AirPods Max vs. AirPods Pro

apple now has two high-end airpods models to choose from the 250 air pods pro or the 550 air pods max so let's find out what difference 300 really makes so i know exactly what you're thinking you're saying lexi this is a ridiculous comparison this is like comparing a ferrari to a ford fiesta and yes i completely agree with you with that said thanks so much for watching and i hope you enjoyed the video look just kidding that being said these two headphones and wireless earbuds are actually more similar than you might think now maybe you have the airpods pro and you're thinking i do want a pair of over ear headphones and should i get the airpods max or maybe you have neither of them and money is not really an object you just want to know which pair is going to suit your needs the best if you're interested in other comparisons between the airpods max and over-ear headphones from other brands don't worry stay tuned we will have plenty more comparisons coming your way soon but for now let's just stick to apples versus apples now normally i would start with sound quality in any headphone review but i actually do want to talk about the elephant in the room first in terms of their design because that's also really going to play into the sound when we get to talk about that so first things first one is an over ear closed headphone and the other is a pair of in-ear wireless earbuds so completely different on that account and that might be the first thing that you need to choose from to determine which one is going to suit your use case the most the other thing to consider is the material composition and the weight of these products so airpods pro are plastic and obviously thanks to their in-ear design they are lighter and easier to wear for an extended period throughout the day if you're swapping back and forth between them to charge the battery you can get a full day's use out of them all right so the airports max are heavy i was genuinely surprised i mean i read the spec sheet i knew that these were going to be heavier than other over-ear headphones but when i took them out of the box and i put them on my head i was genuinely surprised i thought they're actually really quite heavy that's obviously thanks to the material composition which is stainless steel on the telescopic arms and aluminium or aluminum on the cups themselves so if you are sensitive to any amount of weight on your head that these might be a little bit too heavy for you now the other thing though that i did like about the design of the max apart from the weight not being my favorite thing in the world the thing i did like was that the cups themselves are actually quite large and they're actually quite deep as well so if you have bigger ears or you've had problems with ears kind of touching the insides of other over-ear headphones before i don't think this would be a problem at all with the airpods max the actual foam around it is super comfortable so i really like that but i would not use these for working out and i'll tell you why number one they are a little bit too heavy and i don't feel like that they're secure enough to be staying on my head if i was doing anything like running it would definitely be a little bit too uncomfortable for me to do something active and also they're not ip rated so sweat resistance rain any kind of moisture you just don't have any guarantee that these are going to be able to withstand that so i definitely think that these are for indoor use only maybe outdoors obviously but not at the gym so that might also sway your decision now the airpods pro are ipx4 rated which means that they'll be able to withstand a couple of splashes a little bit of rain and also some sweat the color of the airpods max that you choose might also play a difference if you are considering using them to work out with just think a lighter color probably not going to look so good all right let's talk cases because this one is very interesting now you've probably seen all the memes now out there about the smart case for the airpods max i really think that this was such a missed opportunity to make a case that was durable now lots of other over-ear headphones that are cheaper also have a hard case or at least a protective pouch to be able to make sure that if you put the headphones in a bag or you're traveling with them they're not going to get damaged now i haven't had the max for very long but i can just see especially with a lighter color this might develop some sort of you know damage some discoloration and the other thing is durability so i've dropped the airpods pro so many times and they've been totally fine they are built like a tank so i'm not gonna do a drop test on the airpods max deliberately to find out but as i said i definitely feel like i do have to be much more gentle and baby these a lot more now the smart case on the airpods max does not have any kind of charging capabilities in it unlike the case of the airpods pro that does hold several charges in it now when you put the headphones in the smart case they actually go into a low power standby mode but there isn't a power off button so do be aware of that and also there is no way to use these in a kind of passive listening mode like other sort of noise cancelling headphones that you might be familiar with so if you're out of battery you're out of luck you don't get any sound out of them they both charge using lightning so either on the bottom of the airpods max or on the bottom of the airpods pro now the pro case as well is also wireless charged enabled so you can just put it on your qi compatible charging pad and charge away so speaking of chords the airpods max if you do want to use them with a wired connection now there isn't a cord provided in the box right so these are primarily designed to be wireless bluetooth headphones however if you do want to use them as wired headphones to tie to your audio source which a lot of people would because they're a 550 pair of headphones you have to buy a 35 3.5 to lightning cable and i thought okay well i don't want to spend 35 on top of 550 that i've already forked out for so i thought oh i've got this lightning to 3.5 why don't i just plug these in and then plug a 3.5 into my 3.5 source that's going to be so easy doesn't work you really have to buy that 35 cable if you want to have wired listening like come on okay let's talk about one of my favorite things in any headphone review which is of course the sound quality which is super important when it comes to deciding which one is right for the application that you want to use the headphone for now i've been using the airpods pro for over a year as my pretty much my daily driver now the sound is fairly neutral so it's not too booming on the bass the highs in the mids are also pretty well defined but they don't sound super exciting on the default settings and that's actually not a bad thing if you think about you want to do a lot of different things listening to podcasts maybe watching a couple videos jumping on calls and listening to a little bit of music throughout the day now the airpods max when i first put these on my ears i thought i wasn't going to be that impressed but i started listening to music across a lot of different genres and i really felt that they were super balanced and i really did like the sound profile and i was genuinely surprised because i wasn't expecting to like it as much as i actually do i tried a lot of different apps streaming apple music spotify and even title with some masters and i thought that the sound was really really good across all i definitely think that listening to the higher quality files i could really tell the difference however that being said i haven't yet tethered with the 35 cable but if you do want to find out impressions of what it sounds like when you do tie it to an even higher bit rate source say for example flac or lossless files do check out the ongoing review which is linked in the description below so you can read all about that now some users have experienced a crackling issue with the anc or the sound quality on the airpods pro there is a replacement program available if you are one of those affected users these are the same airpods pro that i've had for a year and a little bit now and they have been fine but as i said your mileage may vary so do check out the replacement program if that applies to you call quality super important so i found both of these were actually really good for things like zoom calls when tied to a computer i also did a number of voice calls on both of them in the same environment the airpods pro we know that they're good for calls they have strengths in that especially if i was in a noisy environment the caller on the other end noticed that a lot of the background sound was a little bit more muted and my voice was isolated a little bit better by contrast when i made a call with the airpods max the caller remarked that they could hear pretty much everything that was going on around me so in terms of noise isolation i think that the airpods pro are probably going to be a little bit stronger for that at least in my tests and the experience as the caller on my end when i was listening to the call itself i really found that i liked the sound in the over-ear headphones it's just a bit of a no-brainer because it's a much more immersive experience especially when i use transparency mode so i'm not shouting when i'm talking to the person which i like and it works really well now it's all well and good that i say these things about the microphone and the call quality but i do want you to take a listen to a couple of samples that i have recorded on both of the mics on these headphones and earbuds to see what you think one indoor test on the airpods max not too much sound going on around me but just to give you a comparison between indoor and outdoor microphone performance and here we are the airpods max this is a sample from the microphone outdoors not too much external noise but there are still a few birds and ambient sounds from things like the traffic so airpods max sound recording on the iphone 12 pro on both and one more airpods pro indoor environment just to hear the differences in the microphone performance all right here is a sample of audio recorded from the airpods pro microphone as you can see and here this is the sound from the microphone in an outdoor situation everything else now features and controls so both of them have pretty much the same feature set all up in terms of the settings that you have in terms of both have transparency mode so that's the mode that pipes in sound from the outside world to give you awareness of your surroundings so you can still be listening to music or on a call and hear what's going on so you don't get run over you can still hear a crying baby all of that stuff and i think apple really does do an excellent job of transparency mode across the headphones now both of the headphones obviously have active noise cancellation that's a big reason why you would choose one of these two over the myriad of other options from other brands out there the anc on both of these is really really good now for obvious reasons the airpods max have better anc due in part to the design but obviously newer technology and the array of mics and so on that are contributing to that make for a really immersive experience in order to set up a kind of simulation of some constant loud white noise to see what would happen and how effective the active noise cancellation is in relation to one another i set up in my bathroom with my noisy overhead fan pretend that i'm commuting on the bus the train whatever you have you and see what happens so it's pretty clear the airpods max were much much better i put them on i started listening to some music and i was genuinely surprised like i almost couldn't hear the actual fan itself it was that good and that quiet so i'm looking forward to finally testing these out on a plane because i think they're going to be really really strong for that the airpods pro obviously not as effective with the anc compared to the max just because the in-ear design does naturally let in a little bit more of the outside world but still very impressive just not to the same level as a pair of over-ear headphones the other things that they share in common is an adaptive equalizer to change the sound profile automatically depending on variables like the fit and how they fit either on or in your ear they also both have spatial audio so this is the ability to kind of give you a virtual surround sound experience if you are listening to content say movies that are mastered in 5.1 7.1 or dolby atmos and it sounds really good obviously a little bit better on the airpods max because you have that over ear experience and they both have the h1 chip now that is for faster and more seamless connectivity with ios devices now you can also do some multi-device switching as long as you have all of your devices signed into the same apple id that's available on both of these however it is a little bit finicky and it's not as seamless and as perfect as i would like so if you do want to pair either of these to an android device it is possible because they're both bluetooth headphones but you do miss out on a couple of things including spatial audio support you also lose out on the voice assistant being able to say read messages aloud in your ear and also you won't be able to change the controls say for example the stem on the airpods pro now overall it doesn't really make sense to buy the airpods max if you do have an android device for a couple things they're using the aac codec and you know on android you have the options of things like aptx for example which can deliver better sound so if you're considering these on android it's pretty hard to recommend them right now it might change in the future if apple does roll out additional codec support but for right now for the price i think there are better options if you are on android but i do know plenty of people that use the airpods pro on android and are pretty satisfied just don't need to worry too much about things like aac and codex they just want the really good noise cancellation earbuds now let's talk about controls now on the airpods pro obviously the stem of the airpods themselves is clickable and you can change that to a number of different things whether that is activating the voice assistant clicking back and forth between tracks uh turning on and off transparency mode and things like that that's all adjustable in the ios settings the airpods max have a digital crown on the top similar to what the apple watch has you can use it to adjust the volume by turning it back and forth you can also change it so if you want to move it either anti-clockwise or clockwise that's also a setting you can change which is a nice touch because i was getting confused doing it the wrong way the first time i took it out of the box there's also a button to activate and turn on anc and transparency mode so just to flick between the two and the digital crown itself you can also use to double tap to change between tracks and things like that and also answer calls if you want to the side panels don't do anything don't do what i was doing to try and tap madly to see what was going to happen nothing does all right let's talk battery life now the airpods pro are able to get between four and a half to five hours of listening time on a full charge if you are listening with anc or active noise cancellation turned on and you can even push it a little bit more if you're just using transparency or turning off those settings all together now i've had these for about a year and the battery life now just gives me around three and a half to four hours um after about a year which is totally normal natural battery degradation is a thing with any wireless earbuds or any battery-powered device now the airpods macs are rated for 20 hours of listening with anc and spatial audio turned on i did my own battery test and got around 20 hours and 20 minutes out of them now overall i have to say for a number of different factors i do prefer the airpods pro for all day listening just because i'm able to switch them back and forth between the case to keep charging one in the case while i have one in my ear and that's particularly useful if i'm in a meeting or something and all of a sudden one of the earbuds starts to get a bit low i know i can pull one out put it in the case leave it in there to charge up while i'm still staying on a call on the other earbud i really like that no that's obviously not something you can do with the airpods max if they're running low thanks so much for watching i hope this video has been super helpful for you and working out if you should go for the airpods max or the airpods pro and whether or not it is worth an extra 300 to get an over ear pair of headphones now if you have any questions that i didn't answer in this video feel free to leave me a comment down below or you can also find me on your favorite social media platform at lexi cevides see ya

Channel: CNET

Views: 104,314

Rating: 4.7917109 out of 5

Keywords: CNET, Technology, News, Tech, Review, apple, android, vs, smartphone, headphones, expensive headphones, airpods pro, airpods max, buying guide, buyers guide

Id: PX_FQeigrWE

Length: 17min 22sec (1042 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2021

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