The Old AirPods Max Costs £150 Less and Lasts as Long

Search for AirPods Max in the UK today and page one hands you two prices for what looks like one pair of headphones. Apple wants £499. EE will sell you a set for £349. Nothing on either listing makes it obvious that these are different products with different chips inside them, and the shops are not going out of their way to explain it.

So I sat down and worked out which is which, what the £150 gap actually buys, and whether the older pair is the smarter purchase in September 2026. The short answer is that the cheaper one has the same rated battery life, the same shape to within a couple of grams, and on a lot of iPhones it will do most of the same things.

There are three AirPods Max, and two of them are easy to buy

The first pair arrived on 15 December 2020 at $549. H1 chip in each ear cup, Bluetooth 5.0, a Lightning port, and five colours: Silver, Space Grey, Sky Blue, Pink and Green. Apple has stopped selling it and it is getting hard to find new.

The second arrived on 20 September 2024. Apple kept the H1 chip and the $549 price, swapped Lightning for USB-C, and moved to five new colours: Midnight, Starlight, Blue, Purple and Orange. That version also picked up lossless audio at 24-bit/48kHz over the USB-C cable. It is discontinued but still widely stocked, and it is almost certainly the one you will be offered second-hand or refurbished.

The third is AirPods Max 2, announced on 16 March 2026, on sale from 25 March and in hands from early April. H2 chip, Bluetooth 5.3, USB-C, and five colours: Midnight, Starlight, Blue, Purple and Orange. If that list looks familiar, that is the whole problem.

Apple has quietly renamed the older ones too. Its support page for the original is now headed AirPods Max 1 - Tech Specs, and that page still turns up on page one when you search the product name. Apple is effectively selling you a spec sheet for a headphone it no longer stocks.

The colours are why nobody can tell them apart

Midnight, Starlight, Blue, Purple and Orange are the colours of the 2024 USB-C model. They are also, name for name, the colours of AirPods Max 2. Both charge over USB-C. Both weigh within a rounding error of each other. Put two listings side by side and the colour swatch, the port and the photograph will tell you nothing at all.

Even the best comparison page I could find trips on this. MacRumors' AirPods Max 1 vs AirPods Max 2 guide lists the older colours as Silver, Space Grey, Sky Blue, Pink and Green. That is true of the 2020 pair, and it is not true of the pair you are most likely to be sold. The colour test only works on the model that has nearly vanished from shelves.

What the H2 chip actually adds

This is the honest list of what your extra money buys, taken from Apple's own specs and the comparison above:

• Adaptive Audio, Conversation Awareness and Voice Isolation
• Live Translation, Siri responses via head gestures, and camera remote
• Personalised Volume, Loud Sound Reduction and studio-quality voice recording
• Bluetooth 5.3, lower wireless latency and improved Spatial Audio

On noise cancelling, Apple's claim is that AirPods Max 2 is "up to 1.5x more effective" than the generation before it. That is Apple's number rather than a measurement anyone independent has published in those terms, and "up to" is doing a job in that sentence. If you spend your week on a train or a plane, it is still the most persuasive line on the list.

Now the part nobody puts in a comparison table. The H2 chip adds no battery. Apple rates both generations at up to 20 hours of listening with noise cancelling on, the same figure it has quoted since 2020. The new pair is 386.2g against 384.8g, which by my arithmetic makes it 1.4g heavier, or about a third of one per cent. Your £150 buys features, not endurance.

Some of those features need an iPhone you might not have

Read Apple's AirPods Max 2 spec page closely and three of the headline features carry conditions. Adaptive Audio and Conversation Awareness both need iOS 26.4 or later. Live Translation needs iOS 26.4 and Apple Intelligence on the paired iPhone.

Apple Intelligence starts at the iPhone 15 Pro, as I worked through in my iOS 27 UK guide. Put those two facts together, which is my reading rather than anything Apple spells out in one place, and the position is this: on an iPhone 14, or on a standard iPhone 15 or 15 Plus, Live Translation on your new £499 headphones will not switch on. You would be paying the premium for a feature your phone cannot feed.

AirPods Max UK prices in September 2026

• Apple UK, AirPods Max 2: £499 in all five colours, with free engraving
• Currys, AirPods Max 2: £499 with no discount showing. Worth noting that the Currys web address still reads "apple-airpods-max" while the page it loads is the Max 2 listing
• EE, AirPods Max 2: £499 outright, or £20 today plus £42 a month for 11 months, which EE totals at £482
• EE, AirPods Max "good as new" (the USB-C H1 model): £349 outright, or £15 today plus £30 a month for 11 months, totalled at £345

New stock of the H1 USB-C pair moves around. T3 clocked it at £357 on Amazon in June against a £499 list price, and TechRadar had it at £399.99 in April. Treat those as the floor it has reached rather than what you will pay this afternoon, because the listings come and go.

Here is the bit I find most interesting, and the maths is mine. EE's refurbished H1 pair at £349 is £150 under the £499 Max 2, or 30.1 per cent less, for headphones rated at the same 20 hours. In the United States, MacRumors' deals page on 21 September had Max 2 at $479 on Amazon and the older USB-C model at $429. That is a $50 gap, or 10.4 per cent. The outgoing AirPods Max is discounted close to three times as steeply here as it is there.

At EE, paying monthly costs less than paying today

This one made me check the sums twice. AirPods Max 2 at EE is £499 if you pay now, or £20 plus eleven payments of £42, which comes to £482. That is £17 less, or 3.4 per cent off, for choosing to pay later. The refurbished pair does the same thing on a smaller scale: £349 outright, against £15 plus eleven £30 payments for a total of £345, so £4 or 1.1 per cent less.

Those are EE's own published figures, and the arithmetic on top of them is mine. It is a 0 per cent plan, so there is no interest hiding in the gap, but you are signing a credit agreement and committing to eleven months. If you were going to buy at EE anyway, spending a minute on the payment page is worth £17.

How to tell which AirPods Max you are being sold

• If the listing names a chip, H2 is Max 2 and H1 is one of the older pairs. This is the only test that always works
• Silver, Space Grey, Sky Blue, Pink or Green means the 2020 Lightning model
• Midnight, Starlight, Blue, Purple or Orange could be either the 2024 model or Max 2, so go and find the chip
• Bluetooth 5.3 means Max 2. Bluetooth 5.0 means the 2020 pair
• "Good as new", "renewed" or "refurbished" means somebody owned it first, whatever the photograph looks like

Which AirPods Max should you buy?

Buy AirPods Max 2 at £499 if you are on an iPhone 15 Pro or newer and you actually want Live Translation, Adaptive Audio and Conversation Awareness, or if you commute somewhere loud enough that a stronger noise cancelling claim is worth £150 on its own. Check EE before Apple and keep the £17.

Buy the H1 USB-C pair at £349 or less if what you want is the sound, the build and twenty hours of noise cancelling. Same rated battery, same weight to within 1.4g, same lossless audio over USB-C, same aluminium and mesh. You are giving up a features list, and most of that list is software Apple attached to a newer chip rather than anything you can hear.

Skip the 2020 Lightning model unless it is genuinely cheap. Carrying a second cable standard in 2026 is a nuisance, Bluetooth 5.0 is showing its age, and the price gap to the USB-C version is usually smaller than the inconvenience is worth.

There is no reason to wait, either. Max 2 only reached buyers in April, so the next revision is not around the corner. And if you are not certain you want over-ears at all, the AirPods Pro 3 in the UK do noise cancelling for a fraction of this, and I have written separately about where the standard AirPods sit now the line has been refreshed.

AirPods Max FAQ

Is the old AirPods Max still worth buying in 2026?

Yes, if you get the USB-C version and pay meaningfully under £400. It has the same rated 20-hour battery as AirPods Max 2, the same lossless audio over USB-C and the same build. What you lose is the H2 feature set, and a chunk of that feature set needs a recent iPhone before it will run anyway. The 2020 Lightning version is harder to recommend.

What is the difference between AirPods Max and AirPods Max 2?

Max 2 uses the H2 chip and Bluetooth 5.3 instead of H1 and Bluetooth 5.0, and Apple rates its noise cancelling at up to 1.5 times the previous generation. It adds Adaptive Audio, Conversation Awareness, Voice Isolation, Live Translation, Personalised Volume, Loud Sound Reduction, camera remote, Siri head gestures and studio-quality voice recording. The design, the weight and the battery rating are unchanged.

How much are AirPods Max in the UK?

AirPods Max 2 is £499 at Apple and at Currys, and £482 at EE if you take the eleven-month plan rather than paying upfront. The older USB-C model sells refurbished at EE for £349, and new stock has dipped as low as £357 at Amazon this year. Prices move, so check the chip before you check the price.

My take

Apple changed the chip, kept the shell, kept the colours and kept the price, and then left the shops to sell two headphones under one name. That is how you end up on a page offering £499 and £349 with no obvious reason for the difference. The reason is a chip and a software list, and the software list is shorter than it looks once you check what your iPhone can actually run.

If Live Translation and Adaptive Audio matter to you and your phone can run them, buy Max 2 and buy it at EE. If they do not, the older pair is thirty per cent cheaper and lasts exactly as long between charges. Just make sure you know which one is in the box before you tap buy.

Source: Apple introduces AirPods Max 2, powered by H2, Apple Newsroom