Of course, this all was not without caveats. The most notable one was the “pressurization effect” that I felt during the first couple of days I wore the headpiece on noise-cancelling mode. It felt like my head was just about to explode. I was hoping that I would simply had to get used to it, but it simply disappeared... although it did so along with the almost muting effect of the ANC.
During the first days I wore the headphones they were so good at cancelling noise that I had to rely on my other senses to verify that certain things were done correctly, things like the sound of closing the front door, or making sure that the toilet flushed correctly. So I was disappointed when, after a couple of days, I realized I was able to do those things by ear again. I wanted to test if It was me or if my headphones really were less capable of muting noises, so I engaged in a conversation with ANC on to check if it still almost completely silenced voices. Sad to say, it didn’t do it anymore. Which is not to say that the noise cancelling was now “bad”, it was still quite impressive. But after being used to how good they were, it became disheartening that they were no longer top of the line.
Of course they worked great until they failed the most Apple way, catastrophically, that is. I’ve had my fair share of headphones and earphones, and, as a certified 2000’s kid, the biggest issue I encountered while wearing a pair of wired earpieces was the hackle of finding the perfect cable position for them when they were short-circuiting.
Which is no other thing than to say that they were still usable even at their last moments. The Airpods Max, on the contrary, started making a static noise whenever ANC or transparency mode were turned on, which made them unusable in any of them. They could still work in natural mode, which would be OK, if I hadn’t pay 500 USD for them. The incident made me go through all the troubleshooting steps: restart, update, restore to factory settings. Restoring to factory settings made me notice that the decrease in quality on ANC that I had experienced was all gone, albeit for a couple of minutes.
In the end I had to return them, just a couple of days before I would have been unable to do so. Overall, I was so enamored with them that I even considered completely switching to Apple products. However after their catastrophic failure, I was no longer wishing to, specially after I had been experiencing small issues with my iPhone. To the point that I am now considering switching back to a dumb phone. What are my headphones now? Well, I bought a pair of 10 USD sony earphones, wired, which I'm using with a lightning-to-3.5mm adapter. Too bad the lightning port on my phone is already flimsy. Oh, Apple!