After more than five years of daily use, my AirPods Max recently stopped working.
I can't really complain. Between commuting, international travel and a house move, they'd spent years being stuffed into backpacks and suitcases before emerging to soundtrack thousands of hours of music and movies. They'd had a pretty hard life.
Rather than rushing to repair them, though, I saw an opportunity.
In the five years since I'd bought the AirPods Max, loads of exciting new headphones had launched. This felt like the perfect excuse to break away from Apple's ecosystem and find out whether anything could finally replace them.
Over the next couple of months, I spent time with headphones from Sony, Bose, Sennheiser and Bowers & Wilkins. Their relative strengths varied, but all of them sounded very accomplished with music. In the case of Sony's superb WH-1000XM6, I'd even argue the overall musical performance is better than that of the AirPods Max.
But this period of headphone flirtation had a surprising effect: my movie-watching almost ground to a halt.
For years now, I've used my AirPods Max at least as much for movies as for music. In fact, they've quietly become an essential part of my home cinema setup.
Once the rest of my family had gone to bed and it was no longer neighbourly to keep my Dolby Atmos system rumbling away, I had a simple routine. Rather than switching on Night mode and flattening every explosion, gunshot and orchestral swell, I'd put on my AirPods Max, tap the pop-up on my Apple TV 4K and carry on watching exactly where I'd left off.
The combination of the AirPods Max and Apple TV 4K remains astonishingly good. Their Dolby Atmos implementation, delivered through Spatial Audio with dynamic head tracking, creates an experience that's surprisingly easy to forget is coming from a pair of headphones. It doesn't simply sound spacious; it sounds uncannily natural.
And that's the bit I hadn't appreciated until the AirPods Max disappeared from my life. Every alternative I tried excelled with music, but none recreated that movie experience.
The closest I came was pairing Sony's WH-1000XM6 with the Bravia 8 II TV. It produced an impressively open and fairly cinematic presentation, but because the connection relied on standard Bluetooth, what I was hearing was ultimately a cleverly processed stereo signal rather than the sort of binaural Dolby Atmos experience that Apple's solution provides.
The difference wasn't night and day, but it was enough that I found myself missing the AirPods Max every time I settled down to watch a film, and that had a surprisingly big impact on my viewing habits.
If the family was asleep, I simply wasn't getting the experience I wanted. I wasn't about to hobble my main home cinema system with Night mode, but neither were the alternative headphones convincing enough to tempt me away from it.
Whether it's children, a partner or simply considerate neighbours, I suspect lots of people end up watching films after the house has gone quiet, and losing that window meant the number of films I watched absolutely tanked over the following weeks. I missed loads.
The good news is that I'm now making up for lost time, because I've managed to get hold of another pair of AirPods Max.
The whole experience taught me something I wasn't expecting, though: I'd quietly built my entire late-night movie-watching routine around one Apple feature.
That's not to say Apple has the only solution. Sony, for example, offers the little-known WLA-NS7 wireless transmitter, which promises a similar binaural Dolby Atmos experience with compatible headphones. I'll be testing that very soon.
But until something else can recreate what the AirPods Max and Apple TV 4K achieve together, they'll remain my favourite headphones for movies – even if some rivals have at least matched them when it comes to music.
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Check out our Apple AirPods Max review
