December 29, 2025

My love/hate relationship with AirPods Max

I bought the AirPods Max on day one. I have worn them daily for years, and I have a relationship with these headphones that borders on Stockholm Syndrome.

When they work, they are the best headphones I have ever owned. When they don't, they are the most frustrating piece of technology in my possession. Here are my ramblings about the good, the bad, and the truly embarrassing.

The good stuff

Let's start with why I still put these on basically every single morning:

  1. Sound and silence: Simply put, I love how they sound. I'm sure audiophiles have their charts and graphs and whatnot (btw: I also make music, and I do have serious headphones for specific purposes), but for my daily listening while working they are rich, wide, and immersive. The noise canceling is excellent, and the transparency mode has always been outstanding.
  2. Ecosystem: Transitioning between Apple devices is seamless. Nothing else comes even close to this level of fluidity.
  3. Earcups: They are very comfortable. They are fluffy and gentle and avoid the sweaty feeling you get with leatherette.
  4. Head detection: It's fan-ta-stic. Nothing much to add here: you put the headphones on, they connect to the right device, and if you had playback going it resumes instantly. You take them off (or just lift an earcup to the side), and playback pauses immediately. Absolutely nailed it. (...when it works – more on that later).

The reality: comfort and maintenance

While the earcups are clouds, the rest of the physical build is a mixed bag:

  1. Weight: These things are heavy. However, I honestly don't notice the weight anymore. I guess my neck muscles have apparently adapted.
  2. Baldness: The headband is a different story. The mesh looks cool and all, but if you have a bald head like me, the frame structure becomes an issue. I wear them basically all day, and after a few hours the headband gets annoying if not painful. There is no cushion there, just mesh and metal, and on a bald scalp you feel every ounce of that pressure.
  3. Dirty truths: Washing the earcups is a royal PITA. They stain, they absorb sweat, and cleaning them never quite restores them to factory-fresh. I've ended up buying new earcups twice already – and at 80 bucks a pop that is a hidden subscription cost I did not sign up for.

The hill I will die on

I am still on the 1st gen with the Lightning port. It's the only Lightning device left in my daily use, and obviously I have to keep a specific cable (or actually a cable adapter) on my desk just for these headphones. There are workarounds1, but that's what they are – workarounds.

Sure, sure, it's annoying – BUT: I refuse to upgrade to the new model just for USB-C. It's a matter of principle. Apple did not change enough to warrant the cost, and I will die on this hill before I pay them again just to change a connector shape.

About battery life: it could be better I guess. It's passable, but it's not aligned with what the competition offers (it never did).

The pain and the bonk of death

Make of what's above what you will – but I must talk about reliability. Quite frankly, it's embarrassing.

I am on my third pair. I have had them replaced twice. And every single pair has developed similar, almost catastrophic issues:

For a pair of headphones at this price point ("premium luxury audio!" – super heavy quotation marks), this fragility is embarrassing.

It's embarrassing twice over that I've had to swap them multiple times.

It's embarrassing three times over that Apple never fixed this in a meaningful way through the years.

Zombie Mode and the arrogance of "no off switch"

There is a specific circle of hell reserved for when these headphones enter their "Zombie Mode": sometimes they remain "active" (streaming audio correctly), but the rest of the brain of the device shuts down:

I end up with a pair of headphones that are blasting music and refuse to acknowledge any input. Because there is no physical on/off switch I can't just reboot them quickly. They sit there in this digital limbo, forcing me to perform an awkward hard reset just to get control back. All this while holding down buttons like I'm entering a cheat code. With just two physical buttons, which could even count as an achievement by itself.

This highlights the sheer arrogance of Apple's design choice: you can only get away with removing the power button if your product is absolutely bulletproof. You better be damn sure your software never crashes. These headphones are not bulletproof – they are temperamental. And when they crash, the lack of a simple switch turns a minor annoyance into a rage-inducing experience.

I'm a responsible adult®. Give me my damn ability to easily control the entry point to my device. Take away things, slim down, cut the fat, minimize things all you want. Great! Dandy! But do not take away the entry point.

So?

I won't waste time talking about the Smart Case (we all know it's a joke).

The AirPods Max are my daily paradox: they offer the best user experience in the world when they are working, and the most anxiety-inducing experience when they start acting up. And they do, frequently.

I don't see any other reasonable alternative, because when they behave, they are just too good.

If Apple ever fixes the reliability and gives me a real power switch, I’ll happily buy another pair. Until then, I’m stuck loving something that doesn’t respect me back.

  1. e.g. something like this. Or even a custom adapter like this, which I purchased but it broke after just a couple of days – that thing is very, very fragile. ↩︎