In a departure from the normal heavyweight posts, I’ve decided to allow you to join me in the exploration of my love for technology.
Part of my character enjoys looking forward to new things; technology is the gift that keeps on giving, satisfying this urge for the new and improved. It’s a pretty indiscriminate urge and can be fed with all kinds of different areas of consumer technology.
Since I was a small boy, I’ve always used Microsoft from the early days of MS-DOS. Not just the software, I’ve always built desktop computers from components. There’s a whole smorgasbord of technology to enjoy there, and it’s still a great payload of new stuff these days, albeit much easier to put together and, more importantly, get to actually function as intended.
I built a water-cooled PC recently and have certainly enjoyed the frisson of water and electricity together in a potentially disastrous combination. It works well; as a side note, very good cooling and seeing water rush around the internals of the machine is satisfying in ways that are hard to quantify.
I’m trying to give you a flavour of how much of my life has been taken up with “The PC”. In short, A LOT.
It’s odd then that you find me, here, using an Apple Mac; if an earlier version of myself were to have peered into the crystal ball and seen me, he would have shook his head and returned the crystal ball to the store as having “malfunctioned”.
Covid-19 has had a lot to do with this swap over, and one killer feature the Mac has over the PC. The ability for you to close the lid on the laptop, go away and do something (say, for example, de-escalate an argument between two small children), then come back and open the screen and immediately get going with whatever you left off with.
This just doesn’t happen on Windows, or rather it does, but not consistently, easily or quickly. Sometimes all three at the same time. I have a Dell XPS17, which on paper should work just like the MacBook, but even with no amount of power option twiddling, it just doesn’t.
Now I’ve always had an iPhone (I tried Andriod twice now, but it’s at least five years behind iOS in how friendly and well organised it is), always had an iPad (the singularity of purpose it has prevents you from being too distracted with other things). Once I had the MacBook, the whole ecosystem benefit kicked in.
It’s easy to move from device to device, things work well together and are designed to know about each other, and importantly are user-centred.
Headphones, now I like headphones as much as I like new laptops, I have a good stash of them. Once I hit on AirPods and then AirPod Pro’s, along with everything else in the apple wonder box, I really liked it. In fact, the AirPods pretty much changed up the game for me.
Instead of ferreting around in my rucksack or making a trip to my desk to retrieve headphones, they lived in my pocket practically all the time. This is incredibly useful, taking calls, listening to a bit of music, shutting out the world for five minutes to watch new technology announcements, and so on.
The AirPods are just fantastic. Enter the AirPods Max. I read a lot about these headphones, watched the videos, and thought about what needs they might fill. I didn’t turn up with anything, frankly.
I’m not sure what possessed me to buy the Max in the end, but it happened. Now we’ve got over the preamble, which, in short, is that I’m invested into the ecosystem; let’s get down to the business of some form of review.
The Max’s are indeed MAX; it’s back to digging around in my backpack or walking over to my desk where I keep them. The desk is, in fact, where these headphones mostly live. Let’s look at why in a list;
- The call quality of these headphones is superb; the transparency mode lets you hear your own voice and feel like you’re not really using headphones. Previous over the ear headphones have not been great at this and resulted in me listening to myself talk as if I’ve been shrink wrapped in 2 meters of cotton candy. I.e. pretty muffled.
- They’re big, heavy, and the case is largely a joke. These are not portable in the traditional sense.
- The noise cancelling is most excellent, and when you want to “deep work” and invoke the sound of silence, even when you live in a house with small children, then the Max’s do a great job.
- They fit a specific rather than general-purpose need (unlike the AirPods, which are true generalist headphones). These are for moments of audio enjoyment or immersive Netflix experience. The sound quality is most excellent.
In summary, because of the “use case” associated with the headphones, they feel more at home docked next to your workstation.
The reason most people read a review is to work out if you should actually buy the product. To keep with tradition, I’m going to say, No, don’t buy these. But if like me, you end up buying them, you’ll find that you enjoy them just enough not to return them.
I had to get the Max’s repaired by Apple (customer service was EXCELLENT, the best I’ve experienced of any technology company), during the time when they weren’t around, I missed them, which says something.
These headphones are expensive, and you won’t find them being your “go-to” headphones most of the time, but you will find them excellent at very specific moments in time.
The reason I say “No” is that when compared to what else you might get with the money, there are more obvious and more useful choices.
