'Only limited by the physics': inside Apple’s AirPods Max 2 and the H2 chip upgrade

Over five years since Apple entered the over-ear headphones market, admittedly with a pair that stood out from the rest for a premium build with a hefty price tag, the Cupertino-based tech giant is now ushering in the second generation.

At first glance, you might have a hard time telling the difference, and that's kind of the point. AirPods Max 2 stick with the original iconic design — aluminum and stainless steel parts give these headphones some heft, and they're connected at the top not with a headband but with a mesh canopy that helps distribute weight.

The over-ear form factor is pretty much identical, and the colors are very familiar — it's the same five that debuted when Apple swapped Lightning for USB-C in 2024.

What's changed is everything you can't see: dual H2 chips replacing the original H1s, a new digital amplifier carried over from AirPods Pro 3, and a processing architecture that Apple's own engineers describe as carrying headroom well beyond what ships on day one.

To understand exactly what that means five years on, TechRadar sat down with Apple VP of Platform Architecture Tim Millet and Director of Audio Product Marketing Eric Treski to unpack how AirPods Max 2 is finally catching up to its own ambitions.

Built for the product, not the market

"When we build chips at Apple, it's always about the product. We don't sell chips out in the open market, and this gives our team really the luxury of knowing exactly what they're building for," says Millet.

That's the philosophy that defines AirPods Max 2 — and it's what makes the H2 upgrade more than a spec bump. Rather than dropping in an off-the-shelf component, Apple created a purpose-built audio streaming processor co-designed from the ground up with its acoustics and firmware teams. The goal, as Millet puts it, is to make sure they're "only limited by the physics."

The processing capability that unlocks is significant. Millet relays that his team's view is that "some of the processing we do here is exceeding the kind of compute that you get in a general sense in the Mac — but because we've made it so specific for audio, it's actually deliverable in these tiny form factors."

"We've got giga-operations of floating point implemented in the most energy-efficient possible way," he adds. And crucially, all of it feeds into a single constraint that Millet returns to repeatedly: "It's all about latency. It's hard to trick the human mind when it comes to audio."

ANC without touching the hardware

One of the boldest claims Apple makes for AirPods Max 2 is a 1.5x improvement in active noise cancellation — achieved without changing a single physical component. "Getting those improvements to ANC and especially that 1.5 times more powerful ANC, which of course is a feat in itself, considering we didn't change the actual design of the headphone at all from a form factor or material standpoint," says Treski.

That improvement isn't limited to a specific frequency band either. "We take that average at 1.5 times across an average of all frequencies. We're not cherry-picking individual frequencies or a certain range," he adds. That means AirPods Max 2 should perform better whether it's blocking louder, booming sounds or higher-pitched ones — and that's a high bar, given that the original AirPods Max were no slouches when it came to blocking out sound.

On AirPods Max 2, that gain comes entirely from processing speed and improved algorithms, all running on the H2. "ANC — getting those improvements to 1.5 times without changing the hardware — is incredibly difficult to do. That's all thanks to the compute power and the improved algorithms with H2," says Treski.

The arrival of Apple's newer silicon also brings a breadth of new features to second-generation AirPods Max. Leading that pack is Adaptive Audio, which blends ANC and Transparency together to intelligently block out unimportant sounds while letting important ones through. Think blocking out the background noise of a coffee shop while still hearing someone speak to you, or cutting the roar of an airplane cabin while catching an announcement. It's been one of the standout features on AirPods Pro, and it's a welcome addition to AirPods Max.

Apple needed the headroom and processing power of H2 to make that happen — and it does raise the question of what future software updates might unlock, even if Apple didn't touch on that in our conversation.

Audio quality and the case for personalization

Alongside the H2 upgrade, Apple is bringing over the digital amplifier from AirPods Pro 3 — a quieter change with significant downstream effects.

Treski frames it around distortion and reference accuracy: "It's really about bringing it back to a target — ensuring that we have it with the best fidelity possible with the lower THD. So we have a lot more headroom to sort of play with and gain a lot more clarity."

That headroom feeds directly into Adaptive EQ, which runs continuously and cannot be switched off. "There's no ability to turn off Adaptive EQ essentially... using that microphone and being able to determine what you're supposed to be listening to on that air-correcting mic — a reference mic — and then being able to use Adaptive EQ at 48,000 times a second with the higher range up in the higher frequency. That's really important, especially with ANC, to be able to do this all in real time," says Treski.

The result is a more consistent listening experience across different head shapes, ear fits, and seal quality — effectively standardizing sound for every user rather than relying on a fixed tuning curve.

Personalized Spatial Audio benefits from that consistency, too. Previously, Apple had to tune conservatively because it couldn't account for individual differences. On previous AirPods Max without Personalized Spatial Audio, Apple "had to make one profile for everyone, so we were way more conservative... now we know that we can take more liberties to expand those instruments out more," says Treski.

A platform, not a product cycle

The H2 upgrade also unlocks a raft of features carried over from AirPods Pro 3 — among them Live Translation, which Treski singles out as a personal favorite. It uses beam-forming microphones to isolate a voice directly in front of the wearer rather than the wearer's own: "so challenging to do," he says, "without changing the physical architecture of the microphones."

That same capability should push call quality forward, too, with AirPods Max 2 better able to isolate your voice from surrounding noise. The broader additions — Conversation Awareness, Voice Isolation, Camera Remote, and 5GHz support with Game Mode — all run through the same underlying architecture. The point isn't any single feature. It's that the system can now carry all of them simultaneously.

For Millet, that's the deeper story. "H2 is this platform that continues to demonstrate that it has continued headroom," he says. What AirPods Max 2 ships with today may not be the ceiling of what it eventually does — and that's been a hallmark of AirPods broadly. AirPods Pro have repeatedly expanded their capabilities over time, from Adaptive Audio to the Hearing Health suite to Live Translation.

AirPods Max 2 doesn't try to look like a new generation of headphones. It reflects Apple's broader hardware philosophy: keep the physical design stable — especially one that's well-regarded — and expand the internal system's capabilities to deliver new features.

It's not a redesign. It's a recalibration of what the same shape can now do. And for most people wearing them, that difference will be the point — even if they never see it.

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