Last year, Apple gave its flagship AirPods Max headphones a subtle refresh when it added new colors and replaced the lightning port with USB-C. But it turns out these small changes had a bigger purpose: they weren’t just for aesthetics, nor were they just because Apple was being forced to make the switch to USB-C due to the European Union’s new “common charger” rule – rather, it appears that Apple’s engineers have been quietly cooking up a software update that will finally bring a much welcomed (if perhaps overdue) feature to its overhead AirPods model.
Next month, the Cupertino-based brand says it will add “lossless audio and ultra-low latency audio to AirPods Max”, allowing its users to take advantage of super-high quality, uncompressed sound and to “experience music the way the artist created it in the studio”. The upcoming update will make AirPods Max capable of playing 24-bit, 48 kHz lossless audio, and Apple says that subscribers to its Apple Music streaming service will have “more than 100 million songs in lossless audio” to choose from.
Lossless audio is neither a new nor revolutionary and you could argue that Apple’s audio products have trailed behind some of those from its competitors in recent years. But Apple is known for not rushing to market with its own version of something and its CEO, Tim Cook, recently told the Wall Street Journal that the brand’s “philosophy has always been to be the best, not the first”.
What makes Apple’s version of lossless audio unique, it seems, is that the brand is positioning them as being suited to music production – a fact it mentions several times in its press release. Specifically, Apple is targeting producers who create in spatial audio and says that its update will make AirPods Max “the only headphones that enable musicians to both create and mix in Personalised Spatial Audio with head tracking”. Apple has confirmed that Logic Pro will be compatible with the new feature, and – without specifying which – said “other music creation apps” will be, too.
Ultra-low latency should also make the headphones a great option for gamers, with Apple claiming the update will give AirPods Max “no response delay” and will put them “on par with the native built-in speakers on Mac, iPad and iPhone”.
It’s crucial to note, though, that all of these new features will be limited to AirPods Max with USB-C and users of the original AirPods Max model are out of luck. This is because the lightning port on the original model does not offer the same data transfer speeds you can get with the USB-C, meaning that it’s hardware issue that can’t be resolved through a software solution.
Without confirming an exact date, Apple says the update will drop “next month”. Stay tuned.
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