What’s Apple not telling us about the AirPods Max!?
By: Alexander Leiminer
Tags: Airpods Max, Apple, Battery Life, Kickstarter, Insights

Even when the AirPods Max run out of battery and disconnect, you can turn them back on and get them to run for a while. In our test, we let them run out, put them in the Smart Case for about 18 hours and turned them on again, which gave us another 20 minutes of runtime until they fully stopped responding.

Battery Life Summary

Apple lives up to their claims and we measured around 22 hours of runtime vs. the 20 hours promised. As stated in the chapter before, charging them for 5 minutes also gave us 1 hour and 39 minutes of runtime, a bit over the 1 hour and 30 minutes claimed. In addition, you can usually squeeze a bit more runtime out of them after they turn off and you manually turn them on again. A nice little reserve.

Low Power Mode(s) and Battery Drain

When first launched, Apple said the AirPods Max will go into a low power mode when put into their Smart Case. This left everyone wondering how this works exactly, how much it helps to preserve battery, and if there are other ways to get them into the low power mode.

After a while Apple released a clarification, that the headphones will also go into a low power mode outside the case:

Apple: “If you set your AirPods Max down and leave them stationary for 5 minutes, they go into a low power mode to preserve battery charge. After 72 stationary hours out of the Smart Case, your AirPods Max go into a lower power mode that turns off Bluetooth and Find My to preserve battery charge further.”

Beside this they also added more details around the low power mode if the AirPods Max are put into the Smart Case:

Apple: “If you put your AirPods Max in the Smart Case when you’re not using them, they go into a low power mode immediately to preserve battery charge. After 18 hours in the Smart Case, your AirPods Max go into an ultralow power mode that turns off Bluetooth and Find My and maximizes battery life.”

We tested both — leaving the AirPods Max stationary outside the Smart Case and putting them in the case to see how much the battery will drain in comparison. When leaving the AirPods Max stationary outside the Smart Case for 12 hours, we saw a drop of 5% of displayed battery life. We also let them rest 12 hours inside the Smart Case and also saw a drop of 5%. According to Apple’s displayed battery level, although some rounding could have been applied, both setups seem to perform equally, and we didn’t see a major difference. The battery drain is roughly 1% every 2.5 hours. It remains to be seen how efficient the ultralow power mode is, which Apple claims to kick in after 72 hours outside, and 18 hours inside the Smart Case, but it’s unlikely to play a role in typical use cases.

When putting the AirPods Max in the Smart Case, they immediately go into low-power mode and disconnect the Bluetooth connection to your device. Apple claims they will also go into low power mode outside of the case after 5 minutes. We have no way to determine which power mode has been entered, but in our tests outside of the Smart Case the AirPods Max stayed connected via Bluetooth even after 5 minutes, indicating that there might be different “low power modes”. As described above there is no measurable difference in battery drain while idling inside or outside of the Smart Case though.

We saw a lot of mixed results in other reviews and tests out there, and our guess is that mileage may vary depending on a lot of factors, like temperature, firmware, connected devices, and how exactly the test is set up. Also, reports are coming up talking about massive battery drain overnight, something we didn’t experience in our tests or usage.

Battery Drain Summary

Our test showed an average battery drain of 1% every 2.5 hours independent of putting the AirPods Max in the Smart Case or leaving them stationary outside, which puts them at an estimated 1–2 weeks of pure stand-by time. Long term test will show if there’s a bigger difference when ultralow power mode kicks in after a longer time.

Triggering the Low Power Mode

Directly following the launch there was a lot of speculation about how the low power mode is activated when putting the AirPods Max in the Smart Case. Is it the orientation of the ear cups, the magnets that hold the Smart Case lid in place, or something else?