Apple AirPods Max 2 review: The tiniest of upgrades

After careful hands-on testing, we feature our favorite gear and gadgets as Mashable Selects products in our dedicated shopping guides. Apple's got new headphones in its lineup. Or does it? The new AirPods Max 2 are the first proper upgrade to the company's first and only set of over-the-ear headphones, which came out in 2020; the revised version in 2024 only got a USB-C port instead of Lightning, and Apple, again, just called them AirPods Max. Now, the AirPods Max 2 are here, but the list of upgrades is once again pretty short. I've spent about a week with a pair to see whether these are worth their price; here's what I found. This is the first time, and possibly the last time, I'm lumping all of these together in a headphone review. The reason is simple: They're all the same. The design, weight, and dimensions haven't changed at all. Even the colors on offer are the same: Midnight, Starlight, Blue, Purple, and Orange. I've had an old pair of Midnight AirPods Max with USB-C (check my full review), and the new ones Apple sent me were Blue. There's literally no way of telling that these are different model numbers and two years apart. To be fair, there isn't very much I'd change her