again because your headphones don't send the 3.5mm signal straight to the drivers is a bad time. It's handy to have as an option if you need sound in a pinch but it'd never be my first plan for quality.

It's a little older at this point but when I got my cyrus soundkey I was amazed how crisp it was and especially for something the size of a USB drive. Combined with decent analogue headphones it's amazing, I used to use TMA2 from Aiaiai. If I had to buy a new set I'd love to try some with planar magnetic drivers though since I understand their bass response is especially sharp.