You are wrong about AirPods Max. Just like you were wrong about everything.
By: Bartłomiej Komarnicki
Tags: iPhone, Airpods Max, Audiophile, Headphones, Apple

The whole drama

Apple just announced their over-ear headphones for $549 and tech Twitter clearly is not having it. We can learn from bunch of highly educated individuals that “Apple has lost their minds”, “it’s $200 more expensive than a competition” (not like it contradicts itself) and “you need to be an idiot to buy those overpriced headphones”, even if so far there is nobody who could judge the quality of it. Nay-sayers don’t care. Claim it’s overpriced solely because of the price, refuse to compare that to similarly priced headphones and, of course, talk about “Apple sheep”. It’s not a first time we see something like this though.

A little bit of history

In 1998, Steve Jobs decided to remove a floppy disk from iMacs. People freaked out. Believed it was insane for Apple to leave it off iMacs. It took the industry over a decade to understand that floppy was obsolete but nowadays one would need to be mentally handicapped to assume it was a wrong decision. They replaced 1.44 MB tape in a plastic case with CD drive and that’s where it was.

In 2007, Apple announced their first smartphone. It was missing a physical keyboard and everybody meme’d the hell out of our permanently drunk uncle Steve Ballmer for his infamous take on it. But he wasn’t the only one making an idiot out of himself. The whole world, although intrigued, assumed that there is no way that a $499 phone without a keyboard, fully subsidized, with a plan would sell well. And look where we are now.

There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them, than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get.

In 2010, the MacBook Air box included exactly zero optical discs. That might be confusing for some of you as you never got a computer with CD required to install the system. Although, it was a norm before then and it got replaced with slim USB stick. Arguably the bigger announcement was the Mac App Store. Guess what, with it, they killed another one. The same one that replaced floppy disk. And our beloved Steve Ballmer proved himself as a great visionary once again mocking lack of it in MacBooks Air.

In 2015, Apple started to ditch USB-A and SD cards. And yet again, the tech world got crazy. Although it’s understandable that including just ONE port on a MacBook might be frustrating, a whole lot of people stated it’s unacceptable to remove the most popular port in the world in favor of USB-C. It’s still possible to buy a new notebook with the former but more often than not, it seems that Apple was right, once again.

In 2017, and this is something I’m not too young to not remember, Apple put the whole world on fire. They removed the headphone jack from the world’s most popular smartphone. Everybody and their mom ridiculed them for that and meme game was stronger then ever before. Nobody could believe it’s “courage” when Apple conveniently announced a solution to the problem, a $159 wireless version of EarPods. Not only Twitter idiots got crazy, well known and respected Marques Brownlee also ridiculed the price of it.

What did he say in his review? Well, he recommended them. Three years after, Samsung doesn’t hold their anti-Apple commercials on YouTube as their flagship also miss headphone jack. But users don’t. Now, “technology is ready” unlike when Apple did it. After all, I guess it was actually quite courageous.

Last year, we saw the Pro Display XDR. Despite the obviously overpriced stand, some people just couldn’t comprehend why anyone would buy it over a $199 screen that also displays things. Again, been proven that judging a price by personal needs is wrong.

Few months ago, Apple Silicon Macs were announced. How many people were dismissing them for “a smartphone chipset” that is “not capable of serious tasks”? Well, there are still some borderline braindead PCMR in denial who would just keep lying to make up for Windows counterparts lacking in pretty much every department but reviews are there and M1 is indeed as revolutionary as Apple claimed.

What about those AirPods Max though?

Now, the whole internet is on fire because of AirPods Max. They are compared to Sony’s and Bose’s most popular offers, most likely because that’s everything those people know. Nobody’s asking about the sound quality, about ANC, nobody even bothers to understand what Spatial Audio is and to realize that no other headphones (besides Dolby Dimensions that are $599) have a similar feature. Nobody wants to notice that $349 is not the maximum price for headphones and audiophile options are sometimes quadruple the price or much, much higher than that. But nobody seems to care about audiophiles’ opinions either. AirPods Max were outsold after just one day.

What can we learn from that?

Most people don’t care about what they can learn from anything. If Apple says something and you say otherwise, most likely you are in the wrong. Just like you were wrong all that time.